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Motherless Brooklyn: Ed Norton on the film it took him 20 years to make

Written by on 05/12/2019

Motherless Brooklyn is a 1950s noir thriller, loosely based on the book of the same name by Jonathan Lethem, with a starry cast including Bruce Willis, Willem Dafoe and Alec Baldwin.

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It also marks the culmination of 20 years of work for its writer, director, producer and star Ed Norton, who bought the rights to the book in 1999 and has been circling the project ever since.

The film tells the story of a lonely private detective (Norton) who has Tourette’s syndrome, as he attempts to solve the murder of his mentor and friend (Willis).

He told Sky News that it wasn’t easy to make the studio-scale movie on an independent film timeline.

“You can’t do that without almost planning to the nth degree, you know, especially because we’re doing the ’50s in New York so it’s not like you can just swing the camera casually over here,” he said. “So this is very composed, it’s very shaped and sculpted and planned, and then later, you’ve got to be more flexible.”

Which is as essential as the detailed planning, he says.

“Sometimes you get there, you’re with Willem Dafoe, it’s in the park, the light is a little different than you thought it was going to be, and you’ve gotta react. You’ve gotta react in the moment, you’ve gotta do all the planning you can and then be as fluid as you can be with what actually is happening in front of you.

“So it’s both – you need right brain and left brain in that process, for sure.”

Norton said that as he was so involved and so close to the film, he had to step back at times.

“I think the challenge of all work is to go deep, and then step back, and go deep and then step back in,” he said.

“You have to be way down in the micro details because the micro details are what make a thing cohere and have an actual unique quality. But then, yes, you’ve got to step back and let it also reveal itself to you.”

He said that space allowed him to see if it was working.

“Is it what you thought it was? Is it saying the things you were trying to say? Or is it revealing some interesting things you didn’t expect? But it’s cool to follow those things, you know?”

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Norton knows Radiohead singer Thom Yorke and got in touch with him to make a track for the film.

He said for him it was essential to add some original music to the soundtrack.

“I think it’s really important when the music of a film is its own thing, so that your brain isn’t constantly just getting tickled with, like, the easy dopamine hit of, ‘ooh, I know that track; ooh, I know that track’.

“If you put a mournful ballad by Billie Holiday or Sarah Vaughan or someone like that over a moment when my character has suffered this loss and is feeling this distress, your brain goes to a very different place, which is familiarity with that thing.

“When you bring in an unexpected note, like a Thom song, something’s happening which is you’re also reacting to the freshness of the emotion that’s being created by that and that’s to me, more interesting.”

Norton added that despite being a star, there are people who aren’t aware it is Yorke singing.

“Yes, there’s a lot of us who immediately go: is that the voice I think it is? But there’s a huge swathe of the world that also doesn’t know who he is and takes it, in many ways, in an even more pure way.

“In fact, I was with him at this thing and this one lady came over to me, she goes, I love that woman. Who’s that? Who sang that song? Her voice is so beautiful.”

“I’m like [to Thom], well done, you are indeed Billie Holiday.”

Motherless Brooklyn is out in cinemas in the UK on 6 January

(c) Sky News 2019: Motherless Brooklyn: Ed Norton on the film it took him 20 years to make