Speaker 1: I'm Alec Baldwin and you're listening to Here's the thing. Generally,
Speaker 1: the actors I idolize are the greats of the past.
Speaker 1: I like some younger ones. I respect them, They're just
Speaker 1: not on my mount rushmore like Kirk Douglas or Barbara Stanwick.
Speaker 1: One of the few current actors who tempts me to
Speaker 1: make an exception is Edward Norton. He melts into his
Speaker 1: roles so totally it can be hard to recognize him
Speaker 1: from one film to the next. After playing a sociopathic
Speaker 1: murderer and Primal Fear, he moved to the cheerful Singing
Speaker 1: Boyfriend and Woody Allen's Everyone Says I Love You, and
Speaker 1: from there a long list of great works by great directors,
Speaker 1: including American History, X, Fight Club, and Spike Lee's. But
Speaker 1: movie making has changed over his quarter century as a
Speaker 1: leading man. Fight Club was shot over one thirty days.
Speaker 1: That just doesn't happen anymore. The money's not there and
Speaker 1: the studios don't have the patients. Norton has tried his
Speaker 1: hand at directing twice, once on either side of that divide.
Speaker 1: He's just releasing his adaptation of the Jonathan Leatham novel
Speaker 1: Motherless Brooklyn. I'm in that one and it's out November one.
Speaker 1: His other directing Foray was in two thousand with a
Speaker 1: romantic comedy Keeping the Faith. I actually had more money
Speaker 1: and more time to make Keeping the Faith, a rabbi
Speaker 1: priest joke turned into a romantic comedy than I did
Speaker 1: to make Motherless Brooklyn, which is a big, epic New
Speaker 1: York period period piece of the fifties, done at scale
Speaker 1: with you know, I think we ended up with six
Speaker 1: and eight something effects shots in the film. I could
Speaker 1: have never made this film in the constraints of budget
Speaker 1: and time that we had back then, because I could
Speaker 1: barely pull off Keeping the Faith with more. And that
Speaker 1: was partly a function of in the years since, you know,
Speaker 1: when we made the with Spike Um, which I think
Speaker 1: is one of his better films, which is saying a lot.
Speaker 1: He made that film in twenty six days and it's
Speaker 1: a It's a really cinematically robust film shot in New York.
Speaker 1: Going through the training camp of seeing how he did that,
Speaker 1: seeing how Wes Anderson does his on fractional budgets and
Speaker 1: schedules in your rito, doing Birdman in days unbelievable planning
Speaker 1: just like planning at a level rehearsal um engagement with
Speaker 1: actors in a way that necessitates less handholding and kind
Speaker 1: of debating. On the day Spike and s they know
Speaker 1: what they want to do, They give themselves out and
Speaker 1: things like that. They don't edit the film in the
Speaker 1: way they shoot it, but they are not making it
Speaker 1: up on the day. Um. They have put a lot
Speaker 1: of thought into it and and they drive the proceedings
Speaker 1: along in a very determined way. And when you see
Speaker 1: really good people pulled out off, if you take mental notes,
Speaker 1: you're like, Wow, this can be done. This can be
Speaker 1: done in a different way. It can be done without compromise,
Speaker 1: and you can pull this off. I never ever could
Speaker 1: have made this film without working with Spike West, Alejandro
Speaker 1: and others. Did you know when you make Keeping the
Speaker 1: Faith that you said to yourself over the past several
Speaker 1: years that you would do it again? Did you know
Speaker 1: you do it again? I already had this one rattling
Speaker 1: around in my head. Not unlike my character in this
Speaker 1: My character Lionel says, let's just say, an unfinished puzzle
Speaker 1: makes my head hurt worse than most people. That's as
Speaker 1: close to a line about myself as I've ever written, I,
Speaker 1: I'm also probably obstinate, and um, I don't like to
Speaker 1: be denied. But I but but some of it is
Speaker 1: just that idea that he discusses in the film about
Speaker 1: having glass in the brain. I if I get a
Speaker 1: thing in my head, it just I really I suffer
Speaker 1: a little bit from not achieving the satisfaction of ultimately
Speaker 1: like putting the story together and getting it told so
Speaker 1: I can get it out of my my brain loop.
Speaker 1: You know. Part of my fascination with this piece was compulsion,
Speaker 1: the idea that, as Lionel says, you're doing something for
Speaker 1: certain reasons, and at some point you even forget what
Speaker 1: the original reasons, where you're not even sure why you're
Speaker 1: still pressing on a thing long after everyone's kind of
Speaker 1: blaring it. You're like, yeah, isn't it time man to
Speaker 1: let that to bury? Yeah? I always it's funny, isn't
Speaker 1: it too? Because there's things that are much more important
Speaker 1: in the world, and you can sell yourself like why
Speaker 1: am I? Why am I applying so much in my
Speaker 1: time in life to telling a story? But at the
Speaker 1: same time, we're living in an age where a lot
Speaker 1: of things are encouraging people to be passive, you know,
Speaker 1: so pushing back against anything. That's just a good feeling.
Speaker 1: Your dad was a federal prosecutor. Yeah, at one where
Speaker 1: he was best attorney. It was a U S attorney.
Speaker 1: And your mom most of my life taught high school
Speaker 1: English in a public school. And your and your mom's
Speaker 1: dad was this very successful real estate developer. Yeah. His
Speaker 1: name was Jim Rowse. He was. He was very celebrated. Uh,
Speaker 1: it was. He was. He was on the cover of
Speaker 1: the New York Times when he died, which amazed me.
Speaker 1: And he was on the cover of Time magazine, like, well,
Speaker 1: you know when, when was the last time for positive
Speaker 1: reasons a real estate developer was on the cover of Time.
Speaker 1: He um, He was considered He was considered one of
Speaker 1: the great visionaries of progressive, humanistic ideas about cities. He
Speaker 1: achieved these very very notable sort of downtown revitalization projects
Speaker 1: like the Baldwin or Harbor or Fanuel Hall in Boston,
Speaker 1: place that parts of the cities that had been written
Speaker 1: off abandoned, and he saw vitality in them and was
Speaker 1: convinced that you could bring life back into cities, make
Speaker 1: cities the marketplace of ideas, culture, all of it. Yeah,
Speaker 1: and in many ways, you know, he really um decried.
Speaker 1: He was one of the first people to talk about sprawl,
Speaker 1: that highways were going to create low density development, and
Speaker 1: that this was gonna be people were going to flee
Speaker 1: the cities and we were gonna get kind of non communities,
Speaker 1: We were going to get these sort of like limitless
Speaker 1: um you know, and and that the old world town
Speaker 1: was going to disappear in a way. And he was right.
Speaker 1: He proved these things he talked about in the fifties
Speaker 1: turned very true in the sixties and seventies, and so
Speaker 1: people really looked at him as a a gurup. But
Speaker 1: he um. Then he he developed kind of the first
Speaker 1: planned city in America, which was Columbia, Maryland, UM between
Speaker 1: Baltimore and Washington. It was very progressive um, you know, socioeconomically, ethnically, diverse,
Speaker 1: lots of open space. It was. It was kind of
Speaker 1: this utopian idea of of what American communities could look like.
Speaker 1: But what what I want to get to is, I mean,
Speaker 1: you know, you go to Yale and you go and
Speaker 1: you you switch from astronomy, I studied history. I thought
Speaker 1: I wanted to study physics. I didn't have the math
Speaker 1: for it at all. Like learned that very quickly, which
Speaker 1: was one of those good humbling moments, realized I was
Speaker 1: like better at writing. You switch to Asian history. You
Speaker 1: you live in Japan, and you did you work for
Speaker 1: your grandfather's company in Japan? Yeah? I did. He he
Speaker 1: was consulting to two places that were trying to replicate
Speaker 1: what he had done with in our harbors and stuff.
Speaker 1: I um, I wanted to live and work abroad, like
Speaker 1: in the Foreign Service or like the intelligence agencies used
Speaker 1: to recruit at Yale. And I was was pretty enamored
Speaker 1: of like the idea of doing something something and living overseas.
Speaker 1: But I had the bug. I kind of had the
Speaker 1: theater bug, and I kind of gave myself. I was like,
Speaker 1: I'm going to move to New York. And I couldn't
Speaker 1: really admit to myself I wanted to do that. You know,
Speaker 1: yeah I could, You're like doing this, you don't. There's
Speaker 1: something like it was an apology inside me to me too.
Speaker 1: I and and and and in some ways, because my grandfather,
Speaker 1: by then it devoted all his entire focus was on
Speaker 1: affordable housing development, and he had built one of the
Speaker 1: great organizations in America, a nonprofit organization figuring out how
Speaker 1: to get complicated finance structures to get money into affordable
Speaker 1: housing development. And he was in They were in New York,
Speaker 1: redeveloping thousands of city owned abandoned buildings across the late
Speaker 1: eighties and nineties. And I was working for him in
Speaker 1: New York. I literally went down. I was like twenty one.
Speaker 1: I went down, sat on the porch with my grandfather
Speaker 1: and sort of apologized to him because he paid for
Speaker 1: me to go to college. And I thought, how do
Speaker 1: I tell him? How do I tell him I want
Speaker 1: to be an actor? You know? And he and he
Speaker 1: was the greatest. He was. He was a very eccentric,
Speaker 1: eclectic guy. He was orphaned when he was a kid.
Speaker 1: He he never he never wore suits. He wore like
Speaker 1: moder's jackets and fishing hats. He was originally Yeah, he
Speaker 1: really was. And he and I was shocked. He said
Speaker 1: to me, he said, don't don't. He said, don't don't
Speaker 1: chase money. He said, whatever you do, just don't chase money.
Speaker 1: Just he said, just do whatever, do what you love,
Speaker 1: doing what you have a passion for. And in good time,
Speaker 1: you'll figure out how you can be of service through it.
Speaker 1: You know. He said, you can be of service in anything.
Speaker 1: And he loved the arts. He loved He helped create
Speaker 1: Center Stage in Baltimore by supporting it in the early years.
Speaker 1: He really believed in the arts. So he kind of
Speaker 1: gave me this permission. I was still working for him
Speaker 1: to New York, but then I started moonlighting in the
Speaker 1: theater and I felt like, um, I was allowed. But
Speaker 1: but what I want to get to, I mean, I
Speaker 1: don't know exaggerate this, but but it's like, you know,
Speaker 1: you grow up, you go to Yale, and you come
Speaker 1: from a very right, u stable family and a lot
Speaker 1: of successful people there. And my point is that in
Speaker 1: your acting, especially like book Ending now and Primal few
Speaker 1: years ago, where you really really start to take off
Speaker 1: in the movie business, are two damaged people. Yeah. Uh,
Speaker 1: it's hard to say. You know, it's a funny thing
Speaker 1: because I am I'm not drawn to damage, but I
Speaker 1: I am drawn to sort of the duality, like the
Speaker 1: idea of the layer you see and the layer you
Speaker 1: don't see, and sometimes they're paradoxical, you know. I think
Speaker 1: it's not by chance that like the Greek drama symbol
Speaker 1: is the two masks, the comedy and the drama masks, right,
Speaker 1: because everybody's operating on these multiple level. There's these levels
Speaker 1: in ourselves and sometimes they coexist and they're not necessarily
Speaker 1: antagonistic to each other, but they really are the end
Speaker 1: of the yang, right. And I think that when you
Speaker 1: find um, when you find a character that the the
Speaker 1: yin and the yang is going on like really clearly
Speaker 1: at the same time in them, that's interesting. And sometimes
Speaker 1: it's I don't want to call it cheap, but sometimes
Speaker 1: it's like the kind of primal fear, like a person
Speaker 1: who's faking a thing that's sort of juicy. That's like
Speaker 1: the pulpy version of it. And it was a lot
Speaker 1: of fun, right, especially when no one knows who you are,
Speaker 1: so you can actually surprise a lot of people. But
Speaker 1: then sometimes if it's like American History X, that's not
Speaker 1: really a damage persons, but it's a person with this
Speaker 1: huge complexity going on it. It is like a fellow
Speaker 1: or something. He's a real leader, he's a lover of
Speaker 1: his family, he's got a real intellect, his potential is limitless,
Speaker 1: and he totally destroys himself with the one dark thing
Speaker 1: with this this rage. Right, he's got rage, and the
Speaker 1: rage just just dismantles everything else, right, And those paradoxes
Speaker 1: are sometimes really compelling. Um, playing those parts, I find
Speaker 1: me and I watch you in this film, and I'm
Speaker 1: very drawn to the and of vacuity of that, like
Speaker 1: I need to believe underneath that there's a sensitive person. Yeah,
Speaker 1: you know you're not just it's not just externalized. No, No,
Speaker 1: I think you did a great job. I'm not just
Speaker 1: saying the thank you and uh and I'm not just
Speaker 1: saying this because you're in the film and great in
Speaker 1: the film. But I think, um, it's a very it's
Speaker 1: a very interesting thing to me, like this idea of
Speaker 1: like the counterpoint in people, the capacities and people and yeah,
Speaker 1: Lionel in this has tourettes, but you it's a it's
Speaker 1: absolutely stolen from the book over Black. At the top
Speaker 1: of the film, you hear his inner voice, right, So
Speaker 1: from the beginning, it's the trick of going you're gonna
Speaker 1: know me like a friend. I'm gonna let you right
Speaker 1: in on the inside, so that you can see the sensitive,
Speaker 1: smart person, of depth of feeling, of loneliness, of longing.
Speaker 1: You're gonna have immediate empathy because you're gonna go, I
Speaker 1: like everything about the way this guy talks, the way
Speaker 1: he tells his own story, and then I'm going to
Speaker 1: let you in on the fact that I've got a
Speaker 1: really messed up condition that makes life very difficult, very funny, etcetera.
Speaker 1: And that's a great dramatic trick because you're not forty
Speaker 1: seconds in and you go, I'm on this guy's side, right,
Speaker 1: And that's credit to Jonathan Leatham who wrote the novel.
Speaker 1: That's how the novel works on And speaking of which,
Speaker 1: you walked around with the novel for how long? I
Speaker 1: read the book, loved it, sort of got the rights
Speaker 1: to it, knew I couldn't work on it for a
Speaker 1: long time, and then got into this idea of taking
Speaker 1: this great character study of the book and grafting it
Speaker 1: into this kind of bigger idea. When I say bigger,
Speaker 1: I mean just that the plot of the novel is
Speaker 1: small and byzantine. And I said to Jonathan, Hey, what
Speaker 1: if we let lionel this great emotional relationship you create
Speaker 1: with the character. What if we let that be a
Speaker 1: vehicle into looking at something a little more cinematically grand,
Speaker 1: like the dark history of New York in the fifties,
Speaker 1: and he's he's born and raised Brooklyn Knight. He knew
Speaker 1: the heart of his novel was the character, and he
Speaker 1: loved the transposition, the idea of loved it. So he's
Speaker 1: a real cinemophile. He got it. Yeah, he got it.
Speaker 1: And and also we talked about how, you know, Chandler
Speaker 1: wrote multiple Marlowe detective stories, and it was like, let's
Speaker 1: take the great emotional um connection you create in this
Speaker 1: character and let's let's send him into his next mystery. Right.
Speaker 1: He loved that idea. And thank god, Jonathan's not only
Speaker 1: a secure as an artist, but he also he understands
Speaker 1: that in going to film, you're going into another medium.
Speaker 1: You need something different. I would do a part in
Speaker 1: a film I'll never forget. We do the movie Pearl
Speaker 1: Harbor and Dolittle of the famous aviator. I play him
Speaker 1: in the film and where they're shooting in l A
Speaker 1: one day and members of his family are they're like
Speaker 1: his granddaughter, and they're involved in some foundation or something
Speaker 1: that keeps the flame alive of the the Doolittle memory.
Speaker 1: And I forget what the organization was but this is
Speaker 1: back in two thousand we shoot this movie Big Sunny Day,
Speaker 1: where they are shooting at I forget where we were,
Speaker 1: and I walk up to him and I go, so,
Speaker 1: how's it going. You're enjoying watching the movie? And she goes, yes,
Speaker 1: but Granddad would never do that. He would never talk
Speaker 1: to people that way, the way you're doing that. And
Speaker 1: I was on the tip of my tongue. I want
Speaker 1: to go and this is true of men who had
Speaker 1: to be built a certain way to fit into the
Speaker 1: cockpits of those planes. And they were a little bantams.
Speaker 1: And I wanted to say, you know, if we really
Speaker 1: were going after the whole granddad thing, Bob Balabanda, we're
Speaker 1: playing your granddad, not me. I'm about, you know, sixty
Speaker 1: pounds heavier than your granddad and at least so now
Speaker 1: I don't want to meet the people. I don't want
Speaker 1: to know the people I'm gonna go in there, just
Speaker 1: you know. My point is is that when you said
Speaker 1: about Leatham in the book, well, I'll say to someone,
Speaker 1: the character in the film represents an idea in the film,
Speaker 1: We're no I felt that way about your character. Some
Speaker 1: people have said to me, well, clearly it's based on
Speaker 1: Robert Moses, and you don't want to contend with that,
Speaker 1: because yes, it's infused with Robert Moses, but it is
Speaker 1: also there's a reason I didn't pretend that these made
Speaker 1: up characters of Motherless Brooklyn were interacting with real historical figures,
Speaker 1: because then you end up asked answering all these ridiculous
Speaker 1: questions about your It's like, well, wait, did Robert Moses
Speaker 1: really do that? Is that really true to this? And
Speaker 1: that really happened to go? You know? This is this
Speaker 1: is why the Wisdom to Me in You could Go Back,
Speaker 1: Citizen Kane is about Charles Foster Kane. It's not William
Speaker 1: Randolph Hurst. And yes it is the essence of it
Speaker 1: is distilled, but as you know when you read about that,
Speaker 1: they infused quite a few details in that story from
Speaker 1: other people's lives as well to create an essential American character. Right.
Speaker 1: And Robert Penn Warren's great book All the King's Men,
Speaker 1: it's about Hughie Long, but it's not about Hughie Long.
Speaker 1: It's a made up story. That's why he made it.
Speaker 1: Will he start and to to me um without revealing
Speaker 1: where we know this film goes in the end. There's
Speaker 1: a huge amount that happens in this movie that has
Speaker 1: nothing to do whatsoever with anything that happened in Robert Moses' life,
Speaker 1: on a plotting level, on a psycho sexual level, all
Speaker 1: kinds of stuff. So there's distillations of the type of
Speaker 1: person he was. There's also a weave of everything from
Speaker 1: Strong Thermond and other you know, there's people that had
Speaker 1: details of their lives that inspired me to kind of go,
Speaker 1: I want to distill this into the essence of a
Speaker 1: type of person that we as Americans have to really
Speaker 1: think about. How much of them were willing to tolerate?
Speaker 1: And when he saw the movie, what kind of reaction
Speaker 1: did you get? He that that was one of my
Speaker 1: most nervous days. Uh. You know, there was like the
Speaker 1: day I when you showed up on set and I'm like, well,
Speaker 1: you know his lines. No, I'm kidding. I did the
Speaker 1: best I can with what I have showing it to
Speaker 1: leave him. I was nervous, and he was great. He
Speaker 1: was very very emotional about it. It was very gratifying
Speaker 1: um for him. I think it was you know, it's
Speaker 1: like you've you've done a thing and then the thing
Speaker 1: has refracted and become a whole other thing. And I
Speaker 1: think he was artistically really thrilled when you had the book.
Speaker 1: Over the ark of the time you had the book,
Speaker 1: was here a moment you threw in the talent said
Speaker 1: I don't think I'm going to do it. I had
Speaker 1: I had a couple of moments of feeling like I
Speaker 1: was done Quyhote and tilting it wind mills and you know, well,
Speaker 1: because we have kids who were the same age and stuff,
Speaker 1: you get into this chapter of your life and you
Speaker 1: just say, how much am I willing to bend our
Speaker 1: lives around a mirage? Right? Like? Am I going to
Speaker 1: keep us on the camels going towards the mirage? Are
Speaker 1: we going to are we going to am I gonna
Speaker 1: not do other work? Am I going to like say no,
Speaker 1: we can't take that trip because there's a possibility that
Speaker 1: this might come together. You know, it starts to get
Speaker 1: into a real like life priority crosses over into neurosis, yeah,
Speaker 1: or ego or or but I think you know, Joe,
Speaker 1: I mean I really think and uh, I'm not flipping
Speaker 1: around on you, but you You've said to me, I'm
Speaker 1: doing this thing on Saturday nights as if it can't
Speaker 1: coexist with the you that we all came up on. Uh,
Speaker 1: I saw you in Streetcar, Yeah, you know, Glen Garry,
Speaker 1: Glenn Ross, these things that became for us really iconic
Speaker 1: moments of of what I'd call like the you know,
Speaker 1: dark um way do you think Miami Blues, which I
Speaker 1: was always a big fan of, but them, to me,
Speaker 1: this notion that just because you're functioning in a certain
Speaker 1: gear let's call it the smiley off of the Greek mask,
Speaker 1: that the other thing doesn't coexist, and that it's not
Speaker 1: more interesting because it coexists. That's the thing is to me,
Speaker 1: it's like it's not even that they cancel each other out,
Speaker 1: it's that they become more interesting when they're both there, right,
Speaker 1: because that's more true. There's a lot of dark stuff
Speaker 1: going on under a lot of people's smiley narratives right.
Speaker 1: To me, one of your most interesting sessions in here
Speaker 1: was the one you put up after it all broke
Speaker 1: the Schneiderman. I guess you did, and I thought the way, yeah,
Speaker 1: the way you lead that in with Hey, we've we've
Speaker 1: had these conversations with someone, We've had a conversation in
Speaker 1: a gear that is we're connecting with a conscious humanist,
Speaker 1: progressive yeah and um. And then there's this thing going
Speaker 1: on unseen by almost anybody, right, that's so dark, and
Speaker 1: you just constantly forced, I think, to grasp this idea
Speaker 1: of there's a narrative in a ark, in life and
Speaker 1: in our lives individually, and then there's the shadow narrative,
Speaker 1: this thing that's going on underneath it. And it's very
Speaker 1: very rare that we find ways into having honest conversations
Speaker 1: about how we integrate those two things, right, because that's
Speaker 1: that's like the argument. It's the argument inside ourselves privately.
Speaker 1: You think about anyone we know who we know has
Speaker 1: a measure of quality, admirable quality as a human being,
Speaker 1: and he's doing stuff that is uh, either you know, detestable, unforgivable, whatever.
Speaker 1: We know that person is having an argument inside themselves. Right,
Speaker 1: We're having that argument as a country. We're having to
Speaker 1: say to ourselves, Hey, we have to be able to
Speaker 1: hold the ideal, we have to be able to still
Speaker 1: take pride in our engagement with the ideal, but we
Speaker 1: absolutely have to confront the the shadow narrative. We have
Speaker 1: to be honest about what we are do win that's
Speaker 1: antagonistic to what we're saying. That was movie star, director
Speaker 1: producer Edward Norton. Another great actor whose career spans the
Speaker 1: then and now of old school movies and streaming television
Speaker 1: is Michael Douglas. You know, if I get one more
Speaker 1: drunken guy from the street, hey, man is good. You're
Speaker 1: the man. You're why I got into this business and
Speaker 1: everything I quo it. Hey, you know, that's what I'm doing.
Speaker 1: The rest of my interview with Michael Douglas is in
Speaker 1: our archive at Here's the Thing, dot org ed Norton
Speaker 1: on his favorite directors coming up next. I'm Alec Baldwin
Speaker 1: and you were listening to Here's the Thing. To keep
Speaker 1: up with the next part of the show. Here's what
Speaker 1: you need to know about some of Edward Norton's movies.
Speaker 1: Fight Club was directed by David Fincher. American History X
Speaker 1: was directed by Tony Kay, who took out full page
Speaker 1: ads and Variety complaining he'd been knifed in the back
Speaker 1: after the studio gave Norton final cut on the film.
Speaker 1: And The People Versus Larry Flint was directed by one
Speaker 1: of Norton's heroes, the late milosch Foreman born in communist Czechoslovakia.
Speaker 1: You know, he came out from behind the Iron Curtain
Speaker 1: and landed in America and then made these definitive films
Speaker 1: about individual spirit pushing back against depression, right Cuckoo's Nest
Speaker 1: and Ragtime and Amadeus, and he just made like film
Speaker 1: after film after film that you know, they set the
Speaker 1: bar very high. They were like, wow, you can you
Speaker 1: can take things that no one would call a traditional
Speaker 1: commercial story and make these great pieces of art out
Speaker 1: of them. And the thing was came to him having
Speaker 1: made very few films, and I still kind of considered
Speaker 1: myself more of a you know, my my life had
Speaker 1: been in theater. The funny thing is the first two
Speaker 1: films I did, we did kind of do them in
Speaker 1: a way where we made the scenes work in the room, right,
Speaker 1: They worked in the room. And what what he Allen
Speaker 1: shoots a lot of single takes, so it has to
Speaker 1: it works as one. I got on there with me
Speaker 1: Losh and realized that he would shoot in this very
Speaker 1: open ended, improvissational way. He would let things change and shift,
Speaker 1: and then he wouldn't cover it from the other side.
Speaker 1: And I started to get this anxiety. Like he would say, great,
Speaker 1: you know, let's move and I would say, but nothing happened,
Speaker 1: like we never we never got anything. It didn't work.
Speaker 1: The scene was never played. And he would kind of
Speaker 1: look at me like, what do you think this is?
Speaker 1: This is you know, he said, this is not We're
Speaker 1: not doing play. He goes, I am, he said to me,
Speaker 1: when time he goes, I am a man with a
Speaker 1: pick X and there's a cliff and I must take
Speaker 1: the clay from the cliff. I'm not making sculpture. I
Speaker 1: make sculpture later, you know. And I was thinking I
Speaker 1: might be on the first Milish Foreman film where he
Speaker 1: has lost the plot completely. I'm going to be in
Speaker 1: the first really bad Milosh Foreman film. Because I would
Speaker 1: see him move on from things I could not, for
Speaker 1: the life of me think how he was finished. And
Speaker 1: I happened to have free time and he let me
Speaker 1: in on the editing process, just not to be just
Speaker 1: to literally. I would bring him. I would bring him coffee,
Speaker 1: I'm not kidding, just to watch, and I began to
Speaker 1: realize that he was his he was a master of
Speaker 1: casting and and one of the greatest editors ever. He
Speaker 1: would take things that had never happened and create He
Speaker 1: would create scenes out of raw material that had never occurred.
Speaker 1: And I it was this enormous awakening to the plasticity
Speaker 1: of film. I realized that when you're an actor, you're
Speaker 1: just giving a director raw material to work with, and
Speaker 1: you have to hopefully you trust them in a devotional
Speaker 1: way because you are surrendering, You're surrendering clay to them.
Speaker 1: And I remember Mike Nichols saying, the reason you love
Speaker 1: Jeremy Irons was that if he had a bad idea,
Speaker 1: he knew that Jeremy Irons would give it the full
Speaker 1: force of his talent so that he could get off
Speaker 1: the bad idea because he would say to himself, Jeremy
Speaker 1: gives me everything, and if he can't make it work,
Speaker 1: then I know it's a bad idea, right, And that
Speaker 1: was that was very profound because I think obviously we
Speaker 1: all get into situations where maybe there isn't trust, and
Speaker 1: so we defend, we protect, we resist, Yeah, we shut down,
Speaker 1: but in that happy circumstance when you're with when you're
Speaker 1: with in a trusting relationship, you serve, You really do
Speaker 1: just serve. And if the guy says you know, when
Speaker 1: we were doing Birdman in your wo we could sometimes
Speaker 1: come in and go, guy, this guy's guys, it's got
Speaker 1: to be you know this, it's too white. It has
Speaker 1: to be black, you know. And we would do black
Speaker 1: for a while and then he would come back and
Speaker 1: he would say, no, guys, what are you doing? It's
Speaker 1: all black. I was telling what has to be white?
Speaker 1: And I said it was the other you know, And
Speaker 1: you realize he's having a conversation with himself, not with
Speaker 1: not with you, and and that what you wanted to
Speaker 1: do is serve the debate he's having with himself and
Speaker 1: give him whatever he needs. It's kind of a happy
Speaker 1: place to be when it's going like that, right. But Fincher, well,
Speaker 1: he's more talented across more divisions of filmmaking than anyone. Yeah,
Speaker 1: he's He's as great a cinematographer as any cinematographer. He's
Speaker 1: a great editor. He's annoyingly great with a line reading,
Speaker 1: you know what I mean. He's funny and sometimes you
Speaker 1: have one of those moments like it was sort of
Speaker 1: the like, hey, you know, you're you're feeling each other out,
Speaker 1: and at some point on that movie, I was like
Speaker 1: I was running in wing tips and underwear, and and
Speaker 1: I was maybe I was, I was probably leaning into
Speaker 1: the to the farce of it a little bit too much.
Speaker 1: Maybe Anyway, he comes over and he just goes a
Speaker 1: little less Jerry, a little more Dean. And that was
Speaker 1: and I instantly I was like, that's all we have
Speaker 1: to say the rest of this movie. That's the key
Speaker 1: to the whole movie. I want to say this about
Speaker 1: Fincher because it had a big impact on making Mothers Brooklyn.
Speaker 1: There are times when being a director requires a certain
Speaker 1: amount of almost sociopathic lack of empathy for other people's stresses.
Speaker 1: There are many demands, money's going out the door, time
Speaker 1: is running down, and you feel stress in other people
Speaker 1: you there's no way that won't happen. And one of
Speaker 1: the things I learned, with not a shred of of
Speaker 1: sarcasm in this about was that Fincher was amazing at
Speaker 1: facing down the dresses of others in defense of the
Speaker 1: aesthetic value that he knows. And there were many, many times,
Speaker 1: even within this massive hundred and thirty days shoot where Fincher,
Speaker 1: you know famously he does a lot of takes. Early
Speaker 1: on I decided I already know this about him, whatever
Speaker 1: it is that he's chasing. I have seen the result
Speaker 1: in his films. They have a hypnotic visual elegance that
Speaker 1: I have not seen equaled. And so whatever he takes,
Speaker 1: if he needs thirty five, I have to find the
Speaker 1: way to stay in gear for thirty five. Right. But
Speaker 1: I would say one of the things that I observed
Speaker 1: watching him and nobody is him, but you do realize
Speaker 1: that when he says we're not done because a move
Speaker 1: of the camera where it bumps in the middle that
Speaker 1: everyone else says that doesn't matter, he knows it matters.
Speaker 1: And there are times when you have to say to
Speaker 1: everyone else who thinks you're done, we're not done. You
Speaker 1: have to see the portrait of what a person looks
Speaker 1: like who's standing firm within reason, you know what I mean?
Speaker 1: So um tony kay, Now, I only asked me. Obviously,
Speaker 1: that was a contentious thing and it talks about how
Speaker 1: that was a tough set and everything. But did he
Speaker 1: help you with an act? But see here, this is
Speaker 1: this is interesting and I don't want to sideline on
Speaker 1: it too much, but I think you know, you kind
Speaker 1: of hinted at it. But we're living in this age
Speaker 1: where clickbait journalism likes to create headlines, and before it
Speaker 1: was even clickbait, entertainment press was doing their version of it.
Speaker 1: People like to manufacture antagonism because it sounds like a
Speaker 1: good story, whether or not it in fact existed. So
Speaker 1: the very fact that, even down the chain of it all,
Speaker 1: what's come to your head is that it was a
Speaker 1: tough set, right, that's what you just said. That, that's
Speaker 1: just there's not a spread of truth in it. We
Speaker 1: were We worked center just stickally. He Tony is a
Speaker 1: great photographer. He lit and shot and operated the film himself,
Speaker 1: and he had a great gift for a visual sensibility
Speaker 1: and why what I would call a very pure meter
Speaker 1: for just a kind of a gutsy, visceral thing. He
Speaker 1: never professed to a shred of experience with or or
Speaker 1: even I don't want to say interest in He did
Speaker 1: not want to control narrative, right. He David, my friend
Speaker 1: David McKenna, and then with me. We had worked on
Speaker 1: that script for a long time, and he ceeded that
Speaker 1: to us. He he was like, you guys are good
Speaker 1: at this. I know what to do with it, blah
Speaker 1: blah blah. And we worked hand in glove together through
Speaker 1: a very vital, very guerrilla kind of a shoot. Um.
Speaker 1: There was many, many many times throughout where great film. Yeah,
Speaker 1: we had truly lovely moments together. I remember Tony, He's
Speaker 1: very emotive and one time he cried and hugged me
Speaker 1: and said, you know, I've I've never felt so supported.
Speaker 1: I've never had a collaborative experience like this, and and
Speaker 1: I felt the same. I thought he was a very
Speaker 1: intuitive things what went on turned into this thing as
Speaker 1: if it was about me and him. He got into
Speaker 1: I would call it a fear of release that he
Speaker 1: he was very He cared a lot and in a
Speaker 1: really difficult time finishing things. I'm bringing up in spite
Speaker 1: of what people had said, Yes, you can tell. That's
Speaker 1: why I'm saying it. I can, and I want to,
Speaker 1: and I know for a fact he's told people he's
Speaker 1: very proud of it. In the end, I am I
Speaker 1: just think people. I think people they want to distill
Speaker 1: some sort of negativity in into situations that are complex.
Speaker 1: And I think you know this too, you knowiced. But
Speaker 1: the funny thing is is what's strange about it to
Speaker 1: me is work, work on things done with passion is
Speaker 1: going to produce people contending with each other, right ideas
Speaker 1: are gonna are gonna bump up against each other and
Speaker 1: burnish each other. They're gonna test each other and they
Speaker 1: will refine the thing. People get through those experiences together
Speaker 1: and generally shake hands and thank each other for the work.
Speaker 1: It's not about you, it's not about the ego, it's
Speaker 1: not about the thing. It's like, this is how we
Speaker 1: do the thing that makes it good. And most people
Speaker 1: come out the back. Most people who know what they're
Speaker 1: doing come out the back side of that and celebrate
Speaker 1: that in each other, and then other people turn it
Speaker 1: into some bs argument. Well, let me let me say
Speaker 1: two more things. One is that, um, you know, one
Speaker 1: of the I tell young actors, I say, one of
Speaker 1: the worst traps you can fall on is that time
Speaker 1: goes by and you work with anemic directors, and you
Speaker 1: work with directors who don't offer you much in film
Speaker 1: and television, and you become as we must self directing.
Speaker 1: That not that you've stealed yourself against collaborating with a
Speaker 1: good director. You forgot how, you've forgotten how to do it.
Speaker 1: So you come and the worst thing that can happen
Speaker 1: to is you have a good direct who wants to
Speaker 1: work with you and shape you, and then you're tight
Speaker 1: and you don't let it and you don't let him in.
Speaker 1: You don't have to let him in, right, No, I
Speaker 1: think that's very true. The opposite is if there's a
Speaker 1: situation you can smell now through experience is going to
Speaker 1: lead to situations where then stay away from it, you
Speaker 1: know what I mean. Then then say no, don't, don't
Speaker 1: get suck, and also build your own tribe. You know.
Speaker 1: That's to me the a big part of the appeal
Speaker 1: of directing is honestly, like, I don't know if you
Speaker 1: feel this, but you had Dirty Rock, which to me
Speaker 1: is like, that's that repertory. It's like having your own
Speaker 1: repertory company, right, It's something very special. I think all
Speaker 1: actors in some part of themselves want that. They want
Speaker 1: it's that dream of being part of a troop, right people.
Speaker 1: You know, it's like in West's in Rushmore the Max
Speaker 1: Fisher players. We all want to be in the Max
Speaker 1: Fisher players, you know what I mean? And when, and
Speaker 1: by the way, that's why a lot of us will
Speaker 1: show up and do small parts when it's our turn
Speaker 1: to have a small part or a bigger part. It
Speaker 1: doesn't matter because you're in it. You're in the troop,
Speaker 1: and it's a wonderful place to be. Like it really is.
Speaker 1: I've often felt like, you know, you look at the
Speaker 1: Cohen's or or people who have these long term alliances.
Speaker 1: Sometimes I always thought like I'd like the pleasure of that.
Speaker 1: But one of the things about directing is you you
Speaker 1: get to create your troop. Like people talk about Orison Wells,
Speaker 1: they forget the guy was a kid. He was twenty
Speaker 1: five years old when he made that film. And what
Speaker 1: did he do. He took all of the Mercury theater
Speaker 1: players from his archaeo radio days and his w P
Speaker 1: and he pulled him into the film. Agnes Moore, hell
Speaker 1: you never heard of and they're amazing right And for me,
Speaker 1: motherless Brooklyn, I would say, honestly, one of the greatest
Speaker 1: joys of it was I looked at my roster of
Speaker 1: New York theater actors that I've known in many cases
Speaker 1: for twenty years, twenty five years done plays at the
Speaker 1: twenty ninth Street rep with done plays, and said, I
Speaker 1: know that guy's great, I know she's great. I know
Speaker 1: Alex great. Williams. Great, These are my These are my
Speaker 1: people that I've already got shorthand with, and I'm gonna
Speaker 1: pull him together and make ap F and ensemble of
Speaker 1: the actors I get on with and love. And it
Speaker 1: was pure pleasure for me, even among the stresses. Who's
Speaker 1: the person on the set, off the set, anywhere in
Speaker 1: the whole configuration, who's helping you protect your performance? I
Speaker 1: directed the film once I hated the experience, and the
Speaker 1: person that was most underserved acting wise was it was me?
Speaker 1: How did you prevent against that? Who was your voice?
Speaker 1: I mean? Most permit my partner Bill Migliori, who he
Speaker 1: and I met as an actor, We met as actors,
Speaker 1: and he's a terrific actor. He's my producer on this,
Speaker 1: on the help to keep an eye on the absolutely
Speaker 1: like he's just a trusted you know. You glance over
Speaker 1: a little bit of a nod, a little bit of
Speaker 1: a shake of the head like I'm not really sure. Yeah,
Speaker 1: like you know that there's that I trusted Dick, Dick Pope,
Speaker 1: my my great cinematony. You know, yeah, there's he thinks
Speaker 1: and honestly, uh, I mentioned there's a guy, the guy
Speaker 1: who plays the mayor who you you know, um steam
Speaker 1: Roll right at the beginning of the film. Peter Lewis
Speaker 1: is a actor I worked with when I was twenty
Speaker 1: four in in New York on the stage. And he's
Speaker 1: a terrific actor, and he's a teacher. He's a he's
Speaker 1: an acting teacher. And I did I rehearsed my part
Speaker 1: with him, doing the scenes with you, doing the scenes
Speaker 1: with Willem, just to give myself some time with someone
Speaker 1: that who I like their instincts, I like their meter,
Speaker 1: to kind of get my own rhythm, you know, going
Speaker 1: on and stuff like that. But there's dimensions of directing
Speaker 1: a thing that you're in that are that are not
Speaker 1: great for the best of the experience between actors because
Speaker 1: you're ruining it on some level. On the other hand, though,
Speaker 1: when you have the type of people I had, what
Speaker 1: I loved about it was I love that feeling of
Speaker 1: like of a company like it's it's what when we
Speaker 1: read about Wells and these guys, the fantasy is that
Speaker 1: we're we're all in it together, you know. And on
Speaker 1: this film, God bless every actor in it. Everyone did
Speaker 1: it for me for no money because they believed in
Speaker 1: the piece. Believed in me. I told you I would
Speaker 1: have done it for a lot less. You're You're the
Speaker 1: only person I've ever known who said pay me less.
Speaker 1: There's something when you when you can feel the weight
Speaker 1: of people's conviction. That's what I was going for. You
Speaker 1: did a great job. It was a completely thrilling and
Speaker 1: fulfilling experience. Great actor, now, great director Edward Norton. There
Speaker 1: were a lot of movie titles and director's names coming
Speaker 1: at you fast in this episode. If you'd like a
Speaker 1: list of the films Edward Norton and I discussed text
Speaker 1: thing to seven zero one zero one. That's Thing to
Speaker 1: seven zero one zero one, Motherless, Brooklynness out November one.
Speaker 1: I'm Alec Baldwin, and you were listening to Here's the
Speaker 1: Thing four four f