THE CULTUREPULP Q&A: Edward Norton


As promised to readers of Monday's Oregonian: Here's the 3,800-word "director's cut" of my half-hour interview with Edward Norton….


Edward Norton’s been off the grid for a couple of years. Other than his (masked) turn as the leper King Baldwin in “Kingdom of Heaven,” the star of "Fight Club," "American History X" and "Primal Fear" hasn’t been on the big screen since 2003.

"It wasn't [because of] 'The Italian Job,' which I was sort of forced under duress to do," he says, laughing. "I'd made 'Red Dragon' and 'The 25th Hour' -- which was a wonderful experience -- and then I did a terrific play in New York. I was just satiated. I didn't want to just keep going until I didn't enjoy it. I knew something would come along that I couldn't resist. And that was 'Down in the Valley.' I couldn't get it out of my brain."

"Valley" -- which opened in Portland May 19 (here's my review) -- gives Norton one of his best roles in one of his smallest (and strangest) movies. He plays Harlan, a cowboy-poet drifter who wanders into the lives of a teenager (Evan Rachel Wood) and her foster brother (Rory Culkin), enraging her corrections-officer father (David Morse).

But as writer-director David Jacobson slowly reveals Harlan's inner mind, the movie slowly (and beautifully) flies right off the rails.

Harlan harbors dangerous delusions of being an Old West outlaw. And by film's end, "Valley" turns from an indie romance into a full-blown Western. The cowboy poet becomes a fugitive, riding a stolen horse through the modern-day San Fernando Valley -- and getting into gunfights on movie sets and in half-built housing developments standing in for ghost towns.

"I thought Harlan put words around some ideas that are really interesting: looking for authenticity in places that don't really have it any more," Norton says. "That longing for a more unconstructed time that maybe never existed anywhere but in the movies."

Norton developed, produced and co-edited the film. And he's fighting to help it find an audience even as he's returned to work on big-budget movies. He says Jacobson's striking images -- pitting mythic Old-West fantasies against modern sprawl -- "deserve to be seen outside of New York and Boston and San Francisco. I think it's a film that people in parts of rural America will relate to."

Norton found a half-hour while shooting "Pride and Glory" with Colin Farrell to talk about "Down in the Valley," "Death to Smoochy," classic Westerns, the state of indie film, movies that aren't tidy, the slashing of "Kingdom of Heaven," and much more. An edited transcript follows. [WARNING: We wander into spoiler territory a few times.]

Click here to read the whole interview!

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HARLAN = [ TYLER DURDEN ]
+ [ HENRY FONDA ]

MIKE RUSSELL: "Down in the Valley" starts out feeling like the sort of indie drama we've seen before -- but slowly shifts into this full-blown fantasy Western.

EDWARD NORTON: I didn't feel I'd seen that movie before. I got that feeling with "Fight Club" and "The 25th Hour" -- which felt very of-its-moment, post-9/11.
"Down in the Valley" is really rolling around in the West as it's actually become, rather than some fantasy of it.

Q. I think a signature shot is the one where Harlan's riding a horse on a grassy hill -- and the camera pans until a microwave tower creeps into the shot.

A. I also like that shot where they're trying to escape, and you see the empty sky and the horse and the rider. And then the camera booms up -- and there's all that development trapping them.
To me, the mark of a movie that tends to stick around -- whether it's "The Graduate" or "Taxi Driver" -- is that things that have been in your head kind of crystallize. You go, "Oh, yeah -- that puts a name on a kind of inarticulate feeling I've had."

Q. A key speech in the film goes to David Morse's character, Wade, when he says, "The only good thing about the meek is that they make it easier on the ones with gumption."
To me, it raised the question: Does a liar with a credo have more "gumption" than an inattentive but honest man?

A. I love to hear what it's drawing out of other people. David Jacobson is very evolved in that sense. He reminds me of Spike Lee or David Fincher -- he's confident enough to ask questions without spoon-feeding the answers.
I think about movies like "Do the Right Thing" or "Cuckoo's Nest" -- where you don't know how to take it at first, and then you realize: That's the point. You're being asked to come to your own conclusions and do the work. But that takes a lot of nerve in a world of films that are determined to make sure you understand exactly what they want you to understand.

Q. There are definitely parallels between Harlan and Tyler Durden. They both reject reality in search of what Harland calls a "true voice."

A. You'd never associate those two films based on the textures. But I felt it about halfway through shooting.
What do you do when your life doesn't feel authentic to you? There's the idea that projecting yourself into a different persona can be a desperate act -- or that the modern world makes people feel so numb, they have to do something desperate to feel real.

Q. I love how Harlan models himself very much on the Roy Rogers brand of earnest cowboy.

A. Yeah, or a Henry Fonda. There are a lot of references to Fonda in "My Darling Clementine" -- the man who wants peace.
That's the sad part of Harlan: He can't acknowledge his own role in the conflicts he creates. And yet he's so sincere when he's screaming things like, "This isn't the way to treat a person!" He makes me very sad, because I think he does acutely feel the meanness that the modern world has put in people -- but he's not willing to acknowledge his own.

Q. What classic Westerns did you look to when modeling Harlan's fantasies?

A. Well, "My Darling Clementine." For me? "Shane." It's very iconic -- the drifter who comes into town and has something to offer a child, but knows he can't hang around, that he's not for the civilized world. That’s very compelling to me.
I was always very moved in "Shane" when the boy is rejecting his dad, and Shane kind of grabs him and says, "You want to see courage? What your dad is doing is courage!" There's a person who's fixed, who stays, and Shane knows he has to go.


Q. Well, going back to Morse's speech about the meek: Rory Culkin's character is the "meek" character, and he makes it easier on Harlan -- in the sense that Harlan feels he has someone to protect.

A. Or that Harlan can help open up a sense of self in the kid.
What really hooked me when I first read the script was the scene where the girl's walking, and the little kid says, "Where are you going?" And she says, "Nowhere." And he says, "Can I come?"
David sent me a picture of a caged overpass over the freeway, saying, "This is these kids' world." I know these kids. I see them in the 7-Eleven parking lot. They have nothing. They have no sense of culture, they have no sense of history -- they have no notion of how to create themselves.
Evan made up this great line in the bathtub about waiting for your life to start, but not knowing what's going to start it. I think that's a very particular set of feelings that comes with modern suburban sprawl.

Q. The film's images of nature at war with an industrial hellscape get more and more overt as the movie goes along -- until ghost towns are equated with half-built housing developments.

A. And there's the Western ghost town that turns out to be a part of the fabricated dream of the West -- because it's a movie set.
What I always find poignant when I watch that scene [where Harlan hides out on the movie set] is that Harlan knows it's fake -- but he'll take it. And then he's driven out into the thing he despises the most.

Q. Does the imagery tie in any way into your environmental concerns?

A. I don't really address my politics through art. To me, this movie is much more about the psychic landscape these people are living in -- the emotional experience.
It ties into that loss of connection with what's natural: Look at what we’ve done with what we've been given. But I couldn't psychoanalyze that at all.
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'IT'S REALLY EASY TO STRIKE
THE POSTURE OF
RIGHTEOUS INDIGNATION'

Q. I wanted to touch on something you discussed with Sharon Waxman in The New York Times:
"Down in the Valley" is solid work -- really the quintessence of an "indie" film. So why did it take so long to find a distributor? And does that difficulty say something about the mainstreaming of so-called "indie" film distribution?

A. Well, we learned lessons, too. We took the film to Cannes, but we weren't totally finished with it. In retrospect, that may have been a mistake.
In fairness to these movie distributors, they're all quite terrified. What they saw was 15 minutes longer than it is now, and we were still working on it. We have made it more difficult for ourselves than it should have been.
But by the same token, it's hard to get companies that probably wouldn't have made the film in the first place to put it out, you know? It's not that the boutique labels of the studios aren't making any interesting films -- they are. But at times, things that have a kind of ambiguity or a certain level of complexity make it tough for them to wrap their marketing minds around it.
But you have to be careful. It's really easy to strike the posture of righteous indignation about that kind of stuff. But I don't. We made the film because we believed in it and we felt it. And you can't ever demand, out of a sense of entitlement, that someone spend millions of dollars to put your film out. It has to exist on its own terms. And this one certainly does.
It won't get a "Mission: Impossible" or even a "Crash" level of release. But I do think it's the kind of film that more people want to see than the studios think.

Q. Yeah. The movie touches on a feeling of irrelevance -- of being passed over and crowded out -- that isn't just a "blue-state" feeling.

A. I totally agree. But the challenge is letting people know.
We're out there on a shoestring marketing budget. I'm not saying we're relying on the critics. But in the old days, the Pauline Kaels of the world would say, "Look -- this is a film you should see."
I usually think movies have so much money behind them, it almost doesn't matter what anybody writes about them, you know? It's irrelevant. But I also think there's an inner section -- where the dialogue that interpreters of film have can really make the difference.
In Washington, D.C., for whatever reason, all the big papers enjoyed it -- and it's been doing terrifically in D.C. And then in L.A., they put some stringer AP reporter on it because Ken Turan wouldn't do it, and it's already closed out of two of the three theaters it was in. So you do need people who say, "It's kind of hard to explain, but you'll get a unique experience out of it."
I really hoped that Western regional critics would see it. An audience in Denver or Phoenix might not think "Down in the Valley" is for them -- but it is.


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MOVIES DON'T NEED TO BE TIDY

Q. You've said, "I try not to slap my name on anything that I am not very substantively engaged in." As a producer, what was your involvement in "Down in the Valley"'s development and editing?

A. I met David Jacobson three years ago, and we spent six or eight months working on the script together. He'd done a first pass that had a lot of what's in there, but a lot we got rid of. Then he and my partner Holly raised up the money. And then David and I edited the film. We worked with an editor for a while, but we couldn't really get anyone to understand what we were after [laughs] -- so he and I kind of cut it on our Apple computers together, on Final Cut Pro.

Q. It takes a lot of nerve to say, "We're gonna do a modern Western, and we're totally gonna go there." You don't usually see people mixing genres this overtly outside of science fiction. This is a movie with a horse in a garage.

A. Yeah. I think it's very personal for him. The Valley, and that landscape, is something he grew up in. And he's writing from a place in his own fantasies and feelings.
Our insides aren't neat. You know what I mean? But sometimes in movies, we have a desire to make it neat. Not to knock a film, but I remember reading about John Nash, the "Beautiful Mind" guy -- and he was anything but neat. He was probably gay, and his wife was Nicaraguan … and suddenly, in the film, his wife's Jennifer Connelly and there's none of the rest. A lot of things are cleaned up and explained and neatened.
There's an impulse in the world to redeem everything. I don't think that's inherently bad -- but I don't think it's necessarily the deepest kind of experience. I think it can cause an in-the-moment emotional provocation, but not necessarily one that stays with you, because all the emotional work's being done for you.
When I think of the films that have haunted me or affected the way I look at things, they tend to be a little … messier. [laughs] I mean, look at "Harold and Maude" or "Five Easy Pieces" or "Network" or "Taxi Driver." If you wiped away the sort of collective acceptance of them as classics and put them in front of people today, they'd tear 'em apart. They'd say, "It's unfinished" or "It's unpolished" or "It doesn't make sense" or "You can't do that." Those films aren't neat at all.


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LET'S GEEK OUT ON DAVID MORSE

Q. I'd love to do a quick David Morse geek-out. He's one of those guys like J.T. Walsh -- a very calm, grounded actor who never looks like he's working too hard, and viewers take him for granted.

A. He's just like that. Everyone in the film is adrift in some sense. And he is too. And to have the father not be a villain, you need someone who can straddle the physically intimidating presence and the volatility -- and yet there's a humanity, a basic decency, under that.
And Morse has got that. He can be slamming a girl's door and cracking it -- and yet when you find him alone playing his guitar, you know there's more to him. Even with his kids, you know he's not just a brute. He's failing in some ways, but he's trying to understand.
There's something about Morse. He's got a basic decency in him. He's got something solid in the center. You can't dismiss him.

Q. At the start of the movie, he's the inattentive dad. By the end of the film, he's the avenging leader of the posse.

A. And you also realize his love for his children is real. I have a friend who has two daughters, and he cried really hard at the end. He told me, "I can relate to that delusion of thinking you can protect your kids from being hurt."
There's a stare-off between Wade and Tobe [Evan Rachel Wood's character]. In putting the clamps on her in a traditionalist sense, all this has happened anyway.
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A RETURN TO DIRECTING and
'30-YEAR-OLD-BOY CINEMA'

Q. One thing that comes out in the "Fight Club" DVD commentary is that you're the most analytical of that trio. It makes me wonder if you'll return to directing again.

A. I'll get back to it at some point. I've been working on a couple of things. One or the other of them, I think, will drop relatively soon. I do feel ready to do it again.
I don't know. I just need to feel that it's something that I understand. And sometimes that impulse gets exercised in something like "Down in the Valley." David and I worked extremely closely on this, so it satisfied a lot of that….

Q. You got that authorship itch scratched?

A. Not so much authorship, but the challenge -- of editing the film with David, of constructing it, of making the film manifest that tone and mood that has an integrity to it, of making it speak at its own pace.
I always frankly find editing to be the most satisfying part of the whole process. It's when you can really work wonders with raw material.


Q. To borrow one of your lines, "Fight Club" is the ultimate movie about 30-year-old boys. Watching films like "Shawn of the Dead," I actually think the "30-year-old boy movie" is kind of its own film subgenre at this point.

A. [laughs] "Anchorman." "The 40-Year-Old Virgin."

Q. Several John Cusack films. Does Harlan touch on that at all -- from a different angle?

A. I hadn't thought of it that way, but sure. I do think he's less mature than the 17-year-old girl he's going out with. I really do. He's stunted.

Q. Your degree's in history. Did that come into play here?

A. I don't know. The West is so integral to the way America thinks about itself. Our history in the West has become so enmeshed in myth that it’s hard to distinguish between what the real history is and what we're projecting onto it.
There's this idea of the West as a place -- a frontier across which you can remake yourself. The cowboy as the icon of our individualism. Those historical roots are really interesting, and that's why I like what David was going at in this film -- because it's challenging whether that stuff still holds, whether you can still assess the West on those terms.
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HACKING UP 'KINGDOM OF HEAVEN,'
MIS-MARKETING 'DEATH TO SMOOCHY'
and SOLAR-POWERING THE PLANET

Q. Have you seen the vastly better "director's cut" of "Kingdom of Heaven"? Does your character [the leper King Baldwin] get fleshed out?

A. That should have been a much longer movie. If you want an example of fear-based decision-making in Hollywood…
You know, "Alexander" is just this incomprehensible, turgid thing, and Fox looks at it and has the most incredible rationale: "Let's look at someone else's failure as the rationale for how we cut our film." Instead of saying, "We've got Ridley Scott and a great script," they say, "Well, ours can't be 2 hours 45 minutes long" -- which, in the case of "Kingdom of Heaven," it really should have been. So they cut it down based on someone else's failure, and ended up taking a really great director's film down to a really pale shadow of itself.
But for me, more than anything else, that was just sort of a lark. I just wanted to see how Ridley worked, to be honest. That was a lot of fun.
Now I've got a bunch of things all stacked up, and they’re coming out a little too back-to-back. But that's the way it works.


Q. I have to hear you say it: "Death to Smoochy" got the shaft. It is such an underrated movie.

A. I love "Death to Smoochy."
It's like "Fight Club," in a way -- it's always a mistake when the studio tries to bait-and-switch the audience. They tried to sell "Fight Club" as an action movie. And I think they tried to sell "Death to Smoochy" as a Robin Williams comedy. But the "Mrs. Doubtfire" crowd was not going to be happy with it, and the people who would have actually liked it didn't go because of [the marketing]. It's better to just be true to what it is.
"Death to Smoochy." I laughed until I cried reading it. I think it's got its own little cult following, too. Any movie where they say, "When we played Cowboys and Indians, I was always the Chinese railroad worker" is great by my book.

Q. I know you're a solar-power activist. Any breakthroughs on the horizon?

A. I don’t know. I'm always tracking it. I wish I knew where to put my money, exactly, because I'm sure as the rest of our energy becomes expensive and untenable and solar panels become more competitive, the technology is gonna win that race. You can't have a world where clean, renewable energy pours down every day and not have it marshaled. It will be.
The translucent polymers that are solar cells that will be on every glass panel in a building…. There's fascinating things coming down the pike, I think.
I live in New York, but I have a house in Los Angeles where I'd say about 80 percent of the power comes from solar panels. We've also gotten about 30 systems on low-income families' homes. We'd like to build a little demonstration model to show -- beyond its environmental benefits and the savings -- how much impact it can have on low-income dynamics.

Edward Norton's 'Valley' High (The Oregonian, May 29, 2006)

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