'There is a certain kind of discomfort I feel with not completing a thing.' A candid conversation with Edward Norton on his 20-years-in-the-making adaptation of 'Motherless Brooklyn'
The 50-year-old writer-director-actor is tucked into a plush leather booth at the Knickerbocker, a West Village restaurant that looks like it’s been time-warped out of the Eisenhower era: Al Hirschfeld sketches on the wall, Black Angus meatloaf on the menu, bartenders who definitely make a mean martini. Norton likes this place.
As Lethem’s stock was rising, Norton had been coming off an incredible hot streak, starting with a breakout role as a stuttering teenage altar boy in 1996’sin 1998. Thanks to those roles, he’d already garnered two Oscar nominations before he’d turned 30. His immersive, Method-y approach to parts had people hailing him as the new Brando.
Or rather, his “next” project: There were a few hurdles before Norton could get started. Like his schedule. “We were just starting to rehearseKeeping the Faith. Norton loved the lead character, an “afflicted underdog” who played off the traditional Bogart-style detective. But the book took place in the present day, and the actor felt that trying to set a film version about a gumshoe — even one who blurted out obscene non sequiturs — in the Clinton era would risk sarcasm. “I told Jonathan that if you tried to do it in the Nineties on film, it could end up feeling like” Norton says. “Like retro hipster satire. He agreed that irony was not the angle.
Then, around 2012, he figured out what he calls “the mechanism of the mystery.” The dam burst, and he finished a draft that tied together all the strands of race, politics, power, and noirish thriller. Only he was a little worried that the story he wanted to tell — about the way the One Percent operate without accountability — felt out of sync with the moment. “Obama was being inaugurated for his second term,” Norton says.
personally thanked the firefighter who lost his life during the incident at the film’s New York Film Festival screening
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