Brando, De Niro and little old me-o

If further proof was needed that Edward Norton is the finest actor of his generation, then his being cast in The Score alongside Marlon Brando and Robert De Niro provides it. After all, it’s not every day that you get the chance to play opposite the two dominant figures of American movie acting from the past 50 years. Typically, Norton claims not to have been nervous at the prospect. "I don’t get intimidated by the people I’m going to work with," he states in his quiet, even voice. "It’s a job, a really fun job, it’s not a competitive sport."

That, though, doesn’t mean that egos don’t get ruffled and voices raised when he’s on the set. On the contrary, Norton is a demanding collaborator who won’t settle for second best and he’s acquired a reputation for being difficult. But at the same time, Hollywood insiders still talk about his remarkable and unexpected debut in 1995’s Primal Fear, to say nothing of his incendiary, Oscar-nominated performance as a reformed neo-Nazi skinhead in American History X.

Then there’s the growing list of actresses who’ve fallen for Norton’s cerebral charm: Courtney Love, Drew Barrymore, with whom he once shared a New York apartment, and for the past year and a half, Salma Hayek, the Mexican star of films such as Desperado and Wild Wild West. Add in last year’s romantic comedy Keeping The Faith, which he co-wrote and directed as well as starring in, and it’s clear that the 32-year-old hasn’t wasted any time since he arrived in Hollywood six years ago.

Not that he exactly conforms to the image of a matinee idol. Whereas most young actors look like they devote more time to the gym than they do to rehearsing, Norton is a slight, serious figure dressed all in black, with bags under his eyes and a crew-cut that’s the legacy of his role in the upcoming dark comedy Death to Smoochy. He looks uncomfortable in the plush setting of a midtown Manhattan hotel suite and initially appears defensive, but he’s also articulate and bright. Unsurprisingly, he jumped at the chance to work with Brando and De Niro on The Score, in which he and De Niro play unwilling partners in a jewellery heist with Brando as their wise-cracking fence, even though the script was far from finished when they all signed on. "It was irresistible," confirms Norton. "But we all got into it knowing we needed to fix the script, which can be dangerous. We ended up changing the structure of it, the architecture of the heist and a lot of things to do with my character."

Before long, he and De Niro had turned their relationship in the film into a metaphor for their relative positions in the movie industry. "We kept trying to figure out the tension between them, what it is that’s different about them. So I said, ‘What if the tension comes from where they are in life? That the young guy is talented but he wants the career Bob (De Niro) has and he wants it now, and Bob’s character is saying to him, ‘You’re talented but slow down.’ "

Norton was an unknown stage actor from New York when he went up for the part of Aaron Sempler in Primal Fear, but his audition tape as a murderer who convinces a jury that he is schizophrenic was so impressive that it was circulating Hollywood within days. Before the film had even been released, he’d been cast by Woody Allen in Everyone Says I Love You but he’d also turned down the lead in Francis Ford Coppola’s The Rainmaker.

"I think there are moments when you get faced with opportunities and you have to have the composure to step back and assess what you care about the most in the long term and start being disciplined about your choices," states Norton firmly. "I also had the script for The People vs Larry Flynt, which wasn’t good at first, but I went to speak to Milos Forman about it and something in my gut said, ‘Do this movie’, and now it’s one of my favourites." Whether he’ll remember The Score so fondly is debatable because not even the presence of De Niro and Brando can distract you from the predictable plot. Then there’s the fact that Norton only has two scenes with Brando. Surely he wanted more? "Of course, but to get two was great."

It was perhaps just as well, as Brando was reportedly unimpressed by The Score’s director Frank Oz and supposedly refused to take direction from him, which meant that De Niro had to relay all his instructions.

"There were some days where Marlon and Frank Oz argued but that’s the way it goes," shrugs Norton. "Any set where there isn’t healthy debate between everybody is a set where nobody is working hard enough. I think good, professional people always debate and wrestle and argue and at the end of the day they shake hands and say, ‘That was great’, because they know that it’s likely to push it up to a higher level.

"To me, passion or pushiness on behalf of the work shouldn’t lead you to be labeled a pain in the ass. It’s different from saying, ‘My trailer isn’t big enough.’ "

But it’s sentiments like these that have led him to be tagged as arrogant. Clearly, Norton doesn’t suffer fools gladly but not everyone he works with is able or willing to live up to the standards he sets, and when he turned director for Keeping the Faith, he reportedly clashed with his star, Ben Stiller. That though, was nothing compared to his ongoing dispute with Tony Kaye, the British director of American History X, who accused him of re-editing the film without his consent.

In his defense is the fact that Kaye is a world-class eccentric who didn’t exactly endear himself to Hollywood with his outrageous behaviour, and Norton seems more amused than annoyed when he discusses him. "I don’t have a beef with Tony really because his mood is so to do with which way the wind is blowing," he smiles. "It’s beside the point because the film has a life of its own."

It certainly does and apart from bringing him his second Oscar nomination - the first was for Primal Fear - it also provided him with an introduction to Brando well before The Score. "He saw American History X and liked it a lot. We had a mutual friend and he said to him, ‘Tell him to come over sometime’, so I went and met him.

"He’s an extremely great storyteller and conversationalist and he’s a totally relaxed, interested guy. He’s very well read and I enjoyed getting to know him."

The son of an environmental lawyer and a teacher mother who died of cancer in 1997, Norton was brought up in a Baltimore suburb that his grandfather, the architect and property developer James Rouse, designed as a model community. Despite the fact that Rouse was a multimillionaire and is credited with inventing the concept of the shopping mall, Norton says he didn’t have a privileged upbringing and claims that he was the first person from his inner-city school to win a place at Yale.

Once there, he majored in history and Japanese - he spent some time teaching in Osaka - but devoted most of his time to appearing in college plays. Already displaying the ruthless clarity of vision that’s marked out his career, he decided against being a full-time student actor. "I did a lot of theatre, I did it almost constantly, but I saw no benefit in an undergraduate theatre degree. I didn’t think it would get me any closer to anything that I wanted to do down the road," he says.

After graduating in 1991, he headed to New York and in time-honoured fashion lived in a ratty apartment while waiting tables and appearing in fringe theatre. Then came the audition for Primal Fear and his frighteningly rapid ascent to the Hollywood A-list. Perhaps the only blip in his career so far has been the relative box-office failure of Fight Club, in which he and Brad Pitt railed against the homogenization of modern America and waged a two-man war against Ikea.

It’s Norton’s favourite of all his movies, not least because it’s an anomaly for such a controversial film to emerge from the studio system. "Me and Brad being in it and it being done at that level, I thought was a minor miracle. It was designed to punch you in the nose and it did."

Apart from Death to Smoochy, in which he plays an innocent children’s television presenter who’s being hounded by the man he replaced, his next appearance will be a cameo as Nelson Rockefeller in Frida, the biopic of the Mexican artist Frida Kahlo. She’s played by Salma Hayek and, while Norton makes a point of not discussing his private life with the press, he’s clearly impressed with his current girlfriend. "It’s a labour of love for her and it’s really a testament to her because she produced it," he says fondly. "All the people in it came because of their affection for her."

Maintaining his privacy might not be possible for much longer though, which could have an impact on his acting, because Norton believes that being as anonymous as possible off-screen is a help when it comes to getting audiences to accept him in different roles. So what happens as he becomes more famous? "Well, there’s a certain quotient of familiarity that’s positive," he argues. "The thing I admire in actors who’ve been around a long time is that they become less guarded. They become more at ease and therefore more vulnerable."

Which might be what he needs.

The Score opens on Friday (UK release date)

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