If he were a comic-book villain, Edward Norton would be called the Chameleon.
Radiating quiet intensity, the softly spoken 36-year-old is wearing his
familiar cloak of invisibility when we meet. In the flesh, the young actor
routinely hailed as the brightest light of his generation is presentable and
charming, but otherwise oddly nondescript. The thinking woman’s Brad Pitt is
clearly off duty.
Articulate and clean-cut, Norton has something of the Kennedy clan about him —
not just in his collegiate aura of East Coast liberal privilege but also in
his social activism and his habit of dating famous screen beauties. A Yale
history graduate who was raised in Maryland by a high-achieving family of
lawyers, architects and teachers, he retains no trace of the hate-fuelled
suburban stormtrooper of American History X or the spiritually
impoverished corporate drone in Fight Club. He belongs to the “empty
vessel” school of acting, immersing himself completely in roles, then
discarding them.
On the day of our interview in an anonymous hotel suite, Norton is bristling
at mixed reactions to early screenings of his latest film, Down in the
Valley. Hailed by US critics as a masterpiece in the tradition of Badlands
or Taxi Driver, David Jacobson’s neo-western is a complex and
compelling mix of dysfunctional family drama, teenage romance and tense
psycho-thriller. But it is not Mission: Impossible III, and ends on
an ambivalent, emphatically nonHollywood note.
“A film is not necessarily supposed to explain itself to you, or make you feel
comfortable at the end,” Norton says. “A lot of people say they want
challenging films but when you put one in front of them and they can’t
explain to their friends what it was about, they go ‘it’s too long’ or ‘it’s
brilliant but it doesn’t really work’. Or, like Fight Club,
it’s ‘fascist’! It ‘ brutalises’ you . . . You have to be absolutely willing
to leave at least 30 per cent of the audience in the dust, and probably
angry.”
Besides producing and co-writing Down in the Valley with Jacobson,
Norton also plays a modern-day cowboy who becomes involved with a troubled
teenage girl (Evan Rachel Wood) and her lonely brother (Rory Culkin). This
anachronistic drifter initially seems to offer escape from the suburban
alienation of 21st-century LA. But he ultimately comes to symbolise darkness
on the edge of town.
Ever the perfectionist, Norton learnt to ride a horse and twirl a six-shooter
for the role. “It’s good to know how to ride now,” he says with a dry laugh.
“I can’t see myself having a whole lot of use for gun- twirling in my life
but it was fun while it lasted. I don’t remember playing cowboys and Indians
when I was young but my Dad loved westerns so I used to watch a lot of them.
David and I got into this whole thing about making a western in the modern
West, and whether the West is what everyone wants to believe it is any more,
or whether it has just gone.”
Down in the Valley may wear the clothes of a contemporary western, but
it also takes a hard look at America’s cowboy mythology. “There’s the outlaw
fantasy component of that,” Norton says. “The nobility and romance of guns.
America has this national obsession with guns, but why? None of the world
that was based in exists any more! It’s this fantasy that we cling to.”
Short of scrapping the Second Amendment, of course, millions of Americans will
continue this romance with firearms. But Norton insists that the wording has
been fatally misunderstood. “As the son of an English teacher I think
there’s a comma in that amendment that’s very significant,” he laughs.
“People always talk about the right of people to keep arms, but there’s a
qualifying phrase before that about a well-organised militia being necessary
for the protection of a free state. It was never intended as a licence to
keep guns.”
There are no slick soundbites from Norton, instead freeform monologues that
range across cinema and politics, literature and economics, sociology and
salmon farming. He becomes inarticulate only on personal matters,
stonewalling all questions about his love life. In recent weeks, he has been
spotted canoodling in New York with the 18-year-old Wood, his on-screen
lover in Down in the Valley. But there is little point in pressing
him for confirmation. He barely acknowledged his past romances with previous
female co-stars, from Drew Barrymore to Courtney Love to Salma Hayek, even
when they spoke publicly about him.
Norton has called himself a “control freak”, but he underplays his role as
producer, co-writer and editor of Down in the Valley. His public spat
with the maverick British director Tony Kaye over rival cuts of their 1999
race-hate thriller American History X has left him cautious of being
seen as a “narcissistic dilettante”, as Kaye branded him.
“You have to recognise melodrama as melodrama,” Norton says of the feud. “It’s
a myth that I finished the film off after Tony disowned it.” According to
David Fincher, director of Fight Club, the problem was that Kaye and
Norton are actually too alike, “two guys who are incredibly focused on
getting their vision or interpretation out into the world”.
Norton is certainly focused on his political views, publicly opposing George
W. Bush and the war in Iraq. However, his hands-on activism tends more
towards social and environmental issues. He works with low-cost housing
foundations and ecological advocacy groups, and has made documentaries with
his environmentalist brother, James. Mainstream America’s hostility to green
causes, he claims, lies in an ingrained culture of territorial machismo.
“It’s part of this tightly held sense of identity,” Norton says, “like it’s
somehow emasculating to say we need to protect the environment.”
Always a fast-track multitasker, it’s remarkable that Norton was unknown a
decade ago, making his explosive debut as a Machiavellian schoolboy in
Gregory Hoblit’s 1996 thriller Primal Fear. Since then he has
embraced screenwriting, producing, directing and editing. Between shooting
his next roles in John Curran’s The Painted Veil and Gavin
O’Connor’s Pride and Glory, he hopes to get behind the
camera again for his long-delayed adaptation of Jonathan Lethem’s novel, Motherless
Brooklyn. All this and still only 36.
But acting remains Norton’s chief obsession, as it has been since he was 6.
His dedication is all-consuming, and sometimes even self-destructive. For
John Dahl’s Rounders, he honed his poker skills to championship
level, playing top-flight public tournaments with his co-star Matt Damon. To
become the Kafkaesque narrator-victim of Fight Club he starved
himself down to a walking skeleton. In both films fisticuff scenes left him
battered and bruised.
Ironically, Norton is not a fan of screen violence. “Take a movie like Fight
Club, which people thought was very violent,” he says. “The last time I
looked, I think one person dies in it. In The Matrix, thousands of
people get slaughtered, but it’s consequence-less because they are all just
computer programs. I would question the impact that has on someone’s
sensibility much more than I would question a more substantive examination
of why men feel the need to empower themselves through violence. It all
depends on the intent.”
Norton pushed this dedication to bruising realism a step too far in Spike
Lee’s 25th Hour, breaking his nose during an onscreen beating
from his co-star Barry Pepper. “It took ten minutes to stop the flow of
blood,” he recalls.
Like Marlon Brando and Robert De Niro, Norton has suffered the mixed blessing
of being hailed as the finest actor of his generation and is often compared
with the other two. All three shared a screen in the troubled 2001 heist
thriller The Score. In Down in the Valley Norton pays homage
to De Niro’s improvised mirror monologue from Taxi Driver. “The
first time I saw Taxi Driver I was exhausted at the end,” he says.
“It wrings you out, it exhausts you, and leaves you going — what the hell am
I supposed to do with that?” And yet emotional fireworks are not really
Norton’s style. He is closer to his friend Dustin Hoffman, meticulously
researching each role before disappearing inside it. Unlike Hoffman,
however, Norton pays scant regard to the Method acting tradition. “I’ve
never been a member of the Actors Studio,” he shrugs. “I tried, but I got
turned down.”
Still based in New York City, Norton claims he always travels by subway and
stays under the celebrity radar. “Yeah, you can manage it,” he says.
“Thankfully I don’t inspire stalkers.” Protected by his cloak of
invisibility, the Chameleon walks tall.
- Down in the Valley is on general release from Friday
