Edward Nor­ton: ​‘In Amer­i­ca now, the veil has come off’

Step­ping behind the cam­era for only the sec­ond time was not a straight­for­ward move for Edward Nor­ton. The actor best known for play­ing dan­ger­ous­ly delud­ed out­siders in Amer­i­can His­to­ry X and Fight Club spent more than five years devel­op­ing Moth­er­less Brook­lyn, trans­pos­ing Jonathan Lethem’s 1999 detec­tive nov­el to 1950s New York and cast­ing him­self as Tourette-suf­fer­ing pro­tag­o­nist Lionel Ess­rog. Here he dis­cuss­es his influ­ences, the mag­ic of col­lab­o­ra­tion, and over­com­ing nerves to play the most com­plex char­ac­ter of his career.

LWLies: Thom Yorke wrote a song for this film. How did that come about?

Nor­ton: I met Thom some time around ​’96. I was already friends with Michael Stipe and [Radio­head] were open­ing for REM. Michael said, ​‘You got­ta hear these guys, you’ll love ​’em.’ Any­way, they had decid­ed to go out and play what they were writ­ing at the time and then go back into the stu­dio and fin­ish it. They did this lit­tle unan­nounced show at a club in New York, and they came out and said, ​‘This is the new record we’re work­ing on,’ and then played ​‘OK Computer’.

I feel like Thom, in terms of writ­ers in my gen­er­a­tion, he’s, like, the guy, you know. He gets the long­ing in the heart and the ter­ror in the brain. The dis­cord and the melody. To me, those are very much the para­dox­es in Lionel; he’s smart but also frac­tured, he’s roman­tic but very hard-boiled and cyn­i­cal. I had this notion, long before we start­ed shoot­ing the movie, that I want­ed it to have a defin­ing bal­lad – kind of like how Chi­na­town has a theme. So I asked Thom if he would con­sid­er writ­ing some­thing, and like a week lat­er he sent me the song.

Jazz is a recur­ring motif in the film; there’s the scene where Lionel cuts loose in the club.

Right, so that evolved out of think­ing about what song would be good for Lionel to dance to. I said to [world-renowned trum­peter and com­pos­er] Wyn­ton Marsalis, ​‘Do you think you could adapt Thom’s song into a Miles Davis-style, 1950s arrange­ment?’ So that’s what we end­ed up using. It’s pret­ty mag­i­cal when some­thing comes togeth­er like that. You know, jazz is America’s clas­si­cal music in so many ways, and it’s impor­tant in this movie because it’s all about pow­er and the hier­ar­chies of soci­ety, and at that time jazz was one thing the peo­ple who were being dis­crim­i­nat­ed against had con­trol over. And on a cin­e­mat­ic lev­el, I just liked the idea of Lionel get­ting swept up in some­thing that was almost like a joy­ful release of the thing he tries to hold back.

Were you at all ner­vous about doing that scene?

I was very ner­vous about it. As an actor, I was more ner­vous about that scene than any­thing I’ve done. There’s a sequence in Amer­i­can Hus­tle… I was very inspired by some­thing David O Rus­sell did in that movie where Bradley Coop­er and Amy Adams are falling in love, and they’re danc­ing and the whole scene has this fever­ish sen­si­bil­i­ty. I remem­ber think­ing at the time it felt like very free and flu­id film­mak­ing. You search for those things. You don’t copy them, but you allow them to refract through you.

You men­tioned Chinatown…

Yeah, the thing about Chi­na­town is it came out around this moment of Water­gate and Viet­nam… There’s a lot going on under­neath that film, and it’s very antag­o­nis­tic towards America’s main nar­ra­tive of itself. Chi­na­town real­ly tran­scend­ed the cliché́ that the genre had start­ed to fall into with too many seri­alised detec­tive shows. It remind­ed every­one of the true func­tion of noir.

We’re in anoth­er strange moment now.

Oba­ma was in the process of being re-elect­ed when I start­ed writ­ing the script, and I was def­i­nite­ly fooled into think­ing things were on the right track. In a per­verse kind of way, I think it’s bet­ter we end­ed up mak­ing the film now instead of then. In Amer­i­ca, more than ever, there’s a com­pla­cen­cy around a lot of the prob­lems we’re deal­ing with. Back [in the 1950s], the way things were get­ting done in New York was very author­i­tar­i­an, but it was so under the veil… Now the veil has come off. You wouldn’t think that any­one could get away with doing the same things so naked­ly today, but they are.

Moth­er­less Brook­lyn is released 6 Decem­ber. Read the LWLies review.