Ed Norton: Spike Lee Taught Me the Secret to Filming in New York City

(Bloomberg) -- Edward Norton moved to New York City in 1991, right after graduating from college. “I wasn’t sure what I wanted to do, but most of what I was interested in, other than climbing mountains, was here,” the actor said in late September, sitting in a booth at the Knickerbocker Bar & Grill, a bright and unfussy Greenwich Village institution. 

Not yet having “admitted to himself” that he wanted to pursue acting upon arriving in New York, Norton—who grew up in Maryland—started working for his grandfather, James Rouse, “a very famous progressive urban planner, developer, and thinker about revitalization of cities.” He worked in affordable housing development, charged with interviewing public housing residents and learning about the circumstances of their lives. “[My grandfather] would say things like, ‘To serve people, you have to love people,’ ” Norton recounted.

Norton has lived in Manhattan ever since. The three-time Academy Award nominee directed, wrote, and stars in the film Motherless Brooklyn, out in November. Some 28 years after working for his grandfather, he remains tirelessly in love with the city. The film, adapted from Jonathan Lethem’s 1999 novel, explores the way the city’s neighborhoods were transformed in the 1950s as authorities aimed to eliminate housing for lower-income communities and prioritize the construction of highways and bridges, advantaging the elite.  

Starring the City 

It was important to Norton to assemble a cast of New York actors—including Alec Baldwin, Cherry Jones, Bobby Cannavale, Bruce Willis, and Willem Dafoe—whom he’s come to know over his three decades as a Big Apple resident. “It’s like a repertory company of real New York actors. I think I needed that, because I needed people that would need less from me as a director, because it’s a wordy, dense [film],” he said. “I needed people I know know how to step out on a stage and do the whole f---ing thing.” 

Norton, who’s worked on about a dozen films shot in New York, said he was “familiar enough with the dynamics” that he felt prepared for the somewhat stressful undertaking. “Preparation is the key in New York. You have to move fast in New York. It’s one of the things I really learned from Spike Lee [who directed Norton in 25th Hour] more than anyone else. He’s a confident, definitive stylist, and he knows what he’s going to do. He knows his city, he knows how to move within it, and he prepares just like a motherf----er.” 

No matter how much one prepares, though, a production like this one is still something of a slog. “There’s that famous Mark Twain line: ‘I’m glad I did it, partly because it was worth it, but mostly because I’ll never have to do it again,’ ” Norton joked. “It was hard. The wonderful thing is it’s like going on an adult treasure hunt. You set this thing out for yourself, and you say [for example], ‘Now where in the city can we find a great old pool?’ And lo and behold, that pool [ends up being] a public pool in Harlem.”

Norton said he believes the movie serves as a tribute of sorts to the city. “In a lot of ways, even though it’s a movie about things that are tough that happened in New York, it’s reflective of my multi-decade love affair with the city,” he said.

Ed Norton’s New York

Norton has had an active hand in developing two recent additions to the New York landscape. He was involved in the construction of the Signature Theatre Co.’s three-theater Times Square complex, opened in 2012, which was designed by Frank Gehry. He said he’s “very, very proud” to have been involved in the creation of the space—“where the tickets are 30 bucks”—and he loves “being there … going there to have coffee.” He described the theater as a “place where collisions happen,” which is also how he characterizes the High Line, another venture he had a “modest role” in helping develop. “The High Line and the development and the art galleries [have] changed the city for the better,” he said. “There’s a vitality in that that’s hard to ignore.”

When Norton ventures to Brooklyn, he likes to head to Red Hook, comparing the recent development and electricity in the area to “the way the Lower East Side felt in the ’90s.”

“I like what’s happening with the restaurants, with the art, and the aesthetics,” he said. “It’s great.” He also ventures north in Manhattan, up to Harlem; a significant portion of Motherless Brooklyn was shot at a jazz club in Hamilton Heights. “There’s incredible change going up there,” he says. “And the transformation of the Bronx [too] … I love going up into these places that are changing, and you feel young people bringing their determination to make their life there.” His favorite restaurant in Harlem is the Edge, which is located in a building Langston Hughes once lived in.

Norton, who turned 50 in August, has a 6-year-old son with wife Shauna Robertson. The father-son pair take time to travel around the city together. “My son and I, we have a barbershop we like, so we take the ferry to Greenpoint and then walk in,” he says. “I love walking around in Greenpoint.” 

46 Days

Motherless Brooklyn—which clocks in at just shy of two and a half hours—was filmed across the city in just 46 days, which Norton estimated was about 15 days fewer than he had for his first directing job, 2000’s Keeping the Faith, which he also shot in New York. (Norton said he recently screened Brooklyn for Warren Beatty, who exclaimed afterward, incredulous: “You’re a lying sack of s---, there’s no f---ing way you made that movie in 46 days.”) 

While Norton expressed nostalgia for certain elements of the New York of the ’90s and earlier, he also understands the way in which a city must change. “The constant organic flow of change in a place like New York is part of what makes it so great,” he said. “I think new vitality is super important, and not romanticizing [the past]. The balance is what you want to strike.”

Norton hopes his film reflects the specialness of the city and the importance of neighbors listening to one another. “If there’s anything I think my film, I hope, says in the end, it’s that you can’t make a city work and not have empathy for people,” he said. “You have to have empathy for the human experience of a city. You want it to be a place in which people flourish.”

To contact the editor responsible for this story: Chris Rovzar at crovzar@bloomberg.net

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