Craft Leaders: Edward Norton, filmmaker

In 1999, actor Edward Norton read a novel that changed his life.

“I had just wrapped on Fight Club and was getting ready to direct Keeping the Faith when I read this book that made a really strong impression on me,” he says.

Twenty years later Motherless Brooklyn comes to the screen with Norton as lead actor, producer, screenwriter and director.

“The narrative of taking 20 years to make sounds like I’ve been working on it for that long but it was more a question of finding the time to concentrate on it,” he tells IBC365.

Norton acquired the rights to Jonathan Lethem’s story in 1999 but such was his schedule – segueing from his directorial debut to performing alongside Robert DeNiro and Marlon Brando in The Score then as FBI agent Will Graham to Anthony Hopkins’ Hannibal Lecter in Red Dragon - that development took a back seat.

“I knew I had a stretch of a couple years when I wasn’t able to look at it, but the initial hook was and remains the uniqueness of the central character,” Norton explains. “Jonathan had written a voice for the character where you are inside his head, like Holden Caulfield in Catcher in the Rye. I knew that…