Norton is going ga-ga for Gugu
WHEN actor Edward Norton was casting the leading lady for his second film as a director, he knew he wanted an actress who was a ‘stonecold professional’ who wouldn’t need hand-holding. When he met British actress Gugu Mbatha-Raw, he says, ‘I knew I’d found my heroine’. He praised her work in everything from Black Mirror to the film Belle. ‘She is everything that’s best out of the British system,’ said Norton of Mbatha-Raw, who lives in Los Angeles but works on both sides of the Atlantic. Norton had spent years perfecting his screenplay based on Jonathan Lethem’s best-selling 1999 crime novel Motherless Brooklyn, narrated by Lionel Essrog, an amateur detective with Tourette’s syndrome. As well as directing, Norton plays Essrog. He shifted the story from the Nineties to the Fifties and infused it with a jazz vibe. The resulting movie is right out of the film noir tradition; dangerously dark and delicious. At the heart of it is Essrog. Because of his affliction, he’s almost invisible. In the film, he hooks up with Mbatha-Raw’s Laura Rose (an invented character not featured in the book).
SHE’S a lawyer for a local government agency that tries to protect the rights of mainly black apartment dwellers who are being driven out of the city by a bullying, autocratic city boss, played by Alec Baldwin. It’s a film about murder, women, power and jazz. Audiences at the Telluride Film Festival debated it endlessly. Some thought it too long, while others couldn’t get enough of the sexy, sultry movie beautifully shot by the legendary Dick Pope, Mike Leigh’s favourite cinematographer. In fact, Norton said, Pope was a guiding hand on the film. ‘Dick would go: “I’m only ’umble, but is that what you mean to do?”’ Norton told me, mimicking Pope’s cockney accent. The lush and unexpected way of relaying who’s behind the murder of Essrog’s boss, played by Bruce Willis, came to Norton as he grappled with how to present a hero
who’s not in the classic mould of ‘the smooth-talking guy who knows all the angles’. He added that the noir narrative allowed him to look at the corruption that riddles major cities: ‘The truth was that New York City was being reshaped by a racist tyrant who wanted permanent poverty for non-whites.’ Baldwin’s character Moses Randolph is based on real-life power broker Robert Moses (long dead). He was, in all senses, a master builder who ripped the city apart. Norton said that as he was in preproduction, Donald Trump was running for president, adding that his film tackles ‘the big man problem’. Mbatha-Raw is terrific in it, as is Willem Dafoe as an architect who was once close to Moses Randolph. A major aspect of the movie is the music. Norton worked closely with London-based composer Daniel Pemberton, and Radiohead’s Thom Yorke who wrote the film’s potent ballad. It was a genius decision to hire jazz visionary Wynton Marsalis to orchestrate Yorke’s number. ‘It’s the mashing up of Thom Yorke’s modernism and Wynton’s classical jazz,’ Norton explained. The film is also showing at the Toronto International Film Festival on Tuesday and will open in late November, which also sees the release of Pemberton’s score and a separate soundtrack album.