Charlie Rose Interview 10/30/98
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Transcript
CR: Edward Norton is here. After years of stage work in New York, he burst onto the screen in 1996 with three award-winning films: Primal Fear, Everyone Says I Love You, and The People vs. Larry Flynt. His new film, American History X, opens today. An examinaiton of the roots of prejudice, it promises to be one of this year's most controversial films. Here is the trailer from that film:
CR: I'm pleased to have Edward Norton on this program for a conversation not only about this film, but some extraordinary work that he has done. Let me begin with this film. It is controversial. People are talking about it. What is it you hope that you are able to do in terms not only of your performance, but that you hope this film accomplishes?
EN: Well, when you set out to do something like this..there's different kinds of entertainment and there's different roles film can play. Obviously some are entertainment or escapist fare and this is more in the realm of a provocation almost. The intent of it, at best, is to provoke some thoughtful consideration of some of the real complexities behind these tragic things that we see only in a little bit oversimplified sort of fashion in the nightly news. I feel like the message at the end of it is a very firm statement of the tragedy in all directions of letting your life be consumed by..
CR: Hate
EN: By hate and rage that's behind it. So I hope it's provocative, but I don't think it's controversial in the sense that I would find it hard to believe that anyone could come away from it offended by what it concludes.
CR: Oh, I'm sure they don't. Let me just tell the audience. It's a story of a character, played by you, whose father is a fireman, dies early. And it raises the issues of a young man who somehow becomes caught up with skinheads and is charismatic and intelligent, and then commits murder, goes to prison, goes through certain kind of transformation and it reflects all of that aspect. And it also has the extraordinary conversation.. dealing with a subject of a relationship within families too. And what it does to families.
EN: Right
CR: And you also see the other side of it. People tend to, I suspect, when they talk about a controversial subject, which this clearly is - because of the violence that comes out of it, because of the rage that's there, because of the hate that is in these groups- if you deal with controversy, someone says it's a controversial film which is not true.
EN: Right
CR: Talk a little bit about your preparation and how you approached this, to take a character who starts here and goes here and comes back to somewhere else as a result of an experience in prison.
EN: Well, I think that that's the challenge of a role like that or the appeal of it for me is not even so much just the one very extreme manifestation of this guy but more the emotional distance that he travels. I mean it's obviously a challenge on a certain level just to represent him in that really horrific sort of skinhead mode that he's in. But almost the deeper challenge is to take him from that all the way to the point where after two hours, an audience has been forced to contend with the real human complexity of him and maybe even have a certain empathy for him as a character. There's different, I mean you find your way into a role on all different levels or in different ways and in this case, the start of it for me was almost just taking on this physical transformation
CR: strong physique
EN: I think we all felt that he needs to be, in the tradition of good tragic drama, to be a larger-than-life character. He is seen very clearly in the memories of his brother as almost iconic figure of heroic stature in his brother's mind. And I think that we all agreed that we needed to manifest that, manifest this sort of larger-than-life feeling to him. For me, right off the bat, it was.. I'm not that size [laughs]. So I needed to take that on. And in doing that, you start to find your way into other things. Once you put your body into the kind of shape, it forms the way he feels about himself. Then you start to look at the iconography these people put all over their bodies. The tattoos..
CR: The Nazi signs...
EN: You start to get inside what their relationship to those things and how those things are empowering to them. And all of that starts to lead you into the why of what makes a young American man in this day and age, in our culture right now, move toward this. What are the complex environmental and emotional dynamics that push a person towards those choices. 'Cause on a lot of levels I think as much of the message at the end.. A lot of people seeing this- you, me, a lot of other people are kind of the converted as far as convincing people that racism is a bad thing or that racism and violence have consequences. A lot of people know that already. But those of us who do, I think, do another thing that's perhaps, sort of a bit of a denial. We look at events like Matthew Shepard getting tied to the fence post or this guy being dragged in Texas and...
CR: He [Shepard] was a young guy man that was beaten to death.
EN: Right. And there are things in the news all too frequently and we have a tendency to look at the people who commit the act and it's easier to just call them evil or treat it like it's an abhorration. But the truth is it's not. There's a very tragic and complex human dynamic that flows backwards in their story as well and I think confronting an audience to take on the more disturbing task of dealing with the real complexity of what created that person is tough too.
CR: Who they are and what it is that makes them attracted to this kind of ideology
EN: Yeah exactly.
CR: Let me take a look at a clip just to give a sense of what you look like and who this character is. Roll tape. American History X. Here it is
[clip of Derek arrested while Danny (Edward Furlong) watches]
CR: The person they're holding back in this case is Derek Vineyard's younger brother, who has a heroic worship of his older brother. What is it that you think attracts people to this sort of skinhead, Nazi-loving, celebration of violence?
EN: Well, I should be careful because I am an actor, not a sociologist and this is only..
CR: But you've thought about it more than most people
EN: Of course, and the job for me in this case was to try to understand some of those motivations. My experience, and it's only my experience, is that the truth is a lot of.. the Derek Vineyards in that world are very rare, people with that sophisicated a sense of the specific politics. A lot of times, you run into kids who.. Literally, I was looking for what some of these tattoos mean, some of them are things like Viking runes and Celtic crosses and literally, there are kids who have them on their arm and don't know what they mean. And I thik that's emblematic of a certain reality whch is a lot of these kids enter into that not out of any deep, self-generated sense of identification with fascism or Hitler or Nazi politics or racism even or anything, they just are in such totally blighted environments and circumstances and family lives that they move into the gang out of a sense of belonging, a need for a sense of participation in something bigger..
CR: A sense of family
EN: And a sense of alternative family. But no different than a black kid in Ingelwood who joins the Crips, you know. And that's interesting because you begin to realize that even in acknowledging that, you're acknowledging a very poignant, human sort of tragedy behind why a lot of these.. I mean these are social dynamics that are pushing these kids toward this, not sort of a bad seed impulse to go toward something evil. And then beyond that, you have people who have suffered as this kid has and he makes the unfortunate choice of needing something to direct the anger outward at and it takes the form of.. that rage takes the form of hate.
CR: Did you want to.. I mean I read something somewhere that said you..you wanted to, in a sense, make the character, Derek Vineyard, intellectually smarter than he was. In other words, you felt it was important that do what about who he was?
EN: Well, it was always a function.. a kind of an element of David McKenna's orginal script. He was an intelligent character..an intelligent person because it was always an element of David's.. I think the tragedy that was built into David's script was that this is a kid that at the end, has wasted an enormous amount of potential. And, I think, when I came in to start working on it with David and stuff, we decided to beef it up even further because we just all felt that the more on some levels elevated his intelligence, is charisma, his leadership capacities, care for his family, all these things, those qualities enhance, I think, the dramatic impact of the end in which, you know, the consequences of his initial choices come back to get him, or come back to find him, you have a stronger sense of the waste or of the loss that this guy represents. In some ways..Ah, I don't know how to say it. Not to equate this on any level with these grand tragedies like Othello or something, but there's a reason that Othello is the great general and not a foot soldier
CR: Exactly
EN: It augments or enhances the impact of what we feel for his fall
CR: Right
EN: And no less so Derek. This is a comtemporary American story but in Derek, I think we tried to create a character whose dimensions come out of that tragic hero tradition
CR: Let me take a look before we get to far too at another clip here. This shows you some sense of the kind of action that is taking place here. This is after Derek goes to prison for three years for convicted of manslaughter, I guess
EN: Right. There's a certain element of self-defense to what he does so he's convicted to seven years.
And here he is, and he's visited by a high school teacher who plays a role in his life. Take a look at this
[Sweeney (Avery Brooks) confronting Derek on his beliefs and whether it has helped his life]
CR: We were just talking One of the things that you liked about the moment was
EN: Well, to me, that's kind of always been one of the key scenes in the movie. I love what Avery Brooks did in there because I think he brought to that moment for that character even a complexity, he reveals a certain complexity. That's a character on a lot of levels, he's been almost annoyingly self-rightous in his moralizing to these kids
CR: Exactly
EN: And Derek, in a way, calls him on it in that moment, says, "What do you know about me?" And it's not until that moment that even this teacher Sweeney backs off and admits that for himself it's been a process too. And suddenly you get this vision of him, I think,nprobably an ex-Panther or someone who was himself very consumed by anger that he directed outward to white people and society and God, he says. And it's only when he sort of opens up himself that he sort of penetrates this kid. And then he asks what I think is , for me, really the key question or the key turning point when he says, "Is any of this that you're doing making your life better?" And once he answers no, it's where, I think, the dam begins to break in him.
CR: James Rouse was your grandfather
EN: yes
CR: Who appeared on this program. A man, who deceased, but of a great talent and creativity, who showed what we could do with inner cities. And those landmarks are all over the place in Boston at Fanueil Hall, Waterside and Norfolk and Baltimore
CR: Is he responsible for Columbia too?
EN: Yeah. Columbia, Maryland
CR: Which is where you grew up.
EN: Um-hm
CR: When did this thing about acting come to you?
EN: [Laughs] Well
CR: I mean, why not architecture Edward?
EN: Well
CR: Why not city planning? Something rather than somebody who goes to Yale, studies Japanese and becomes enamoured of what an actor's life could be
EN: I actually kind of caught the bug when I was very young, when I was about 5 or 6 years-old. And I stated actually taking acting classes when I was about 5 or 6
CR: 5 or 6?
EN: It's been a true lifelong pursuit, although not fully embraced as I guess what I would call a life pursuit or a professional pursuit as an adult until I was a couple of years out of college, maybe. But its somethig I've always done and something I've always been compelled by
CR: There's no question that when you went to Yale, you were going to be an actor?
EN: I knew that one of the reasons I wanted to go there was there was a very fervant..
CR: Drama school
EN: theater environment there. But I don't know that I knew or had accepted. I guess I hadn't come to grips with completely at that point with the idea that at that point that I was going to choose that over other things. I was very interested in a lot of things but as you get older and you know, you fnd yourself, you can't do everything and the choices start to reach a point where I was letting other opportunities go to not give up the opportunity to keep acting. So at a certain point you say to yourself, "This must be what I really want to do because I can't imagine leaving it for any other opportunity." And then at that point, you sort of embrace it spiritually. My granddad.. There's no show business people in my family, but there's a lot of artists. Two of his sons, my uncles, one's a painter and one's a musician. My grandfather and my parents are enormous suporters, lovers of the arts. There the people who keep us all in business because they're avid attenders. And so, there was a lot of support for it even though there was not a tradition of actually doing it.
CR: What do you think it is about acting that brings such.. whatever it does for you?
EN: Ah, I don't know
CR: What is it that draws you to it is my question.
EN: I would say on some level I've always had a compulsion towards mimicry on some level since I was very, very small. I don't know. Sometimes I think that the most essential quality of an actor is an empathetic quality it's the ability or an instinct towards looking at other people and the gestural ways that they communicate and soaking that up and having an instict for soaking that up and representing it.
CR: That's the natural quality of an actor. If there's some natural gift, that's what an actor has.
EN: Yeah
CR: The capacity to do that going in
EN: It's kind of a radar for human or at least an interest in it. On another level for me, I've always found that because I always did have a difficult time with the idea of making choices that would limit my experience or choosing lifestyles that somehow put me in a track. Being an actor on an adult level for me, you get to be an experiential dilettante. You get to dip very substantially into these worlds of experience, even modes of being and expression and really root around in them for a while. Get the thrill of it, get the taste of it, and then step out without any of the consequences of actually choosing that as a lifestyle.
CR: And go on to something else.
EN: And go on to something else. And I find that is for me an incredibly..that's not even a job for me. That's the work that's not work. I really, really enjoy that sort of diversity of experience. And then on a broader level, I do have a fundamential faith in or passion for the broader art of storytelling.
CR: Back to mimicry, has Woody Allen seen you do Woody Allen?
EN: Yeah. After a while of working with him, I finally got up the stones to sort of do it for him straight and he kind of.. he was like [imitates Allen] "You know, that's very good."
CR: Just give me about a 30 second warning
[Both laugh]
EN: He is so distinctive. I talked to Kenneth Brannaugh one time not too long ago. He had just done this film Celebrity with him. And we were talking and we were sort of admitting, and it's not something people comment on. If you're the person sort of playing the role that he would have played..
Yeah
EN: It becomes almost impossible to be around him and not, in some ways, become his proxy
CR: [Rose laughs] Yes, so you've go to be Woody's part in the role
EN: You find yourself taking on his cadences and rhythms, and at a certain point, you just have to surrender to it, I think.
[Rose laughs]
CR: What was it like, what did he teach you, what did you get from him?
EN: Well, he's very..
CR: What you learned, I guess, more than what he taught you.
EN: Well, you learn things from every director because they all have different styles. Some things get very technical but he's still..I think he has for a long time, he tends to film things in the way that.. He doesn't shoot a lot of coverage. In other words, he doesn't do these over-the-shoulder, over-the-shoulders. He tends to film things in long, what they call master shots. It's more theatrical
CR: Long master shots rather than a lot of cutting
EN: Yeah. And interesting things come out of that. You realize you get a kind of a spontaneity with people, which is one of the things he's famous for. That feeling of real, extemporaneous dialogue and interaction. I think his work ethic is intimidating, too. To make a film a year is kind of an amazing thing. And to be finishing one while writing another going on and on. It's ..
CR: But everybody wants to work with him
EN: Yeah.
EN: I know of no one who..Because he's one of the few true auteurs, I think, in the best sense of the word. He follows a personal muse. As an actor, it's always thrilling to work with anybody who has a real clarity of vision because it frees you on a lot of levels to just serve someone else's..play a role in ...you know that the world that you're going to be creating is going to be very distinct because its coming out of that person's very unique mindset. And I don't know why. I'm just a fan of his films. I'd do one anytime, really.
CR: How do you see that whole sort of notion of how you are going to handle all this because the kind of talk about you for this film, this role, which you, I think, this is the best role you have ever done
EN: I'm as proud of it as anything I've ever done. I mean everything has different satisfactions and this is a certain kind of one. But it's certainly a character with a very challenging scope so I felt..
CR: Because of all the range that we've talked about?
EN: Yeah. I felt good about it. It's definitely ..Anything you enter into with a certain fear quotient, that's always a pretty good sign to me that it's a good thing to be chasing. because it means if you're a little bit afraid that you're not going to be able to pull it off, that's probably means it's going to be a challenge that's going to be rewarding if you do.
CR: What would you worry about, whether it's Primal Fear or The People Vs. Larry Flynt, which is a totally different kind of thing, playing the attorney in that, or this. What is it when you create a character, and I'll end with this, that you worry about? Not being able to be what?
EN: Ah.
CR: I mean you know you're a good actor so you can deliever But it seems to me that with the performance , you're looking to make these people memorable.
EN: For me, the actors that I appreciate the most the character that are so distinct from the person themselves and any knowledge of the actor and their personna that the character lives on independently in my head and in the collective they take on this life of their own a Ratso Rizzo or a Travis Bickell Hannibal Lechter any character that really takes on a life of it's own. For me, I become nervous if I feel I'm not going to make it distinctively different from myself
CR: Let me just follow up on that. So what do you need and do you know when you get it? Do you know when you've locked it? Do you know I'm inside this guy's head deliver on making this person. Whatever it is.
EN: Yeah, I mean a film, by it's nature, a fragmented and repetative process done over a long period of time so you're never completely certain in the way, for instance in a play when you're out there performing on a given evening, you can feel it and
CR: you get a feedback
EN: You're doing the whole piece so you can feel if the piece is working. In a film, it's a bit more of a crap shoot in the sense that in your head as you go, what pieces have I done so far and is it holding together. But I do think even then if you've done you're homework and if you've spent the time, you can feel a certain point when you click over into a zone with the character point where literally, if something happens that was not in the script or was nexpected, you'd respond out of that place. And not out of you're own head and that's when I think for me I know I'm down in that skin.
CR: In the zone you want to be in
EN: Yeah
CR: It's great to have you on the program
EN: Thanks very much
CR: Edward Norton.The film is called American History X. Back in a moment, stay with us.
***
Brief note: I transcribed this, so it is subject to my own preferences rather than the standard by-the-book transcripts. If you compare the clip to this transcript, you'll notice that I left out instances where EN was searching for the word or instances where Rose agrees with EN while he's talking. I find those to be largely unnecessary pieces that only serve to distract the reader from the point of the conversation. And, of course, the mistakes are all mine.
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