CAN: Down in the Valley interviews
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On
day 4 of our Cannes trip, I received an email informing me on where to show up
for an interview with Ed Norton, you know....the guy who played Tyler Durden,
one of my favorite characters to hit the big screen in the past decade or so.
Not to mention his awesome performances in many other movies like AMERICAN
HISTORY X, PRIMAL FEAR, THE SCORE and most recently even, KINGDOM OF HEAVEN.
Norton was in Cannes pushing his latest small picture contribution,
starring and co-producing a film called DOWN IN THE VALLEY, written and directed
by David Jacobson (DAHMER). The film co-stars Evan Rachel Wood, David Morse,
Bruce Dern and Rory Culkin, and is set in the present-day San Fernando Valley,
and revolves around a delusional man (Norton) who believes he's a cowboy and the relationship that he starts with a rebellious young
woman (Wood).
Unfortunately for me, I hadn't seen the movie yet (I waited in line for an hour the night before, only to be turned away as the guy right in front of the rope as they shut the theater down because it was full-- natch!), but I still wanted to interview the man, as he is, in my opinion, one of the best actors of his generation, so I wanted to see what he had to say about his latest project. Arriving at the Martinez Hotel along the Croisette, I scrambled to the room in question, and sat down among 5-6 other journalists around a roundtable, waiting for Tyler to show up.
About
15 minutes later, a skinny guy wearing an unassuming jacket and jeans, straddled
into our room, almost by accident, and walked towards our table. It took me a few
seconds to realize that it was Mr. Norton himself, very nonchalantly, and very
non-"movie star"-like making his way toward us. Several of the
journalists got up to shake his hand and introduce themselves, but for some
reason, I didn't because I was fiddling around with my tape recorder (Note to self:
you're a moron). I did, however, manage to take a picture of the man before he
sat down, which was good, since he has been known to be somewhat of a private
person, and I wasn't sure if he was going to tell me to go fuck myself as I
snapped a couple off. He was cool about it though (although if you enlarge the
pic to the left, you'll note that he's staring at me like I'm the devil
himself).
Speaking very softly, he sat down and began answering our questions one by one for the next 20-30 minutes, followed by another 15-20 session with director David Jacobson, who also seemed like a nice enough fellow. In the end, Norton turned out to be a pretty damn good interview, with elaborate and insightful responses, not much pretense about him, and definitely no attitude. A good experience overall. Below, I have put together some of the Q&A for your reading pleasure.
EDWARD NORTON
Why did you do Kingdom of Heaven?
Ridley and I tried to do a couple of films together, but they never worked out. So he asked me if I wanted to play the French Baron villain in the film. I said: "Who’s playing the guy in the mask?" He said: "Nobody, but I’ll get somebody with a James Mason-like voice", so I said: "I can do a James Mason-like voice!" Then I asked: "How long would it take?" He said: "Two weeks" and I said: "You know what, if you can really do it in two weeks, I’ll do it". So I called his machine and left him a message in that voice, so he called me back and said “Fuck you, was that you?” I said "Yeah" so he said, "That sounds great, let's do it".
Why
not take credit for the role?
The Orlando Bloom character keeps hearing about this guy and then he comes and there’s this mask. If you say Tony Hopkins is the King then you know what’s coming. But you want the audience to feel the same thing as the Bloom character; you want the audience to go there and say, "Wait who is that?", that’s the whole point of the character, that’s the mystery of him. That was just for kicks, but it was fun to do a vocal thing. Also, a free trip to Morocco, man!
Why
is this movie [Down in the Valley] so close to you?
It was just one that caught my interest. I was very compelled by the things in it. The character was a real layer cake and he had a lot of layers that kept evolving. That’s always challenging as an actor and fun. I met David very early on in his own process with it; he almost put it down as a stream of consciousness. I really responded with some of his ideas so I said listen why don’t we work on this for a while together, we can write a script out of it. So we wrote together for like 6 months.
You
didn’t take a writing credit?
No, it’s David’s vision. This character Harlan and these critical elements of: “What would happen if Shane walked in a Western town today, and what would he encounter if he got involved with the family?” are his. That was a brilliant idea, doing a Western in the modern West. I worked a great deal on the script with David, we wrote a lot of the film together, but it was very much born of this very strange and specific vision that David had of the Valley and Harlan and stuff. So I produced it.
I enjoy the process when you’re feeling that you’re flying from the seat of your pants on a film. This experience was shorter, but it reminded me a lot like working on FIGHT CLUB. Every day would be like: “Wait a minute, wait a minute, how is this going to work? Can we do this? He wakes up in a Western town?” I mean, how many people are we going to leave behind right here?” If by the end of the movie, we’re somewhere under 50% of the people in the theatre no longer with us, then we’re fine with it. It’s a fun place to be, it’s stimulating, it's fun to ask yourself: What’s you reference point here? What kind of story is this? Working in a place where you’re kind of not really sure how unorthodox you can get with your structure or how far you can stretch your surrealism before it breaks or doesn’t hold. I don’t know if we succeeded or not, but it's fun to see it through on its own terms.
Being
that Evan Rachel Wood is less experienced and younger than you, how
did you find a common ground?
She was real easy, she’s really brave, really professional, and she came from a very intuitive place. She grew up in the Valley too, I think she knows it, she knew that stuff, she got the feeling, and we improvised a lot.
You
seem in charge of your career, how do you choose your projects?
Sometimes
I have a harder time finding things that feel like they're
attempting anything original, have something to say or are just a
good genre piece. And suddenly, a flood comes in where you catch a
couple. Or like THE PAINTED VEIL or something. I’ve been trying to
produce that movie for 6 years and it finally came together with the
right people and money. And then it happens to be popping out among
some other ones, and then you get busier, For me, it's just more
kind of having the willingness to have it ebb and flow; I don’t
really enjoy something that’s not a little bit fresh for me.
DOWN
IN THE VALLEY was very special for me, I think David is very
brilliant and courageous in the way of my favorite filmmakers I’ve
worked with: Fincher, Spike Lee and Milos. He’s willing and
committed to the idea, he’s not going to try to make you feel
comfortable with the film, he doesn’t define a positive film
experience as one where you leave the movie understanding totally
and feeling good about it or comfortable about it. He’s willing to
say that exhaustion is a success, or that confusion is a success, or
just being disturbed is a success. You can say: well sure…but when
you really get down to it, there are a lot of highly regarded
filmmakers who I don’t think for a second would leave their
audience uncertain as to what the movie was about or uncomfortable
with it.
People sit around and say how great RAGING BULL is, but the bottom line is that most people were exhausted. If you’re honest, the first time you saw that movie it beat the shit out of you! A lot of people panned it when it came out. I think increasingly, it takes a very specific type of filmmaker in the current environment to say: "Look, I’m not here to provide redemption, I’m not here to give you an experience that you can encapsulate to your friends 5 minutes after you saw it, that’s no necessarily the definition of a terrific film".
And David is really rigorous; he never bulked from the idea of letting that character remain an enigma and forcing people to ask themselves, sort through their own reactions to it. He just impressed me a great deal early on with the strangeness of those visions. When we were working on the script, he sent me a disc with photographs on it of the valley, there was maybe 150 photographs of the valley, there was all those things, it was like hills and a highway, power lines and houses and it was just gorgeous. He’s got a real feeling for what he wants to depict here. He has a sense of how he wants to show what the modern West has become. And sometimes you just want to dive in on somebody’s wave.
DAVID JACOBSON
Were
you okay with Ed [Norton] saying that he liked the script, but that
you'd have to work on it together for six months?
I was because he is very intelligent and we saw things in very similar ways. If his ideas were ridiculous, I wouldn’t have done it. And when we first got together we were supposed to just meet for 15 minutes, but we talked for 3 hours. I thought of what he could bring to it and out of me, and it was positive. He was to me the producer who really protected my vision of it, he made sure we had time in editing. To me, the guy really understood what I wanted to do.
How
did the original script play like?
It was a little more apocalyptic, I have some pretty dark visions. One thing I found out as I was sending the script around, I thought Harlan [Norton] was the more interesting character and I was clearly thinking of casting that character where that’s where the money for the film was gonna come from. In my original script, we focused more on the boy and his change, in the current version Harlan kind of spirals down. But thematically, it didn’t change.
How
did your relationship change when Edward was in front of the camera?
I feel I’ve gotten good performances in my last two movies and it's funny because I never feel like I do that much. Because to me, great performances come from good writing and good casting. I also give my actors a lot of love and faith, they feel that and I think that’s the most important thing. If they feel safe, they try things and use their imagination. And if they’re good -- in this case, I had good actors -- then you get wonderful things. It's the way you interact with them, what you say to them, I ask them and try to get them to think of the ideas, I don’t tell them do this, do that or move your body like this. The more that they can own their performances, the more imagination comes out. I was reading John Huston in interviews; he wanted the actors to feel as much freedom as possible to try things, to do what they want to do. It’s a very effective way two work.
Were
you always a Western fan?
When I was living in Paris in 2000, I started going to a series of Western films and that’s what got me into it. I also read this book called “The Searchers” which is better than the movie. ONCE UPON A TIME is my favorite Western. So in seeing all these movies, they inspired me. I also was writing about my childhood where I was growing up in the Valley and I was stunned where I started to feel that there was weird similarities. Growing up in the Valley in the 60’s and 70’s wasn’t too different than an old Western town.
What
happened at Sundance?
That was an early point where we had a rough cut in December and the idea was to show a rough cut at Sundance with the idea of selling it. We got notes from Jeff Gilmore and we didn’t take them.
Edward
spoke highly of working with Evan [Rachel Wood], how did you get
them closer?
I didn’t know they would! I spent a week of rehearsal with them and that was the main thing or me, to get them closer, familiar to each other. We did tons of improvs, in fact, some improvs became scenes in the film. During that process, they became comfortable and Evan always had this "thing" for Edward Norton, so maybe that crush helped.
DOWN IN THE
VALLEY is currently seeking
American distribution
Source: JoBlo.com
