Edward Norton Fights His Way to the Top
By Barbara Teasdall
Reel.com
Like the poker player he portrayed in Rounders, Edward Norton has learned to keep his cards close to his vest. At least when it comes to his personal life.
The eldest of three children born to a lawyer father and a teacher mother, Norton grew up in Columbia, Maryland, with the burning desire to be an actor. He believes that the roles he chooses are all his fans need to know about what makes him tick. Norton wants his acting to stand alone and to be unencumbered by any fodder about his personal life.
After graduating from Yale in 1991 with a degree in history, the now 30-year-old Norton eventually wound up working at New York's Signature Theatre Company, known for staging the plays of Edward Albee. A phenomenal audition landed him a role in 1996's Primal Fear, opposite Richard Gere, as the accused killer of a bishop. A Kentucky mountain dialect, cloaked in altar-boy innocence with a streak of psychosis, made the role Norton's breakout performance; so riveting that it garnered the newcomer Academy Award and Golden Globe nominations for Best Supporting Actor.
Norton followed this up playing Drew Barrymore's boyfriend in Woody Allen's Everyone Says I Love You; as Larry Flint's lawyer in The People vs. Larry Flint with Woody Harrelson and one-time steady Courtney Love; and as a reformed white supremacist in American History X, with Edward Furlong and Beverly D'Angelo. The latter led to another Academy Award nomination, this time for Best Actor. Perhaps just to keep fans guessing, Norton turned down the role of the title character in Saving Private Ryan.
In his latest film, Fight Club, Norton plays a Gen-Xer who tires of his white-collar world and enters the realm of the fight club to which he is introduced by a new friend, Tyler, played by Brad Pitt. Attempting to overcome frustration with their boring everyday lives, young men beat each other to a bloody pulp, which eventually leads Tyler to near-messianic status.
During a late September heat wave in Los Angeles, a very articulate Norton spoke with a great deal of thought and intelligence about his new film and about growing older.
Q: In Fight Club, it’s implied that young men today are angry and looking for a way to express their rage? Isn’t that a gross generalization?
Edward Norton: I totally agree with that. I think it's a very important distinction. There is nothing in the film that's a suggestion. First of all, it's important to distinguish what a character in the film suggests and what the film suggests. What Tyler is proposing is one half of the dialectic in the film. By the end, the other characters have pulled back from that and the film kind of leaves it in your lap to decide. So whatever Tyler's espousing isn't necessarily to be confused with the message of the film.
Q: But what do you think?
EN: I'm just saying that it leaves it open to you to figure out - like the narrator - how far do you want to go with something like this? But I also think that even Tyler is not really espousing violence directed outward against other people, as a form of redemptive gesture. He says, "Hit me." It's about, "I want to have real experiences. I don't want to die without having had real experiences in my life." I think the aggression in Fight Club, and the radicalism in Fight Club, is very much directed inward. I think the Fight Club is kind of metaphoric for the fight against your own impulses to get cocooned in things. Which is why, when the guys fight, they get up and hug each other at the end and thank each other for the experience. It's the gesture that's helping them strip away the fears; the fears of pain and the reliance on the material signifiers of their self-worth.
Q: So what do you do to get out your own aggressions?
EN: I think people do all kinds of different things.
Q: Since you're not like that in real life, how long does it take you to get into character for a fight scene?
EN: The intense fighting stuff has to be very well choreographed. I think one of the strange ironies of film is that sometimes the violence in film that seems the most intensely brutal is actually the kind of acting that's the least emotionally connected. I get more of an emotional rush for the fight in the car, when we're arguing, or when I'm burning my hand, or something like that. Technically, with fight scenes, you have to repeat them in very small fragments, over and over.
Q: How did this script change from the original, the one that director David Fincher had when he first approached you?
EN: It's very true to the spirit of the book. There's very little text in the film that's not verbatim out of the novel. I think the ending is amplified into a more cinematic ending. In some ways, it's shifted a little more toward the redemptive, in the sense that there's a definite pulling back from Tyler - a defeat of Tyler and a retreat from everything Tyler's going towards. In this film, like at the end of The Graduate, he's accomplished something. You don't know what he's accomplished exactly, but you get the sense that he's reached some kind of middle ground between his old self and this side of himself that he's been battling.
Q: You've spoken about how you think these ideas apply to your generation.
EN: I don't know that I'd want to put a simple label on the whole thing, but I do think a lot of why I responded to the book - and why all of us responded to the book - is that it was one of the first things I read that made me think, "In a much more substantive and complicated way, this is really on the pulse of the energy I feel in my generation." Much more than I had felt with these kind of Baby Boomer-created Reality Bites visions of us, as this kind of reductive, aimless, angst-ridden slackers. I felt Fight Club - in a way that none of that stuff did - really probed down into the despair and paralysis that people feel in the face of having inherited this value system out of advertising. There were so many things in the book. My first encounters with Brad and with Fincher were just kind of sitting there going, "I loved this," and reading these aphorisms out of the book. They were really things you felt like you could almost whack up on a big poster and they would become a banner. It was the first thing I read that I thought could really be what The Graduate was for that generation or Rebel Without a Cause; something that really rooted around in the dynamics of this frustration.
Q: What about the focus in the press about the violence in this film? How do you react to that?
EN: It's coming from a lot of people who haven't even seen the movie. That seems like lazy journalism to me.
Q: Were there unusual struggles with the ratings board?
EN: Not at all. That's the standard fare. There's not one major scene that we shot that isn't in the film because of violent content. Not one.
Q: Are you worried about copycat violence from this film? Like blowing things up?
EN: This is no arsonist's handbook. There are no instructions on how to make a bomb in this.
Q: That was done intentionally?
EN: Yeah. But you know, I've gotta say, that kind of stuff comes from people catching a buzz on a movie that they haven't even seen, and looking for easy copy. The critical community calls for more sophisticated films, more complicated films, and more eclectic films to come out of the studio system. When they get one and don't grant it a more sophisticated eye, then the onus is on the critical community, in my opinion. Because if you examine this movie and really listen to what it says, there's nothing in it that's suggesting violence against other people, or anything like that, as a means to an end.
Q: Do you think real-life fight clubs may emerge?
EN: Yeah. But if people didn't make art that critiqued the dysfunctions in a society because they were afraid of copycat things, then Nabokov never would have written Lolita, The Beatles never would have made that record, Scorsese never would have made Taxi Driver. Every movie that's ever been called dangerous or radical is now a cultural hallmark of a whole generational energy. It's much, much more disturbing and dangerous to me to suggest that a cultural medium as potent as film should not look at the ways that we're unhealthy, in a complicated way. That's living in serious denial, as a culture, to say, "Let's not make films about the violence that's in this culture."
Q: In the film, you're talking to co-star Helena Bonham Carter, who asks you what's going on. You look at Tyler, who gives you a sign that this conversation is over. It's almost like you're the submissive to a master.
EN: Right. I love the way that's edited and put together, because I think it's where it starts to really answer to this surrealness. But my thought on what you're saying is - and in talking to Fincher about it - is that in the character of the narrator, there is this juncture in the phone booth when he has the choice to move towards her, or move towards Tyler. And in moving towards her ... in a way, I think she's almost like his female animus. She's exactly the same as he is, on a certain level, and he can move towards her and have a connection. He can go toward this more seductive, negativist approach or someone who's essentially saying, "Let's try something else. Don't go towards what you know already." So he moves towards that. I don't mean negative in the sense of bad, but in the sense of, let's contend with what we've been sold on.
The scene that's really interesting for me is in the car, when they fight. Because what's revealed there is, in essence, that it hasn't been so much of a commitment to the philosophy in the same way that Tyler's committed to it, or a commitment to the pursuit of his ideas. Really, for him, it's been the satisfaction of having a relationship, a personal connection with somebody. And in that is the root of his jealousy when Helena comes into the picture. Because in the car, what they really end up saying is, "I thought this was our thing, and why do you leave me out?" It's kind of a relationship fight from his end. And Tyler is saying, "This is not about our relationship. And if that's why you've been in this, then you've got a big surprise coming. Don't make this about you and me because this is much more about what's being explored here." And in that is the emotional hurt for the narrator. And I think it's at that point that they start to split.
Q: Do you think you have life figured out better now?
EN: The thing I liked about the film is that it does touch on something that I feel is part of what's going on in our generation in its 20s. We've been kind of having our mid-life crisis in our 20s.
Q: Just wait until you really hit middle age!
EN: [laughter] Yeah, I know. But we have, in essence, been going through this. The film is, in a lot of ways, about that process of figuring out what you don't like. About starting to name the things that make you unhappy.
Q: Did you feel old in your 20s?
EN: It's not about whether I felt old or not. Personally, I think that going through your 20s is hopefully going through a lot of the experiences that let you start to identify what it is that you like and don't like. You stop receiving your ideas about what you should like and don't like from other sources.
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