In “Down in the Valley,” Edward Norton plays a deluded 21st century cowboy whose contrived Old West masculinity and aw-shucks innocence attract a restless teenage girl desperate for something more authentic than the tract homes of suburban Los Angeles.
Norton is again – as he did in “Fight Club” – exploring the strange avenues a person might take to eke out something natural in a consumerist world.
“People who liked ‘Fight Club,’ I think will like this film a lot because on a deep psych level, it’s about the same things,” says the two-time Academy Award nominee. “It’s about fantasy as a desperate attempt to get away from the numbing banality of what the modern world confronts you at times.”
Norton’s character – Harlan Carruthers – appears to have wandered into California’s San Fernando Valley straight out of an old John Ford Western. Harlan wins the heart of young Tobe (Evan Rachel Wood) and captivates her younger brother (Rory Culkin). But his identity isn’t as genuine as it seems, and the romanticism sours.
In a disparate filmography that spans a decade, Norton, 36, has ranged from a neo-Nazi skinhead (“American History X”) to a reflective drug dealer headed to the slammer (“25th Hour”). Since impressing audiences as the duplicitous altar boy in 1996’s “Primal Fear,” Norton has been ranked as one of the finest actors around.
“Down in the Valley,” which opens today, was made two years ago, and Norton and director David Jacobson had to fight to secure a distributor.
ThinkFilm eventually picked it up, but Norton has criticized the “indie” divisions of major Hollywood studios (who passed on the film), suggesting their taste isn’t as artistically motivated as they claim.
During a recent interview in New York, where Norton has lived for years, his tone was a little more conciliatory.
“Just because you’ve made a couple movies, you’ve done some good movies, you’ve been nominated for some Academy Awards, whatever – nobody’s entitled,” Norton says.
An intense and guarded person, Norton has in the past shown that he isn’t reluctant to use his power to get what he feels is best for a film.
And he has frequently gone further than the typical actor-director collaboration, often honing scripts. Jacobson’s original screenplay for “Down in the Valley” was a darker “Badlands”-style murder spree. Norton helped bring out the contrast between Harlan’s old-school (albeit deranged) grit, and the kids’ shallow modern environment.
“David (Jacobson) and I have been talking about (‘Down in the Valley’) for three years together,” Norton says. “We spent six months writing, two months prepping, we shot it, we edited it for a year together. It’s been a very deep collaboration.
” I think it was worth it to both of us because we had a lot of feeling for it.”
Jacobson, who directed the dark indie films “Dahmer” and “Criminal,” welcomed Norton’s involvement. “I felt OK because Edward is really smart, and we see things in a similar way,” he says. “He didn’t say ‘Let’s turn this into my vision.’ It was more like, ‘Let’s find out ways to sharpen your vision.”‘
Norton says he has often put total trust in a director, citing David Fincher (“Fight Club”), Spike Lee (“25th Hour”), Woody Allen (“Everyone Says I Love You”) and Milos Forman (“The People vs. Larry Flint”).
“Sometimes it’s just really nice if it’s a filmmaker that you’ve got a shorthand with them, or you know their work and you love it – it can be great,” he says. “But I don’t feel that that often.” Norton tried the director’s chair himself in the 2000 comedy “Keeping the Faith” and plans to revisit it.
His upcoming roles include a turn-of-the-century magician in “The Illusionist” (out in August) and starring alongside Naomi Watts in “The Painted Veil” (due in the fall). He’s now shooting “Pride and Glory,” a story about a family of New York policemen.
Norton doesn’t envision himself acting steadily for decades to come. “There’s some work in front of me that I absolutely want to see through,” he says. “But I don’t want to get to be 80 and look back and go, ‘All I did was make movies.”‘
Instead, he’s interested in something “away from the arts entirely,” but doesn’t know what. He has, though, spent an increasing amount of time working on environmental and housing causes.
It runs in the family: his father, Edward Sr., has worked for the National Trust for Historic Preservation. His grandfather, developer James Rouse, devised the 1967 planned community of Columbia, Md., where Norton was raised.
Norton says his interest is less due to his background than “a generational sense.” Either way, it appears to inform his films – especially “Down in the Valley,” where paradise has been paved over.
“Harlan is the one who’s got a sense of that,” he says. “He’s got a sense of what’s wrong, what’s been lost.”
