All-Star Game: Edward Norton on Brando, De Niro And `the Score'

Multiple-Oscar winner Marlon Brando sits at a bar with multiple-Oscar winner Robert De Niro, and across the room spots multiple-Oscar nominee Edward Norton approaching.

He turns to De Niro and, in his trademark husky voice, rasps: "Here comes numb-nuts."

OK, so it's not "Stellaaa!" or "I'll make him an offer he can't refuse." But then Frank Oz's The Score, which will open nationwide on July 12, isn't A Streetcar Named Desire (1951) or The Godfather (1972). That doesn't mean that Norton - considered by many to be the best actor of his generation, as De Niro and Brando are to theirs - wasn't happy to be there.

"You do different things for different reasons," the actor says, smiling as he recalls the scene. "Obviously, The Score is not a profound movie. That's not what it's trying to achieve. It's a heist picture, and I've always loved caper and heist pictures.

"I think people still like what I call `men at work' pictures," Norton adds, "because it's always fun to watch characters in a process, doing technical things or leading a high-wire life that you could never lead yourself. Frank and I talked about this when we sat down to discuss The Score. It's the thrill of the process that makes this kind of movie fun to watch.

"Under other circumstances I might not have done this movie," he admits, "but when they said `Marlon and De Niro are going to be in a movie together. Do you want to be the third guy?' I didn't even hesitate.

"Actually," Norton adds. "Bob was first and I signed on next, but they were already talking to Brando. And I know Brando, so I called him and said, `Are you actually thinking about doing this?' He said yes, so I said yes."

The film's plot: Expert thief Nick Wells (De Niro) wants to quit the business and settle down with his girlfriend (Angela Bassett), but his pal and longtime fence Max (Brando) convinces him to partner with cocky Jackie Teller (Norton) to swipe a valuable trinket from the nearly impenetrable Customs House in Montreal.

Jackie poses as a simpleton in order to infiltrate the Customs House, and the game is afoot. Can they break in and get out? Should Nick trust Jackie and vice-versa, and can either of them trust Max?

Norton - who earned critical esteem with memorable performances in such diverse fare as Primal Fear (1996), Everyone Says I Love You (1996), The People Vs. Larry Flynt (1996), American History X (1998), Fight Club (1999) and Keeping the Faith (2000), the last of which he also directed - says that neither of his co-stars disappointed him.

"Marlon I'd known, and on the set he was consistent with what I expected from reading about him all my life and from mutual friends," the lean, soft-spoken actor says during a conversation at Manhattan's Essex House hotel. "He's incredibly funny and he's a practical joker. At 70-whatever, he's still interested in the world around him.

"Meeting him brought home for me what he has been saddled with on some levels," Norton adds. "He's the kind of person, personality-wise, who's least suited to being venerated by others. And it must be so frustrating for him, because it walls you off from just the pure experience of people and things. He'd love to sit in a cafe and watch people walk by on the street.

"He's an absorber and inquisitive," Norton continues, ``and, having gotten to know him, he just recoils from anything having to do with the veneration of Marlon Brando. It's not that he's cynical or has disdain for good acting, but because it's cost him the freedom to move in the world the way he'd like to."

Norton didn't know De Niro before filming began, but he says that the older actor more than lived up to his advance billing.

"Bob is everything he's cracked up to be," Norton says, gesturing excitedly with his hands, as he often does. "He lives up to his hype. He is that focused, that professional, hardworking, demanding, exacting and specific. That wasn't a surprise, but it was so impressive to me because he works so much and has been working for such a long time, and he continues to have that discipline."

Like both Brando and De Niro, Norton - who will turn 32 on August 18 - has a reputation as an intensely private guy. There are two kinds of private guys in Hollywood, however: some who are simply protective of their personal lives and some who maintain a low profile to protect their characters, convinced that the less an audience knows about the performer, the more they can believe the role he or she is playing.

"I think it's both for me," says Norton, who may or may not still be romantically involved with actress Salma Hayek. "There's not a single person among us who doesn't dip, on some level, into the peripheral media that accompanies movies. And that's fine.

"At the end of the day, though, as an audience member, I have complete faith in storytelling as an important cultural phenomenon," he says. "We go to movies because we sort out meaning through them and they're social events - when we go into a theater we want the lights to go down, the movie to come on and for the whole experience to take us away. That's why we pay money to see movies.

"I want that to happen," Norton says. "I want actors to take me away. As an actor, I feel that, to the degree that media and publicity puncture that suspension of disbelief for people, it's negative to the things I care about more."

Norton leans in.

"In terms of my own sense of privacy, I don't think I'm an intensely private person," he says. "I think I'm a normally private person in an abnormally unprivate business."

Whether he likes it or not, Norton's public profile continues to rise with each film, and should go even higher with his next couple of projects: He'll cameo as Nelson Rockefeller in Frida Kahlo, a biopic starring Hayek as the controversial Mexican artist, then share the screen with Robin Williams and Catherine Keener in Death to Smoochy, a dark comedy about competing children's-television stars.

Like The Score, they should only further complicate Norton's nifty trick of juggling career and privacy.

"I don't think it's a trick," he says. "I think it's a decision. Sometimes it's out of people's hands, but I think it's less out of people's hands than they want to admit. You can establish or at the very least inform the tone of your interaction with the media, with people and the way they approach you."

Besides, Norton has a Plan B if the acting game ever gets to be too much.

"I'd probably write and direct," says Norton, who's currently adapting Jonathan Lethem's novel Motherless Brooklyn into a screenplay. "I write anyway, and it would keep me close to what I love."

(Ian Spelling is a New York-based free-lance writer.)

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