Ed Norton Interview

December 22, 2006 3:15 PM
by [email]

Romance is not the first thing that comes to mind when you hear “Edward Norton.” Brilliance, yes; boldness, yes; movies that push the envelope, absolutely. But the actor, who was 27 when he turned in a career-making performance in “Primal Fear,” was all about unlikely love when he read screenwriter Ron Nyswaner’s (“Philadelphia”) adaptation of W. Somerset Maugham’s unabashedly romantic novel, “The Painted Veil.” He even stuck around for five years, waiting for producers to green light the ambitious project, which was shot on location in China and depicts the culture circa 1920.

Norton studied Chinese history as an undergraduate at Yale, but that wasn’t the movie’s only plus. The actor stars as Walter Fane, a bacteriologist who drags his adulterous wife Kitty (Naomi Watts) to a middle-of-nowhere village where he’s been sent to cure a cholera epidemic.

Q: So- five years. What was it about this film that made you so dedicated?

EDWARD NORTON: The best movies, I think, are the ones that have themes at the heart of them – that transcend the period. When I read ‘”The Painted Veil” I found myself more moved by the story of these people going through the process of losing their illusions about each other and managing to recover a deeper sense of each other. I related to it more than I tend to relate to movies about wedding planners and things like that.

Q: Was Naomi also attached from early on?

EN: Naomi and I talked for a couple of years. We wrote a lot about it.

Q: Like, letters to each other?

EN: Yeah, not pretending to be the character or anything, but just kind of noodling on what we related to. Because the script was also developing…how far we are going to take this moment, how overt is the forgiveness, how much can be expressed in words. The both of us relied on John (Curran, the director) enormously. She had a relationship with him – they’d known each other for fifteen years and had already done one film (“We Don’t Live Here Anymore,”) so that was great. We had to shoot this film profoundly out of sequence and do a lot of the deep scenes in the middle of the movie without having shot any of the beginning yet.

Q: How did your take on Walter differ from the book?

EN: In the book, many of the same things happen but they happen in different ways – Kitty has to go back to Charlie and sleep with him again before she realizes how thoroughly awful he is. The impact of the experience with Walter finally lands when (Kitty) goes home. In the film, we made that happen between her and Walter. As the story goes on, his unsuspected depths keep getting revealed – the depth of his passion, his capacity to be hurt, to be vengeful. He becomes almost psychologically violent. That gives way to a kind of humility and compassion that you don’t notice in the beginning. As an actor, you sit there going “wow, this guy is quite an onion. He keeps peeling away and peeling away.”

Q: Was your background in Chinese history part of the appeal?

EN: I didn’t go looking for a film about China. The fact that I had some background just made it more appealing once I had encountered it. It’s not really part of the book, but John pushed me and Ron to get more specific about when this was taking place and what was going on. We all recognized that that was smart because it resonated with things that we’re seeing today.