The writer,
director and star of
Motherless Brooklyn
talks New York, noir
and making musical
acquaintances.
tepping 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
cliché 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 areINTERVIEW 087IN CONVERSATION Interview by ADAM WOODWARD Illustration by TOM HUMBERSTONE
Edward Norton
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