Edward Norton - On making The Illusionist - page 2

05-07-2007 15:49

You’re rarely seen in period films, and here you are in two back to back with ‘The Illusionist’ and ‘The Painted Veil’: was that a conscious thing on your part

No, it’s pure coincidence because with The Painted Veil we’ve been ready to go at any moment in the last seven years. It just happened that it fell together on the heels of another period piece. I rarely step back and look at the relationship of any of these things to each other. I don’t tend to make decisions about things with regard to how it fits into a larger body. It’s almost exclusively execution dependent with me. I love period films, but I just don’t happen to have had ones laid in front of me that I thought were good, or that resonated with me. I’ve looked at many of them over the years, I just don’t happen to have been pulled in by them the way I was pulled in by these two.

Are you a fan of the romantic genre in general

I certainly am a fan of films like Out Of Africa or Brief Encounter Or Doctor Zhivago, sure. I tend to find something more meaningful in films that I think are real, that have some sort of universal quotient to them or that are really a study of the eternal dynamics between men and women. I think the reason Out Of Africa holds up as a ‘romantic film’ is that it’s really about loss. It’s not about romantic consummation, it’s about a woman confronted by the fact that she can’t hold on to things, not possessions nor property or even this man. The dynamics between those characters are ones that I think people can still relate to. So you get the romance of period and place, and the exoticism of it but I think there’s something in it that people can recognise themselves in. And I like that. I tend to respond to that. I don’t tend to respond to the people who meet through a wedding planner, or whose dogs get their leashes entangled.

Is there a single motivating factor that gets you interested in a project

I tend to prioritise work that I feel like on some level has something to say about the experience of people of my generation, or people that I know. Things that reflect what’s difficult, about the times we’re living in. Those films that have meant a lot to me over time – not my own but films generally – have been films that I would say were engaged in their times. That doesn’t mean that they were particularly commercial, those are just what I tend to gravitate towards. But it’s fun to mix in other experiences too.

The Illusionist is released on rental DVD on 25 June 2007 and retail DVD on 9 July 2007.