The Entertainment Tonight website has this interview along with a quicktime movie and a quote in Read Audio format.
When the world's greatest poker players convene in Las Vegas, Nevada, for the 29th annual World Series of Poker, they'll be joined in competition by two young upstarts -- recent Academy AwardŽ winner MATT DAMON (Good Will Hunting, The Rainmaker) and EDWARD NORTON (The People vs. Larry Flynt) who are also the stars of Miramax Films' upcoming card-playing drama Rounders.
After mastering the art of poker in preparation for the Rounders roles, Damon and Norton accepted an invitation to compete in a prestigious poker tournament in Las Vegas for a purse of $1 million.
Set against the backdrop of New York's high-stakes underground poker world, Rounders is the tale of Mike McDermott (Damon), a master card player who trades the poker-playing rounds for law school and a shot at a new life with his girlfriend Jo (GRETCHEN MOL, Last Time I Committed Suicide). For Mike, the new life he's staking out seems like a legitimate road to success, but it's short on the thrills and excitement of backroom poker games. But when Mike's longtime friend Worm (Norton) is released from prison, Mike is faced with the high-stakes dilemma of his life: to keep on the straight and narrow, or deal himself back into the world of the rounders for the sake of his friend.
'Rounders' also stars JOHN MALKOVICH, JOHN TURTURRO, FAMKE JANSSEN and MARTIN LANDAU. The film is scheduled to open this September.
Find out if Matt is as good a poker player in real life as he is on the big screen. [This is a Quicktime movie clip of Damon playing cards that you can find on the Entertainment Tonight website]
ET: When you're tossing down these $100 chips do you go, 'Wow, I used to work a week for that.' Do you feel like you're dealing with a lot of money out there? That's a lot of money out there. Does that shock you at all?
Edward Norton: It would have shocked me more if it had been my money. We were sponsored.
ET: Would you have given it to charity?
Matt Damon: Had we won we would have given it to charity, but we were sponsored by the casino.
ET: The characters in the film are just bizarre. How did you guys fit in with Doyle, Amarillo Slim, and some of these old characters?
Matt: I don't know that we did fit in.
Edward: We're skinnier than most of them.
Matt: Yeah, we're definitely a little skinnier than most of them.
ET: Tell us a little bit about 'Rounders' really quick.
Matt: It's a movie set in New York. I play a card player/ law student who kind of leaves the world of poker to become a lawyer and my friend here (Edward Norton) gets us into debt and so we have to go back and play some cards to get the money. Pretty straightforward tale of two young guys with this world of poker as the backdrop.
Hear Matt's strategy for playing a hand of poker. [This is a Real Audio clip that you can find on the Entertainment Tonight website]
ET: You were instructed by Doyle and some of the other players on how to play. What did they tell you? What did they teach you?
Edward: We only read Doyle's book. We never got a chance to be coached by him. We got some time with Johnny Chan in Atlantic City, so it was great.
Matt: And Johnny Chan appears in the movie so it was great. So when he came to work in Atlantic City for the movie, he sat down and worked with us a bit. Yeah, these guys have been really nice. They're world class poker players and they've been very, very cool to us.
ET: Were you a gambler before or was this pretty much it?
Matt: Yeah, it's a whole different thing. You know, a weekly game with a couple of beers and potato chips and nickels, dimes and quarters is a totally different thing than this. This is a lot more serious. The home game that I used to play people would feel guilty if someone lost too much money, you know. It's kind of a different vibe.
ET: Has your life changed since your Oscar?
Matt: Not at all. My life's like this all the time. Usually I have eight to ten cameras following me around.
ET: I noticed a camera crew following you to the bathroom.
Matt: Yeah that was interesting, interesting. I invited them in and we got to know each other. No, it's been very strange, very strange. Luckily I've been working so I've had my head down.
ET: You don't go wandering into restaurants.
Matt: No. But hopefully things will cool off and I'll be able to do that really soon.
After earning an OscarŽ nomination for his rookie role in Primal Fear, ED NORTON puts on his poker face and goes mono-e-mono with ET for an interview on his new film Rounders, co-starring MATT DAMON.
Entertainment Tonight: I know that you're a good poker player...
Edward Norton: I would say that I became a decent poker player over the course of this. I didn't play poker before this, neither did MATT [DAMON]. We were coached pretty intensely for a period of about three months.
ET: Now you guys got together and went to some of these seedy underground poker houses?
Ed: Well they are not necessarily seedy. Some of them are but some of them are very what they call "carpet joints." They're very like, they're nice and they have a pretty high level game. I mean some of them have half a million to a million dollars going around the room some of the nights. So it's like, those ones aren't exactly seedy.
ET: Now you were in some of those types of places?
Ed: Yeah but not putting that kind of money down. They have lower level games.
ET: How seedy of a place did you get a chance to check out? What were these places like?
Ed: The seedy ones are pretty hilarious. It's like what everything is made of and it's the amount of smoke and the kind of people in them. I mean you've got like Russian gangsters and like Romanian gypsies who are sometimes kind of whacked out on coke and coming in probably having just mugged somebody and putting that money into play. There's some very very funny evenings but the thing is it's very convivial. There's a lot of regulars and there's a lot of people who really know each other and there's a nice spirit to the whole thing. There's never a danger element.
ET: So you never felt threatened that some Russian gangster was in there?
Ed: No. There was a thing that we put in the film though about. There's a game that I'm playing in at one point in the film and I start sort of looking at these two guys and saying no Russian at the table because that's something that goes on. People get very frustrated when two people start yacking in whatever their various language is because that's very much against the protocol.
ET: Did you bring anything else that you learned in this underground world into the film?
Ed: Well, sure you're always going to, to some degree. That's kind of the job. I have to give a lot of credit to the two guys who wrote the script David Levien and Brian Koppelman because they had spent so much time in it that it made our work easier. For us it was almost about learning what the stuff in the script meant because the script was so ripe with the language and the references and the characters. They had found so many of the great details and moments of the world that they get a lot of the credit for that.
ET: So you had to study up on a lot of the terminology to get it all?
Ed: Yeah there's a lingo, but that's the job. If you're going to make Top Gun you're going to go and learn the airforce language. You've got to. That's part of the fun of it.
ET: Was there any portion of that lingo that was peculiar to you or didn't make sense? I know there's one phrase "finger up the spine."
Ed: Oh, it's all funny. A finger up the spine. When you see what that really is, it's exactly that, it's a finger up the spine. It's a subtle brush off. It's a way of saying you're out of here because we're onto you. When he says in there, you're not just going to get a finger up the spine--a finger up the spine is the polite first warning you get. It's the slight touch on your back where you know they're onto you and you're out of there now. No harm done but the next step is going to be worse. I don't know about all those things but we heard stories about guys who came and tried to hustle some of the big clubs but they're pretty few and far between because the people are too sharp.
ET: What would happen in a place like that if someone came in and tried to put one over on them?
Ed: We heard stories. People are politely dis-invited. The thing that actually is more than sort of the direct threat of the loan shark type character which is a whole thing unto itself. The real curse for anybody who gets busted doing that is that you can't get a game and the thing is there are not many of these big games getting off in any given place. In New York there are these certain clubs. They are the big game on the east coast, the big private games, and if you get labeled you're not going to be able to get back in because no ones' going to want to play with you. That's sort of death for these guys. It's a very interesting little subculture.
ET: You gave a great performance in this film. In the screening room I heard people mumbling OscarŽ. Now does these keep you going from one project to another?
Ed: No, to the degree that that reflects people appreciating and responding it's great. Any actor who wants to sit up there and say they don't care and that their not interested in whether people liked it or not, that's a pose and it's a very unsophisticated pose. Or it's a selfish one because there's no other reason to do this. There's no other reason to do this except to try to entertain or move, or make people laugh. The whole point of it is what you're trying to do for other people. You're trying to create a reaction, so to the degree that those things, those kind of awards, to the degree that it reflects that people out there on the audience level to say, "Man that did it, that scared the hell out of me." Or "that really made me cry." That is enormously gratifying. That's why you do it and to pretend that it's not very satisfying is ridiculous. But beyond that, those things are not what a careers about. Those moments do not change the minute to minute reality of your life of what you still have to do when you get down and do it the next time. Sure I guess you could say that sometimes some good things come out of them, but I've actually found that Hollywood is such a small town that long before those things actually hit the airwaves that long before the benefit that you were going to derive out of them has already happened within the world of the actual professionals in the industry. By the time that it rolls around and people are saying that he got such and such a nomination or whatever, the impact of the work you did happened long before that. It was known by people in the community and those things are sort of a parallel phenomenon all their own that don't really impact on it all as much as people would like to believe.
-- September 2, 1998
If you have new information on Edward Norton (and you can provide a verifiable and reputable source), please email me- Susan
Note: Articles and images have been posted without permission for noncommercial and nonprofit use
with no intention of copyright infringement. The purpose of this reprinting is to disseminate correct information about the
actors, films, and studios. I have included author names and links to sources whenever possible.
