Original-Cin interview: Motherless Brooklyn's Edward Norton on directing himself, rewriting a best-seller and systemic racism
By Jim Slotek
When I suggest he should get extra points for difficulty for his ambitious labour of film noir love Motherless Brooklyn, Edward Norton jokingly replies, “It’s like gymnastics, I guess.”
Certainly, there was audacity involved – starting with telling the author of a novel that won the National Book Critics Circle Award for Fiction that you had a better idea and wanted to do a wholesale re-write of the plot.
Read our review of Motherless Brooklyn
Then there was the decision to direct himself, playing the lead character, a private detective with Tourettes, who effectively delivers two streams of dialogue, one of them a staccato “tic” that is almost like a second character talking.
At a round table interview at the Toronto International Film Festival, Norton agrees with the “difficulty” assessment, but says, “There are not a lot of things that end up being very good that aren’t creatively risky.”
Gugu Mbatha-Raw and Edward Norton star in Motherless Brooklyn, directed by Norton.
Almost since its publication in 1999, Norton has had the rights to Jonathan Lethem’s best-selling novel about Lionel Essrog, a detective for a seedy agency run by a man-of-secrets named Frank Minna (played in the movie by Bruce Willis).
What Norton saw in the novel was a chance to use Lionel, a.k.a. “Brooklyn,” as a springboard for a snapshot of a tumultuous and corrupt time in New York politics, when a brutalist city-planner named Robert Moses razed neighbourhoods (many of them African-American) and pushed expressways over the objections of existing communities.
Moses tried to roll over civil activists like Jane Jacobs in the ‘60s (later a hero of Toronto’s community battles), and, in the ‘50s, against Hortense Gabel, a lawyer who’d eventually be on the New York State Supreme Court.
Moses is represented in Norton’s film version of Motherless Brooklyn as Moses Randolph (Alec Baldwin), whom Norton describes as, “an autocratic individual who was antagonistic to almost all of our democratic ideals, and who positioned himself as a man of the people.” You know, kind of like the guy who Baldwin plays on Saturday Night Live.
The whole project was partly an homage to Norton’s grandfather, James Rouse, a progressive 20th Century city planner. “For sure, my grandfather was a huge inspiration,” Norton says. “He was a person who believed that, (in) our society and our lives, we should be looking out for people, raising up people who had the least. He believed that society was not stable if the bottom was dropping out. So, he was the antithesis of the character Alec Baldwin is an amalgam of.”
Lethem, Norton says, was in total agreement with the surgery he performed on his book.
“(The novel) Motherless Brooklyn takes place in the ‘90s, but Jonathan, who I knew from mutual friends, is a great writer and has a really incredible erudition about cinema.
“The novel is really about the experience of being inside this character’s brain, knowing him, and feeling empathy for him even as you watch him navigate this painful and funny affliction.
“And I told him I felt there was an issue, that he had written a ‘50s hardboiled bunch of characters, but he had set them in the modern world. In film, which is very literal, I didn’t want it to feel like The Blues Brothers, like guys in fedoras in the modern world, and he agreed with that 100%
“So, the initial impulse to set it in the past was simply to allow the vernacular and the world and the language that he had written to be authentic instead of ironic. And he loved that idea.”
Norton’s vision of the story involved a scandal that was connected to Randolph’s war against Black neighbourhoods, and a mixed-race secret that springs from Essrog’s relationship with Laura (Gugu Mbatha-Raw) an African-American community lawyer. Key scenes in the movie take place in a jazz bar setting, and a soundtrack featuring the seemingly unlikely pairing of Wynton Marsalis and Radiohead’s Thom Yorke.
“I think Thom as a writer has expressed this duality of longing in the heart, but also kind of psychic terror and dissonance. Musically, he expresses Lionel’s head kind of perfectly for me. I asked him to read it and he wrote this song. Daily Battles, and I thought I wanted to underline it more.
“And Wynton curated the jazz that’s playing in the club and played it. But at that moment when Laura reaches out and is so empathetic to him, I was nervous about using a known jazz ballad, because that’s the last thing you want to do, is take people out of that moment between them
“So, Wynton did this beautiful arrangement of Thom’s song and played it as if it was a Miles Davis tune from the Birth of the Cool era.”
“People like that make you look like you know what you were doing. They really elevate a thing. That’s what a cast does. I say sometimes directing is like you’re the madman in the room saying, ‘We’re gonna do this, we’re gonna do that.’ And it’s all insane. Then other people bring their talents to bear and suddenly it looks like vision.”
Maintaining the integrity of “Brooklyn’s” Tourettes while directing his own scene sounds like a juggling act. “There were many arguments against directing this and acting in it,” Norton says with a laugh. “But one of the arguments for it was knowing I could experiment with the condition a lot, but also be the one who sculpted the balances of it later.”
As for the parallels between Moses Randolph and Donald Trump (who Norton never mentions by name, saying, “There’s a reason it’s called Citizen Kane and not Citizen Hearst”), it seems that was accidental.
“You can’t control everything. You’ve got to write and express things from where you’re at and what you’re feeling. I had moments with this, when Obama was being inaugurated for his second term, where you’re like, ‘Maybe a lot of what this is about is heading further into the rear-view mirror.’
“Not that I want to call 2016 a silver lining for my film, or something like that. Because I think I would trade the relevance of my film for a redo on (Trump’s election) in a heartbeat.
“That said, I think as we made the film, we realized there were things more than ever worth underlining within it.”
Motherless Brooklyn opens in wide release Friday, Nov. 1.