Exclusive Interview with Edward Norton for 'Stone'

Edward Norton, who stars in John Curran's "Stone," recently stopped by in town and was kind enough to sit down with me and chat about the film, which co-stars Robert De Niro and Milla Jovovich.

In "Stone," Robert De Niro plays a parole officer who oversees the case of Edward Norton's character, who's in prison for covering up the murder of his grandparents with a fire. He's hoping for an early release.

Milla Jovovich plays Norton's wife, a sexy woman who attempts to seduce De Niro. Both men have their dark sides, and "Stone" explores how they deal with their predicaments. Enjoy the interview below!

The Screening Log: Considering "Stone" is your second collaboration with John Curran, what is your working relationship like at this point?

Edward Norton: Great. I really enjoyed the experience on "The Painted Veil" with him. He's a terrific director of actors, but then I loved what he did with the film, so I was eager to work with him again. I felt like we had developed enough trust on this, which is important because he knew on his side that the film would be a challenge. He was going after some very elusive themes, and I think he knew he was going to make a film that asked a lot of questions and didn't give a lot of answers. I think he wanted to go there with actors he had a lot of faith in. If I got a role like this I like it to be with someone who I feel really good about. You're swinging wide and you really got to trust someone's sort of taste on what to pick. It was a good fit, and De Niro and I had also been looking for something else to do. We had talked about trying to find something that would let us dig in a little bit deeper together. He rang me up as soon as he read it and said this is really good, we should do this. It was good on all those levels. I would like to work with more people like this again. It has great advantages.

The Screening Log: To what extent did the movie's spiritual theme (and all themes for that matter) appeal to you?

Edward Norton: John was very articulate in saying he wanted to make this right now because the financial crisis had hit, and there was so much talk in the air about the whole notion of things about life that people take for granted and about people going through the experience of approaching retirement and thinking that they were set and then finding that everything had crumbled that they had anchored their sense of themselves in. John was urgent in saying he wanted to roll around in that sense of decay and abandonment and like the way that we build up lives around constructs of marriage and church and work and stock portfolios and we don't necessarily do the hard work to make sure those things are as authentic as we think they are. When the rug is pulled out it's bad. When you look at De Niro's character as the protagonist of this, it's a portrait of somebody sliding off the rails as they deal with the fact that a lot of what they built their life around is inauthentic. I read it and thought this is relevant. There is consequence to denying confrontations with yourself. All of that was interesting to me.

The Screening Log: What kind of preparation did you do for this role, which seems like it was definitely a challenging one?

Edward Norton: The script was originally set in the South and the description of my character was different than the way we took it. John really wanted to set it in Michigan. He thought it was the best physical representation of this idea of assumptions and then collapse. It was the biggest industry in America and here it is in decay. He told me he wants to feel Stone is from Detroit. I had that to go with. Apart from that I didn't feel super confident about him because I had no image of him in my head. I felt a little more at sea with this. Ultimately, at the end of the day, it was just meeting these prisoners. I was doing it for a while and I was getting great insight but still not like a specific idea of the character. Just in the last five days before we shot I met one guy who just blew it all open for me. I really thought he was like the perfect construction of what I was looking for; his physicality, his voice and his anxiety. I was just going to channel that. Then it got easier. Once you find "it," it's like a car. Once you figure out the key, you can drive it for a while.

The Screening Log: Building on this idea of imprisonment or inner imprisonment, it seems something that spreads across several of your performances…

Edward Norton: I think that's true. If nothing else, I think I find myself pulled to things that are rolling around in what's difficult about contemporary life. When I did "American History X" and we sat down to work on the script together, David McKenna talked about rage as a trap or a cage or the way marginalization makes people punch back. And "Fight Club" too, those all films about people sucked into one form of trap. I think the reason I get pulled into them.

The Screening Log: As an actor, what are you looking for in your director to feel more comfortable on set, and which directors do you feel you've worked best with?

Edward Norton: On set, I think one of the great qualities of many of my favorite directors is that they look to be surprised. A director's impulse to control what happens is almost indirectly proportioned to how exciting the work ends up being. David Fincher, Spike Lee, John. I mean, the people I have worked with who I think are inspiring are often the ones who are so confident in what they know their part is, and they're the ones who sit and watch and watch and don't say anything for a long time. They listen and watch, and they hope to be surprised.   

The Screening Log: Do you feel you want to get back behind the camera again?

Edward Norton: Sure. At some point.

The Screening Log: Since this is your second time working with De Niro, do you have a favorite De Niro performance?

Edward Norton: I think many, but the way I would put it is that what I really admire about him is that across a long period of time, he's really investigated some very deep themes in American life in a committed way. You don't necessarily think of the actor as the writer or as having control over the conversations, and yet when you look at someone's career as De Niro's, you see somebody exerting a very specific artistic sensibility and a real impulse to explore certain themes about dysfunction and particular kinds of pathologies, and I always look to him with a particular kind of admiration because of that reason. The reason he's become what he's become is because of his skills and his commitment to the choices of the types of things he works on. That's a very high standard. It's not always commercial. Now he's become part of the canon, but none of his earlier films were commercial at all. Burt Reynolds was the biggest box office star at the time De Niro was doing "Taxi Driver" and "Raging Bull" and these kinds of film. He was not the biggest movie star, but those films are still around.