Directed by John Curran (who directed Norton previously in The Painted Veil and wrote the screenplay for The Killer Inside Me), the story unfolds on the outskirts of a slow-decaying Detroit intended to reflect America in its current state of economic, political, and moral upheaval. The real prison seen in the film is Southern Michigan Correctional Facility, and Norton met with inmates to better inhabit the mentality of a man who will do anything to escape his confines. Meanwhile, in Austin, Texas, for the movie's U.S. premiere at Fantastic Fest, Norton talked about hanging out with career criminals, what it's like to go toe-to-toe with De Niro, and the challenges of shooting sex scenes in prison visiting rooms.
Much has been made of your propensity for playing characters with multiple personalities or hustler types, but this character seems different. He's moving towards integration or transcendence. I was wondering if you saw the character that way and if that was an appeal for you.
Definitely. I mean, I try to be careful because I think John Curran is such a... I so respect the seriousness of the way he looks at films, and that strong intent he puts into leaving certain things gray, for people to mull on, that I've been trying with this not to say, you know, what I think was true or not true. But I definitely did not read this film as a film about a con. I definitely responded to it, and John expressed it as an examination of what constitutes an authentic spiritual experience. And that was very interesting to me. Especially when John laid it up against, I think in his mind, an allegorical interaction with where the culture is in America right now, and the way that we've got these constructs that we use to define who we are, but underneath them a lot of things are decaying, and we may not be confronting the truth of ourselves, the way we're behaving. And when [Curran] started layering those kinds of ideas over saying, you know, "I want to put it in Detroit," the landscape of a place that was who we are and now is falling apart, I started to feel like, "Wow, he really wants to take an earnest look at people who are in a state of spiritual anxiety or are struggling with authenticity in their life."
For me, I know it's sort of parsing words, but people have drawn a connection through things I've done -- like, you know, duality or whatever. I get it, but I don't totally relate to it, in the sense that I don't really see many of the things people reference as duality per se. I just think they're complex. I don't go directly at themes of duality with a conscious eye, but I do get very, very drawn towards something that has, you know, layers within layers within layers. [With] Stone, John put it to me in a way that was very, very intriguing, which is that he just said, "I only have two thoughts on the whole thing. One, that I want it to feel like it's from Detroit, and from the margins of Detroit, very specifically." And he said, "The other thing is, the first time that guy's sitting in the chair, I want to look at him and go, 'This guy is not a very likely candidate for a spiritual transformation.'" And he said, "By the end, I want to really be questioning whether he might have actually had one." And, you know, that's just a very complex idea.
There are many ways in which the internal states of the characters are reflected in the setting, in the city, and the urban decay, and the movie is also a mirror for the culture at large. Do you see that American landscape as a wasteland or as an opportunity?
Well, let me put it this way. I think if John didn't feel that in collapse there was possibility of renewal, then I think you'd have Jack blow Stone away. Because that would be the ultimate kind of refusal to confront that he has done this to himself and possibly have the chance at something happening. But I think as ambiguous as it is, I don't think that John's intention is to leave you with the sensation that all is bleak.
Even though everybody looks at Nietzsche as very... People talk about nihilism, but the truth is his nihilism was full of the idea that you bust things up to renew them. It's very hard to see where you are at in the curve from the place you're in. I was looking at this series of lectures, and I noticed that Gore Vidal gave one; it was a very interesting subject line. Gore Vidal kind of put up what he thinks is the vice grip that American history has led to, and kind of put out this idea that he thinks without some serious upheaval, we won't escape the vice grip of the hypocrisy of a morally upright sense of ourselves that does not track with our imperial reality. He kind of talked about the humbling effect of history on a culture. I look at this film, and I'm like, "John definitely is interested, I think, in the idea of a humbling experience."
What was it like going into the prison and meeting the prisoners, and how did you come up with Stone's strange way of speaking?
I think it's just sort of what you hear in urban Detroit. The two guys that [Stone was] modeled on were both actually from the same part of Detroit, southwest Detroit, which has a very, very distinct [vernacular]. Stone is an imitation of that, exactly. Sixty percent of the actual wording of the way we had [Stone] say things was affected by the way these guys talked. We went through it with them, line by line almost, and said, "This is the intent, but how would you say it?" The script was originally set in the South, and we pretty much just chucked all that when John moved it up to Detroit, and the guys in the prison were invaluable.
What were those guys in for?
Actually both very much what we had Stone set up as: guys who had been involved in the drug trade and the gang life from a very young age, and pretty much been in and out -- through juvie, and everything. One of them in particular was, to me, very poignantly in the same state Stone is in. In fact, he was up for parole this spring, and he was approaching that, and he was extremely, extremely, intensely agitated about it, dwelling on it, very, very forthright about, you know, the fact that he felt, in a weird way, that he had never been given a platform for a sense of a spiritual life, that he'd been cobbling it together. He really was this fascinating kind of grab bag of references from Power of Now to Buddhism primers that he had read to, like, Scientology. He literally was this crazy, autodidactic spiritual cobbler, and it was affecting. He was very affecting. He was the one who had that voice. He had this really shattered, cracky, husky, weird voice.
One of your producers described you as "one of the few actors that can believably terrorize Bob De Niro." What was it like working with De Niro the second time around, and did you effectively terrorize him?
[Laughs.] No, it was good. I think intimidation flows one way from De Niro. I don't think it flows in. But I'm joking. He's not intimidating. If I've ever met a person who had projected onto them an image that does not square with the human that's the artist under all that, it's him. He is so far from that thing that people relate to, and it is amazing. Even though what I love about this film, and him, his performance, I feel like he's investigating this very depressed, and alcoholic, and emotionally distant, sort of withering guy, who maybe was a bully at a point in his life, and these things snap out. But even when those moments come, where that thing snaps out of him, you get this glimpse of, like, that thing, and you just go, knowing him, I marvel at, "Where does that come from in him?" It's really heavy.
The other irony about him is because he's so fantastic, I know this is a weird thing to say, but there are actors who are great on the line, and there are actors who are great off the line, and I look at him as one of the great off-line actors. He's such a weirdly great listener. You know, he's like one of those people who when he's not talking, you're almost more aware of things going on in him. So I think people look at him as a very intuitive actor or whatever, and he's the most right-brained... He is such a clinician and a scientist. He's like a note-taker and a researcher. He's a right-brained details guy until he shoves it through some weird membrane he's got in there, and it becomes this thing.
Your scenes with Milla in the visiting rooms are like sex scenes, but without intercourse. Was that a challenge in shooting them?
No, I don't think I thought that that particularly was a challenge. You know, one of the things I felt about the movie was there's Stone and Lucetta, and there's Stone and Jack, and there's Jack and Lucetta, and there's Jack and [his wife] Madylyn, and if you really look at the film, there's all these two-way conversations, and I kind of think in every one of them, everybody's disconnected. Everybody's failing to hear each other. Jack and his wife, everything they say to each other falls into this void, and with Stone there's no trust, and I think with Stone and Lucetta there's a different kind of a disconnect. She's the most existentially even person in the whole thing. He says [points to his head] she doesn't get in here.
To me their scenes were more about one person for whom it's all pretty simple, and one person for whom it's incredibly complicated and difficult. What's sad, in a way, is she's very pure in her intention to help him, and he needs her so badly in the beginning, and he doesn't need her at all in the end. The only thing that destabilizes her in the movie is him moving from a place where he needs her so much to where he doesn't need her. It wasn't even so much about the sexual connection they had. For us, it was figuring out, what's the nature of their disconnect?
I thought she was great, man. Do you remember Karen Black in Five Easy Pieces? I kept thinking of that. I don't know why. She's gorgeous, but she's so weird. She's dangerous, but she's really got this bizarrely paradoxical innocence to her.
[Top photo credit: Gary Gershoff/WireImage]