The INVESTIGATOR

MURDER, MYSTERY AND... TOURETTE SYNDROME? EDWARD NORTON REFLECTS ON A 20-YEAR JOURNEY AS WRITER-DIRECTOR-STAR TO MAKE MOTHERLESS BROOKLYN, A NOIR WITH A UNIQUE TWIST

IT’S BEEN NEARLY 20 years between my first film as director and the second, Motherless Brooklyn. So I guess the question is: why the rush?

Truth is, I didn’t intend for it to be that long. But I knew when I got the rights to Jonathan Lethem’s novel that I wasn’t going to work on it right away. We did Fight Club. I directed Keeping The Faith. For four years I just wasn’t working on it. Then I wrote about half of it but got blocked.

Finally, the guy running New Line, Toby Emmerich — we’d become friends doing American History X — told me, “I want the rest. Write it!” He pushed me and pushed me and I finally finished it. And then Toby was the one who said to me, “You gotta direct this.” That was maybe 2012. The funny thing is, we talked about the fact that with Obama getting elected for a second term — this black community organiser as President of the United States — maybe a lot of what this movie’s about is fading in the rearview mirror. But Toby was a big believer in it.

It took us five years to get the resources together. New Line wasn’t making these kind of movies. But then Toby became head of Warner Bros. And Donald Trump got elected President. And suddenly the underlying themes in the movie felt white-hot again. Toby said to me, “Now is the time to do it.” I really should just tell people I wrote it last year, in response to everything that’s been happening. But gestation is important.

I think there’s a reason Milos Forman [director of One Flew Over The Cuckoo’s Nest and Amadeus] took long breaks between making movies. Paul Thomas Anderson, too. Iñárritu. I think the people who do really good stuff gestate for a long time.

I worked with Milos on The People Vs. Larry Flynt. He really taught me about the plasticity of film. I had never seen anybody with such a faith in the process of filming as a way of simply gathering raw material. Not shooting a film to service an edit he already had in his mind, or a storyboard, but really treating it as a process of gathering clay, knowing it was going to be sculpted later. And watching him edit I learned how much that clay could transform from the shape it had seemed to have on the day. That was eye-opening to me, because it made me realise you needed to give the script and performances room to reveal themselves in ways you didn’t necessarily presuppose.

On this film Toby Emmerich correctly predicted that the necessity of me directing was partly to be able to sculpt my own performance with this very tricky role. I didn’t have to perfect the performance on the day. I could do it at different levels — play around a lot more freely knowing it was only me who would determine the right balance and arc later. Given our tight schedule this was important, because I was able to move faster and not be so hung up on ‘the right delivery’.

ALONG TIME ago I asked David Fincher, “What’s your most important advice to a director?” And he said, in his typically indelicate way, “You can only have one crybaby on a movie. Only one person who needs you holding their hand a lot. Figure out

who’s worth it and make sure they’re the only one.” But on this one I realised, “I can’t actually have any needy actors. I can’t have anyone in the cast who isn’t such a tradecraft pro that they are easily capable of dealing with me banging around like a madman.”

I cast everybody in the movie from my core, New York theatrical-based roster, with the exception of Gugu Mbatha-raw. Probably the times I felt the most anxiety were with Gugu, because of the intimacy of some of those scenes. To be trying to adjust them as a writer and director while also being in it with her was very difficult — I constantly felt the impulse to say, “I’m sorry, I’m sorry, I’m sorry.” But she’s such a stone-cold, Rada-trained, unflappable pro! Her ability to adjust on the fly and stay within the emotion despite all my externalising distraction was just fucking phenomenal. Phenomenal. As was Willem Dafoe and Bobby Cannavale, Alec Baldwin. But those are people I’ve known a long, long time and have an easy rapport with. Gugu was like my MVP in terms of placing her faith in me and just infinite patience with the distraction entailed in me wearing both hats.

And I owe a lot to Bruce Willis, who helped me get the movie made by agreeing to do it for almost nothing. The story really hinges on what happens to his character and the emotional impact that has on my character, Lionel Essrog. The whole movie doesn’t play if you don’t buy that. It needed to be someone who the audience brings an existing affection for. But it wasn’t just because Bruce is who he is. His character is a figure of mystery, he’s enigmatic, he’s the coolest guy in the room, the guy with all the angles. He’s a mentor for Lionel, like an older brother to him. And Bruce brings that almost intrinsically. I love it when you’re getting an actor in that zone that’s their bread and butter.

Technically my anchor was Dick Pope, the cinematographer. I worked with Dick on The Illusionist and I think a lot of what people love about that movie is down to him. If you look at his work on that and with Mike Leigh on Vera Drake, Topsy-turvy, Mr. Turner... It’s immersive, it’s not self-consciously period, it’s lived-in. You’re in an environment of depth and grit and without some bullshit patina or matte finish that indicates insistently that you’re in a different era. I knew he would be the right person to shoot this.

We looked at Edward Hopper paintings as a reference point. And Vivian Maier photographs. There are homages to about six or seven Maier photographs specifically in the film. But Hopper had a big effect on us. We talked a lot about the loneliness that’s in Hopper’s urban tableaus. Like when Willem Dafoe and Alec Baldwin meet in the night under an awning in the spill of the light — we tap-danced like crazy to get the city to shut down all the lights along Fifth Avenue, to create enough darkness to create that shaft of light.

There’s a great tradition of films — Forrest Gump, Rain Man, A Beautiful Mind, Good Will Hunting — that function because they’re about an underdog. They’re about a hero who’s got some kind of an affliction that makes them unique. And the audience roots for them not despite the affliction but because of it. What was in my mind was this idea that to be pulled through a purposefully murky and convoluted story, you have to be hooked into a character.

I watched Forrest Gump again about a year ago. It’s a much more politically toothy film than you remember. It’s actually quite sardonic and it has some bitterness in it. It’s dark. It’s written by Eric Roth and he’s got a great, incisive sensibility. But you don’t really remember the plot of that film — you’re carried along by the poignancy of this character and humour of this guy navigating the world in his condition. And I think that’s a very successful way to pull people through something dense. Chinatown does that, but not through an afflicted character. It just does it ’cause Jack Nicholson is so fucking cool that you’re with it. You have no fucking idea what’s going on in Chinatown eight-tenths of the way through. I defy anybody who says they understand what’s going on in that movie until maybe the last 20 minutes. And even still people come away really with an essential sense of it.

You come away with an essential sense of the sin of a city.

It’s not coincidental to me that Chinatown hits right as the Vietnam War is ending and people are questioning, “Are we really what we say we are?” And you get this story that under the sunny American Dream idea of Los Angeles is theft and incest. The place that was marketed as the land of the American Dream is in fact all built on a crime. My feeling was that New York has not only deep, vast shadowy criminality within its modern history, but also the stain of racism actually baked into its infrastructure.

I felt like for all the films that have been made about New York, there hadn’t really been a real hard look at what I think is the great, hidden, dark truth of the second half of the 20th century in New York, which is that it was run by a Darth Vader. It wasn’t La Guardia. It wasn’t Nelson Rockefeller. It wasn’t true to any of the signposts of a democratic society. It was run — full stop — by an imperial Caesar who was a racist and who baked racism into the infrastructure of the city. He destroyed much of what was most beautiful about the old city, ruined it in ways that it can’t, in some ways, recover from. But people don’t talk about it. Right in the middle of post-war Pax Americana the biggest city in America was being run by an anti-democratic, authoritarian bully: Robert Moses.

Our villain in Motherless Brooklyn is based on him and played by Alec Baldwin. And you can say, well, there are echoes of Trump or whatever. But the truth is, Robert Moses was a genius and Trump is a moron. Trump is a clown. Robert Moses was a once-in-a-century genius. But a terrible person. One of the reasons Alec’s so great is that there’s a seductiveness to his argument: that you have to have the capacity to look forward unsentimentally to get things that are important done in the chaos of a society. That kind of abandonment of a sense of obligation or responsibility, the idea that the rules have fallen away from you, is a timeless sort of threat. People amassing power who don’t have a sense of humanistic responsibility to other people are dangerous as fuck. And it’s an eternal return.

Going back to Milos, I used to ask him why he was so constantly interested in stories about people pushing back against oppressive authority. Well, Milos had lived through the Nazis. He lived through totalitarian Communism. And his view was, “You’re not gonna win. These things won’t go away. But if you cease the defiance, they will take more than half the field.” He really believed it was a relentless, constant fight to keep the omnipresent forces of this kind of bullying desire for control and power at bay.

LIONEL ESSROG IS pretty hardboiled in the sense that, as he says, he can’t see past his own daily battles. We talked about the fact that even though people don’t have as extreme a condition as Lionel, when you’re admitted into the inner life of a person and he says, “Hey, the first thing to know is I’m pretty fucked up,” your affinity begins. Because whether or not they have Tourette syndrome, most people feel the same. The truth is most people down inside their inner core think, “I am not totally understood. There’s a ‘me’ that nobody else knows. And I’m doing battle in the world. I have to fight my way through life.”

Whether they have Tourette syndrome or not, I think he speaks to that part of people that feels they’re not seen for everything that they are. And the truth is, people don’t have a lot of bandwidth to fight for the bigger things. They’re like, “Life is fucking hard.” When Thom Yorke wrote this song, ‘Daily Battles’, for us, it flattened me. When I heard the lyric I teared up and went back in and wrote the line into the scene where Gugu’s character says, “We’ve all got our daily battles, right?” Like, the point is he’s in the car with a black woman in 1950s New York and he’s lamenting his condition. And she’s sort of like, “Hello?!” She’s out there on the barricades. And he doesn’t really get to be with her unless he is willing to get off the fence.

I think most people know there’s a lot of bad shit going on, but it’s hard to find the room in their own daily struggles to add that to their list of what they’re gonna deal with.

I feel like hopefully the movie’s a fun adventure and takes people deeper than they expect at the start. And when noir works it’s not about people following every twist of the convoluted plot. It’s whether they come away with an essential sense that things aren’t what we thought they were. Noir, in the most high-minded sense, is about revealing the shadow. There’s a lot of dark shit going on and we’re going to look at it. And I think — getting highfalutin — that’s when maybe films have an actual role to play in making sure people don’t swallow the party line wholesale.

Has my relationship to acting shifted? Some, yes. When a piece is really good and worthy like Birdman or Fight Club, I am so happy to be in the ensemble that’s coming together around someone else’s big idea. To give everything you’ve got in the service of whatever it is a great director is chasing is wonderful. But sometimes there’s a character or a story and you’re like: this one’s mine. Mine to construct and incarnate and make it the way I want it. And fight the fight to have it stay as close to the thing that was in my head as I can make it. There’s a pretty deep satisfaction in getting through that. And there are things that come to you from taking that on that are a joy. Having Thom write a song, Daniel Pemberton the score, [virtuoso jazz trumpeter] Wynton Marsalis do an arrangement, having Dick Pope do his thing. And you’re there going, “How did I get to dance with this kind of talent?” That’s a great feeling. That gets into some sort of macro creative experience that’s gotten beyond acting. It’s taken you up into the realm of being some kind of a curator of an idea that inspires people to do all kinds of great work. And you’re there to marshal it all and pull it together. That’s pretty thrilling.

MOTHERLESS BROOKLYN IS IN CINEMAS FROM 22 NOVEMBER