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NEW YORK (AP) - Edward Norton braces for The Question.
The actor knows it's only a matter of time before it pops up - yet again - in a discussion of his new film. And when it does, his jaw hardens ever so slightly.
Who really made American History X?
The question is unavoidable when dealing with a film that generated one of the ugliest post-production struggles in recent years, as the star dueled the director for final control.
The apparent loser, first-time director Tony Kaye, is so embittered by the experience that he vows never again to speak to New Line Cinema or Norton, whose name induces a flood of expletives.
``I provided him an ambiance and a stage and the freedom for him to do his best work,'' says Kaye. ``And he repaid me by stabbing me in the back a million times.''
Norton pauses before responding.
``The best thing about making a film is that they're collaborative,'' he says wearily. ``And the worst thing about making them is that they're collaborative.''
In other words, welcome to the jungle - Hollywood-style.
It began with a gritty, profane script: A reformed white Nazi skinhead, freed from prison after murdering two black teen-agers, tries to prevent his younger brother from following in his destructive goose-steps.
``The first time I ever read it, I put it down and said, 'That's a tragedy,''' says Norton. ``In a classic, dramatic structural sense, it's a drama with a prescriptive lesson. Here's a guy who comes fully to understand what his flaw has been, and yet it's too late to accept the consequences.''
Norton signed on. Thanks to a steady, protein-rich diet, he gained 30 pounds of muscle, shaved his head, hung out with skinheads and stuck an enormous black swastika over his heart.
``The big challenge of this for me was to introduce a character who is nightmarishly awful, who is coming back at you in slow motion and you're just going: 'That is the worst nightmare! That is evil!''' says Norton.
``By the end, though, I wanted the audience not to be able to use the word evil because he's too completely humanized in a sad way. I wanted people to feel pain - emotional impact, maybe even empathy - over the fact that this character has fallen so hard.'' So far, so good. The film showcases Norton at his sociopathic best, a performance that recalls his riveting debut as the angelic teen-ager on trial for murder in 1996's Primal Fear. Norton beat out 2,000 other unknowns for the Primal Fear role after Leonardo DiCaprio turned it down, and won a Golden Globe and an Academy Award nomination. Norton's unexpected flashes of savagery impressed critics.
``On some level, you can only pull that off one time,'' Norton says. ``I had a field day. It's exciting to know that you're the best person for it because no one knows who you are and you have that card up your sleeve.''
After that, Norton did a U-turn, playing - and singing - a goofy role in Woody Allen's Everyone Says I Love You, tackling the roles of an unimposing lawyer in The People vs. Larry Flynt and a hard-core gambler in this fall's Rounders.
Norton was soon seen as a breakthrough star, and touted as the next Sean Penn or maybe even the future Dustin Hoffman. Directors flooded his agent with scripts.
"What lifts him into the stratosphere and creates those moments that are just unforgettable on screen is the depth of his concentration and intelligence,'' says producer John Morrissey. ``His focus is total.''
Norton, a Maryland-born, Yale University-educated preppie who speaks fluent Japanese, spices up interviews with mouth-twisting terms like ``realm of theatricality,'' ``hyperbolic'' and ``behavioral naturalism.'' But he's also painfully thoughtful and reserved.
``Look, I just feel that sharing intimate elements of my personal life gets them trivialized and oversimplified,'' he says. ``I don't want everything of value in my life to become an anecdote.''
That wouldn't be easy once he wrapped on his ``Uber-neo-Nazi.''
Controversy, of course, is often a marketing gold mine, and ``American History X'' has generated a mountain of buzz for a film that cost only $10 million. It just wasn't the kind of buzz the studio was expecting.
The trouble began after Kaye, 46, delivered his cut of the film to New Line Cinema. Even though it reportedly scored well with screening audiences, Kaye was unsatisfied.
He asked for - and was granted - time to make a second, shorter cut. When it arrived, the studio thought it lacked the necessary emotional punch and permitted Norton - at age 29 and lacking any directorial training - to get his own crack at it in the editing bay.
Kaye was incensed. He publicly renounced the re-edited version in a campaign that included full-page ads in Daily Variety and the Hollywood Reporter lampooning the studio and the star.
Relenting, New Line permitted Kaye a number of weeks to come up with an acceptable version of his film. When the deadline elapsed, however, Kaye showed up empty-handed. New Line, tired of waiting and having already missed several delivery dates, decided to release the so-called ``Norton cut.'' Kaye demanded that his name be removed from the final product. The studio declined.
Kaye, an award-winning advertising director, says the ``crippled version'' of his film is a ``huge embarrassment.'' He holds Norton mainly responsible.
``This guy basically destroyed my opportunity of debuting with a pretty ... good film, which is quite rare,'' says Kaye. ``I don't know if he did it knowingly or if he really is a fool. He reduced it into a performance. That's really all that's left.''
Norton, who insists his version of the film changed Kaye's original vision by ``no more than 5 percent,'' says he's more shocked that the studio indulged the director for so long.
``He has whipped up an imagined chasm in his mind that's way beyond what's really there,'' Norton says of Kaye. ``I think that's a function of him having a letting-go anxiety.''
For Norton, the ruckus is overshadowing the hours of grueling shoots, the physical burdens of transforming his body, the weeks spent researching, debating and sharpening his dialogue.
``It is a distraction and it is unfortunate,'' he says. ``The thing you absolutely learn in any kind of art is that once you let it go, it has a life completely of its own. It's not yours any more. It's for people to respond to, to interact with - that's the beauty of it all.''
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