Edward Norton on the best date movie of the summer

0:00From KCRW Santa Monica and KCRW.com, it's The Treatment.

0:13Welcome to The Treatment. I'm Elvis Mitchell. This show's been on for about 30 years, and about 30 years ago, my guest made a splash with a role that really sort of, for me, summarizes what his career is about. Secrets and people who husband information. That role was primal fear. And since then, Edward Norton has played a number of characters. We could talk about The Illusionist or Motherless Brooklyn. Some of the characters you play have been about people who like to hold on to information. And your new film, The Invite, I think kind of is part of that symmetry, isn't it? I love it when the external eye sees connective tissue in things that you've done.

0:49Like creative process and life tends to flow in this very, it's very lumpy. You know, you don't experience making films as a career. You don't experience it as a portfolio. You do each one, right? And you, at least I kind of find that something gets under my skin for one reason or another and you lock in on it. And you tend to treat it as though, in a way, it's the only thing. And then later, maybe someone observes that there's connective tissue between the things you've done. I've never had a conscious awareness of seeking that connectivity. But when people point it out, I can see it. Maybe there's an unconscious part of one that's drawn toward consistent themes, or maybe that's my secret sauce, or maybe it's an aspect of, you know, like Jordan's fade jump shot.

1:51It's just something he's good at. And maybe there's a gravitational pull toward things that have similar, you know, DNA in them. You just mentioned Jordan. You're talking about their affinity and skill. There's certainly the skill level for you, but I do think you have an affinity for characters. Because as a person, I know you should be somebody who likes to gather information from as many places as possible. But you like to share that information. I mean, there's an eagerness you have to share information and to get information from others. You often play characters who use information as kind of a carrot to get stuff out of people.

2:28Well, information's a really, I mean, it's a super interesting way of looking at character and motivation and even the way that, you know, plot unfolds because you're right. Very much like the experience of a film for an audience is an unspooling of information, right? And emotions information. It's not always literally just mechanics of plot, but I'm not sure I've ever heard it put that way. But I think about actors that I found compelling or who were inspiring to me, you know, a Daniel Day-Lewis or a Robert De Niro or people who seem to communicate a lot of information in ways that are not just verbal.

3:14And what you said, the idea of held information of people who seem to contain an enormous amount or even make an active, they make listening an active experience on film. That's a very interesting way of thinking about it. And definitely this, which is, I don't mean to make it sound too highfalutin, because actually it's something you don't do enough as far as I'm concerned, which is comedy, but also farce. and it's basically almost fey doh. There are lots of doors slamming, people coming in and out of rooms. I know it comes from a play, which makes all the sense in the world, but it has that sort of sense of movement.

3:52You're new from The Invite, directed by Louis Wilde, we should say, and also written, adapted by a pair of actors, one actor at least, Rashida Jones and Will McCormick. I would say it's about a couple who are sort of uptight and invite a much more libertine couple from upstairs. Yeah, I say an unhappy couple spends an evening with a happy couple and all kinds of things, you know, ensue. There's a lot of films that I think Olivia and all of us shared a really deep affection for, you know, from Mike Nichols, multiple Mike Nichols films, you know, Virginia Woolf, Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf, Carnal Knowledge, The Graduate.

4:34So many of Mike's films were comedies of manners or mores or of values and the collision between people, you know, not through violence, not through things, but through where they are in life. I think Mike was so good at seeing the comedy and the, you know, the knife in the way that people perceived and misperceived each other. And also the anger, because those films you're talking about, there's so much anger in all of them. I agree. I agree. And festering anger, festering anger, sexual taboo, you know, I mean, in The Graduate. And it's not people who will be from your experience, it's people who are bored with experience.

5:17Yes, bored with experience. I mean, you think of Benjamin Braddock, you think of, but you think of the two couples in Virginia Woolf. What is really going on there? You think about really Art Garfunkel's character in Carnal Knowledge. I mean, think about Mike and the films he made. I think the first three films he made, Virginia Woolf, The Graduate, and Carnal Knowledge. And that is, if you think about the moment in which those films were made, that's some real unpacking of taboo in the age of sexual liberation or the liminal edge of it. And then, too, I will say I think that a lot of the best of what I love about some of Cassavetes' films, Woody Allen's films, you know, Manhattan.

6:00There's certainly a bit of husbands in this. Yeah, husbands and wives. Because those films are all about, you just mentioned Husbands and Wives, these films are all about anger. And what you just said, that festering anger, this anger that people haven't really expressed, that really gets called to the fore in front of strangers. Yeah. And I also think impactedness, you know what I mean? The idea of the repression of what we're feeling and what we want because of the structures, not just physical, but the emotional structures that we've nested ourselves within, you know. I mean, what I think is so great about Virginia Woolf, and I think Olivia really does in her own way get at this, which is that it sometimes takes a collision.

6:44You know, it takes a crash of your life as it is against someone else. An unexpected encounter is needed to catalyze change and that maybe there's something redeeming or for an audience cathartic in seeing someone else crash out. One of the things I think sort of helps what you're talking about is that Mike Nichols was an actor, and he knew how to get behavior out of actors. And there have been all kinds of stories told about what he did with Elizabeth Taylor to make her comfortable. And I think someone who has the same kind of persona and affect as Penelope Cruz, to use that to sort of seemingly foreground that.

7:32Yeah. and then not. And also to sort of play with what we might describe to kind of a mystery about the characters you often play. One of my favorite sections of the film was when it's like the planets are spinning and you're the sun where you just sit and don't say anything for a long time. Yeah, he's very watchful. But I also was really sort of moved by the staging of that. I keep arguing that maybe it's not the date movie of the summer, but it's the double date movie of the summer. It sounds like a line, but as I've watched people watch it, I've realized that this is a very interesting thing for two couples to see together and then go have dinner afterward.

8:12I mean, there are few enough things that get people out of the house and off the couch and into a theater, you know, and I think about films even in the recent age, like to me, an absolute classic of marital relations is Ruben Ostlin's film Force Majeure, right? I mean, the original suite is Force Majeure, which I think has, maybe in the last 10 years, I'm not sure I've ever had more fantastic conversations around the table with couples talking about a film than that film provoked. Do you know what I mean? It is so provocative. And I've already had a number of people say about the invite that it has provoked some really, really, really intense and hilarious post-viewing conversations at dinner afterwards.

9:09And so I do think picking another couple and going as a double date and then going to dinner after might be the most fun night out you have this summer. But I think a really good friend of mine, a wife of a filmmaker, kind of encapsulated it for me. She said, God, I haven't laughed that hard in a long time. And now I think I need to go home and have a good cry. I'm always a little bit loath to talk about process because I like for people to just see a film. But I do want to say, you know, like when I made Birdman, it was a creative process that was unlike anything else I'd gone through just because the way Alejandro made the film.

9:51But Olivia did something while we were making this, which is she shot, it does all take place in one apartment in one evening. And it afforded us the opportunity to work in some unusual ways. And she shot the film like a play. She shot it in page order. And by shooting it in page order, she gave us all the permission to sort of improvise and build and discover, you know, moment to moment and carry on and have the next bit of what we did informed by what had come before. And I'm not sure I've been in anything that changed so much in the course of doing it because of the way that it was done. It evolved enormously along the way.

10:40And Olivia kept saying, I think she had a lot of people freaking out around the margins about the amount of on-the-fly, I like to say, discovery. they were saying change of course but she she kept saying look we're we're stitching the parachute on the way down but it's gonna open you know it is gonna open and and i think it did i think she i think by insisting that that we might not know exactly how it was gonna end until we got there which is an incredibly bold thing for a director to do all that thought for a second we're gonna take a break and talk more about spirituality and trust with our old friend Edward Norton.

11:21His new film, directed by Olivia Weil, is The Invite, is The Treatment. There's more to come. Stay with us.

11:33Welcome back. We're talking about spirituality and the new youth with our old friend, Edward Norton. His new film, his actor, is directed by Olivia Weil. He's coupled with Penelope Cruz in the film The Invite. She's coupled with Seth Rogen. You were saying what was really great about what she'd done just before the brag. Yeah, just there's so many dimensions of making a film, there's a certain pressure that comes from the simple fact of how many people, how many people are involved. You know, it's hundreds of people, even on a small crew like this, you just have so many people and a lot of equipment.

12:06You know, there's a cost structure. There's no other way of putting it. Everybody who makes movies knows the fantasy is that you're like Radiohead and you just go in the studio and you keep working until you're done and you're happy and you bring a brilliant thing out and you don't need anybody else, right? They've got the band, they've got Nigel Goodrich, they've got their own studio, and they go until they're content, right? Filmmaking is like, you know, the constraints, the hemorrhaging of cost tends to make people want control. And immediate results. Yeah, control, result, a sense of confidence that there's a roadmap, there's a plan.

12:43So for a director of a film to work improvisationally, fluidly, to invite discovery, risk-taking discovery, change, abandoning script, making things up, changing on the fly. But it's also saying she trusts an actor enough to know who the characters are. That's the big bet. I'm going to go further. I'm going to say in my 30 years, I'm not sure I've ever had an experience where a director trusted the cast more than on this film. Insofar as Olivia sort of said, look, this is an armature. And I want the four of us to fill these characters in with ourselves and with our own experiences and write your own backstory and bring it all in.

13:35And the film's based on a fantastic Spanish film that almost nobody over here saw. But that movie's really claustrophobic. Yeah, it's called Sentimental. Sentimental. Yeah. The actors are brilliant. And Seth Gay, who wrote and directed it, should get full credit. There's like a French version of it. There's a Polish version of it. Yeah, there's like a Korean version of it. I think a number of people have seized on it. And Olivia really said, I want our version of it to be informed by the four of us intensively. And she not only allowed, but asked us to bring a lot in to it. I mean, Penelope's character wasn't Spanish.

14:19You know, Penelope brought this enormous amount of stuff from her own interest in menopause and women's hormone experiences. And frankly, Esther Perel, you know, and many of Esther's wisdoms, I think, emerge in the end of the film. You know, Penelope just brought so much into it. My character was not originally named Hawk. And the idea of why he's Hawk is actually based on my friend Hawk Koch, who many people in this town know because he was the head of the academy and he produced Primal Fear and produced my first film that I directed called Keeping the Faith. and without revealing the film. I was privy when I was in my 20s to things that Hawk went through.

15:05And I was so moved and amused by much of it. I brought a lot of it to Olivia and she loved it. And so we infused. There's a process of infusion that made it, for all of us, I think, very more personal. But again, I have been extremely, extremely fortunate. I've worked with people with extremely unique creative, I don't know, modes, Milos Forman or Spike Lee or David Fincher or Woody Allen or Alejandro Iñárido or Wes Anderson. And I really thought the way Olivia approached this was the experience of doing it ranked right there with my most joyful, pure, creative experiences of making a film. Because she somehow, she created this space where anything could happen.

16:02Anything could have happened. And where we landed was not where I think we set off intending to end. there's much more depth of seriousness and emotion in the end than there was in this when we set out. It was lighter. And I kind of just really give it up to her. I can't. And on top of it, she gives like a career best performance. For me, and going back to talking again about Mike Nichols, because he was an actor, that kind of trust and also playing it in chronological order because it also gives a kind of an emotional weight to each day that you know you're building towards something, it's kind of helped you to know until you're working through this kind of in three acts because it is a three-act pace.

16:46So as your couple, you and Penelope get to know more about Seth and Olivia because when you guys first come in, you come in as a unit. Yeah. And you're not so much of that by the end, but I'm wondering if that grew too out of performance. Yes, and the back end was really tricky. I think Olivia was getting a lot of pressure to keep it light, to be honest. And she and Seth in particular had a strong feeling that they needed to get into the real s**t. And in some sense, I think even more than I did necessarily, I think Penelope had a really strong instinct that there are fracture points or that there are fissures or frictions under this other couple that seems...

17:30Ideal. Ideal or to have no problems or things. And the particular way, the particular, I think, hilarious way in which you end up seeing them was totally Penelope's idea. I actually still do sometimes for myself, I'll still do that thing you're taught to do when you're young, which is write your character's backstory out. Like know a lot more about him or her than's ever gonna make it to the film, right? I had some of my inspirations, my friend Hawk, and there's aspects of my friend Julian Sands, the late actor. and Julian actually came into my apartment in New York and said, is this a Harise?

18:10And actually said the line, he said, I want you all to go away so I can lie naked on it and think about the things that have happened on this carpet. Like those were all, that was all from him. But I had this idea in my head of what had happened to this guy. You know, what was the secret in a way? Like people say carry a secret as a actor, carry a character. And I had it in my head, but Olivia started saying that she felt that to get over into the deeper s***, there needed to be some kind of a hinge. Because we were in kind of a certain tonality, and it was like, well, how are we going to earn that?

18:47How are we going to get there? Seth had a notion, a funny notion about challenging me in a certain way. and I suddenly had this thought like, well, if he did that, my private backstory that I had written out for myself, I thought maybe that's the frequency shift that can be the hinge into that back end. And Olivia said, well, do you know what it is? And I said, yeah, I wrote it down a while ago for myself. And she said, why don't you come in and just do it? And she said, I don't want to know what it is. And she actually set the cameras up on her and Seth. And in the film, when he tells that story about himself, her reaction is Olivia hearing it for the first time.

19:32She never heard it. And Seth had neither. And then the incredibly insane thing he says to me at the end, Seth made up on the spot, which is maybe one of the best lines I've ever heard improvised. But it absolutely put us all on the floor. But I don't think anyone, when I said trust, like, I think Olivia is saying to me, come in and drop that on me. I trust you. I want to shoot myself hearing it for the first time. I mean, honestly, I'm not sure any, I don't think I've ever had a bigger act of trust in me as an actor than that. And it works. You know, it really works. In the film, and she was like, I don't ever need to hear it before you come in and do it.

20:18It was bananas, like bananas. We started off by talking about secrets and trust. We'll end with that. And I'll tell you in the 30 years of doing this show, you're one of my favorite people. It's always great to have you here. Thank you. I can't thank you enough. My guest is our old friend. Thanks for loving films the way you do. Thanks for being in them. It makes it easy. His new film as actor is The Invite.

20:47We know actor-director Edward Norton from a variety of roles, from his first in the 1996 film Primal Fear, for which he received an Oscar nomination, to the film A Complete Unknown, for which he received an Oscar nomination. He stopped by to discuss his most recent role in the film The Invite, in which he acts with Seth Rogen, Penelope Cruz, and Olivia Wilde, who also directed. Previous interviews with old friends of the show, such as Edward Norton, can be found at the archive. KCRW.com slash the treatment. At KCRW.com slash the treat, you'll find The Treat, our weekly series with creators on their inspirations.

21:34This week, it's comedy writer and Porsche aficionado, Spike Fairston, on a TV performer who gave new definition to the phrase, late night. the show is produced and edited by Rebecca Mooney and mixed by Katie Gilgrest to better days everyone I'm Elvis Mitchell it's the treatment