Interview: Edward Norton

Edward Norton (The Illusionist, Fight Club, Death to Smoochy) stars as Walter Fane, an English bacteriologist who moves himself and his adulterous wife Kitty (Naomi Watts — 21 Grams) to a remote region of 1920’s China racked by a Cholera outbreak in The Painted Veil, directed by John Curran (We Don’t Live Here Anymore). The script is adapted from the novel by W. Somerset Maugham by screenwriter Ron Nyswaner (Philadelphia) and Norton, who have been collaborating for over six years to perfect the script and also get the project off the ground. The finished project is well worth their time – filmed on location in China in cooperation with the China film Bureau, The Painted Veil is part love story, part adventure film, and epic both visually and dramatically.

I had the chance to meet Ed Norton and discuss The Painted Veil while he was in New York City prior to the film’s release.

Question: What was it like filming in China?

Ed Norton: It was a great experience, I mean it was… I think a lot of times when you make movies, the artifice of the experience is very present around you, so you’ll be creating a reality, but then when you step out of work, you head home or whatever. And it’s not that often that the experience making the movie has a lot of parallels to the experience that the movie — that’s in the story. But it was in this case, we were obviously far from home, we were working through the difficulty of translation, sometimes the inefficiency of communicating that way, of people doing things differently than you do them, and you know, having your own sort of problems fade away because you’re off in this other context. A lot of it fed directly into what the story was about, and that was kind of special. Other than that, it was great. There are attendant frustrations to making anything way out in places where there aren’t even paved roads and things like that. But those logistical challenges were minor compared to how great the whole…. the Chinese crews and our colleagues there were amazing. They were really, really…. Their work ethic was just unbelievable.

Q: What about this film appealed to you?

EN: I think for me it was a combination of two things. One is, that if you watch David Lean films, or Out of Africa, selfishly you watch those films and you can’t help but think how great it would be to have that kind of experience. So when you see the potential in something for that kind of scope, it’s very tempting. But the best of those movies, I think, are the ones that have themes at the heart of them that transcend kind of the period, you know? And I think that… when I read it, I found myself more moved by this story of these people kind of going through the process of losing their illusions about each other and managing to recover a deeper sense of each other… I related to it more than I tend to relate to stories about wedding planners and things like that. So for me it was sort of the combination of the epic scope of the film, but with a set of themes at the heart that I thought were moving.

Q: Were you familiar with Somerset Maugham’s writing? Had you read a lot of his stuff?

EN: I had read a few of his things, I had not read The Painted Veil, and I read Ron’s script before I read the book, and went back to the book and then in a way we moved on with the script, sort of up and away from the book in some sense.

Q: Walter’s character is a lot different in the film than his character in the book, somewhat more extreme in some ways. How did you decide upon the direction you took with the character? What was you frame of reference?

EN: In some ways I think the Walter of the book is more harsh…. Well, in the sense only that he doesn’t – in the book many of the same things that happen, happen in the film, but they happen in different ways. In the book she has to go back to Charlie after his death and sleep with him again before she realizes how thoroughly awful he is. In the movie we’ve moved that recognition further forward. In the book, the impact of the experience with Walter and everything, finally lands when she goes home and confesses her – asks for forgiveness from her father. In the movie we’ve made that happen between her and Walter before his death in some ways. But as Ron said, we never wanted to abandon the idea of a woman confronting the limitations of her view of life in a way, but we didn’t want… we wanted to let those changes take place between the two characters in some sense.

Q: What did you particularly like about this character? Is there something that appeals to you?

EN: With Walter?

Q: Yeah, with Walter.

EN: Well, it’s not so much… I think I know what you’re saying. I never look at a character and decide whether I’d like to have a beer with them…

Q: What kind of challenge was in it for you?

EN: Well, just that he has so many layers to him. He’s a character that on first impression… much as she perceives him, I think the audience has the chance to perceive him as having… he’s a little bit antisocial, he’s very cerebral… but as the story goes on, this kind of unsuspected depth keeps getting revealed in him. The depth of his passion, the depth of his capacity to be hurt in a way, to be vengeful, he becomes almost violent I think, certainly psychologically violent. And that too even gives way to a kind of humility and compassion that you don’t read in him in the beginning. So as an actor, you sit there looking and go, ‘Wow, this guy’s quite an onion, you know? He keeps peeling away and peeling away.’ And I think Kitty equally. And I think that’s what makes it a very complicated little dance between the two of them.

Q: You had studied Chinese history before coming to this project. What attracts you to China’s culture and history?

EN: Well, I should say I didn’t go looking for a film about China. The fact that I had some background in China just made it more appealing once I encountered it. But…. Well at the moment, it happens to be the biggest country on earth [laughs]… and I think that it’s also one of the oldest cultures on earth…. And in a lot of ways China to me is like America in the sense that it’s too vast to really encompass easily, or make general statements about it. It’s geographically diverse like America, it’s ethnically diverse like America, it has this deep, deep, deep history, and so to me it’s just a fascinating place. Also, right now, this isn’t what the story is about – although in a way it is what the story is about – it’s in flux, it’s a place where enormous changes are happening, and it’s palpable, and I think in that moment in which this story takes place it was another moment in which change was ripping across that country, and people were asserting their own… they were asserting their right to throw off the shackles of other countries’ meddling in their affairs… and it was an interesting moment.

Q: So the alienists helped reinforce their isolation, and that was important to happen in China. Do you think that could happen anywhere else, or do you think that was critical to it?

EN: I think you could argue it could take place in a similar kind of historical moment in another place, but as far as you could change anything in any number of ways. But in this case I think… it’s not really a part of the book, but I think John Curran brought a specificity to the historical moment in the film. He pushed even me and Ron to get more specific about when this was taking place and what was going on, in part because I think we all recognized that was smart because it resonated with things we’re seeing today even. But also to be honest I think just because John is a good dramatist and he looked at it and said, ‘How can I create an environment around these characters that drives them closer together? Beyond cholera, what could be going on?’ And he found this moment in Chinese history where foreigners were being attacked all over the countryside. And it’s just good drama.

Q: In the press notes there’s mention of Chinese citizens taking issue with the filming of certain scenes in the film, stating the representation of dead bodies on the streets invites bad spirits. I was wondering if you had issues with that?

EN: Well, to make sure it’s not misinterpreted, the people in the town where we were filming didn’t get angry. The scene in the film is that Walter’s insistence on the bodies being removed violates the Buddhist tradition of the body being allowed to rest so the spirit can depart, all these things. I think the Chinese people we were working with… I think the more we gave voice to the Chinese perspective on people’s intervention into their affairs, the more the Chinese people we were working with felt deeply connected to it. It was fairly late in the process that we wrote that scene where Walter’s saying to the Kernel at the campfire like, ‘I don’t get your beef with me. I’m here doing the best I can.’ And the Kernel says, ‘I understand that, but your country is pointing guns at our country.’ The more we gave voice to the Chinese perspective, the more it gave it resonance with our Chinese colleagues.

Q: You had to do some convincing to bring Naomi Watts to the project. How did you two work together once the film was finally in production?

EN: She’s supreme, I really can’t say enough good about her. I’d say beyond any film I’ve ever worked on, these two performances were like in lock-step, there was no way to do one without the partner doing the other. They’re so intimately intertwined it’s definitely the closest I’ve ever worked on a day-to-day level with another actor. And it’s just fantastic because she’s so unafraid to work on levels of nuance that’s it’s really challenging… it’s really great because she’s putting things over so subtly. There’s stuff in the film she does that I just love, there are moments like… I just love that sequence with her and Dianna Rigg because she’s not really saying that much, but you feel, you feel the impact of this perception of Walter washing over her till the point where she walks out and kind of can’t speak. And that kind of work is so wordless, I think it’s the best that you can do in a film acting, because it’s almost gestural, it’s not… she has a great feeling for how much the camera can draw out of you, and it was just… I could not have had a better partner in all of it.

Q: How did you and Naomi get to this level, and how did John help cultivate this collaborative relationship?

EN: Well, Naomi and I talked for a few years, she was also involved for a long time. And actually a lot of times we just sort of wrote a lot about it, which was really interesting, it was different.

Q: Letters to each other?

EN: Yeah, just – not pretending to be the characters or anything [laughs] nothing like that. But just kind of noodling on what we related to. And also because the script was always developing… debating, ‘Okay, how far are we going to take this moment? How overt is the forgiveness? How much do you want them to say on his deathbed? What do you need expressed and how much of it? How much of it can be expressed in words and how much of it doesn’t need words?’ and all that kind of stuff. And of course the both of us relied on John enormously. She’d had a long relationship with John, they’d known each other for fifteen years and had already done one film, so that was great. But we had to shoot this film profoundly out of sequence, and do a lot of the deep scenes of their relationship in the middle of the movie without having shot any of the beginning yet. And that relies a lot on a director going, ‘Don’t worry about hitting it perfect, let’s do pitch one here and pitch one here and pitch one here and pitch one here, and give me the raw materials to sort it out later.’ And I think that requires an enormous amount of trust in a director, because you have to be willing to essentially fail, to do things like, clownishly wrong, and you need a lot of trust among everybody.

Warner Independent Pictures releases John Curran’s The Painted Veil nationwide on January 19th.