Edward Norton

Edward Norton
Edward Harrison Nortonis an American actor, filmmaker and activist. He has been nominated for three Academy Awards for his work in the films Primal Fear, American History Xand Birdman. He also starred in other roles, such as Everyone Says I Love You, The People vs. Larry Flynt, Fight Club, Red Dragon, 25th Hour, Kingdom of Heaven, The Illusionist, Moonrise Kingdomand The Grand Budapest Hotel. He has also directed and co-written films, including his directorial debut, Keeping the Faith. He has...
NationalityAmerican
ProfessionMovie Actor
Date of Birth18 August 1969
CountryUnited States of America
If two people are at completely different stages in their spiritual life, that can present a real problem.
I'm an actor, and, beyond that, the thing I do most compulsively is writing. So I come at it very much from this sense of character. I get interested in people. And I feel confident in my capacity to absorb and manifest the characteristics of people. I have a real auditory hang-up for dialogue; re-creating the way people talk really is an addiction in my brain.
We must realize that nature is absolutely essential for our survival, and we must act on that premise now.
The Zionist Tulsa Jew who's pugnacious is a reality. I grew up around it. And I think it's really, really funny and surprising and unlikely.
But work that's got real substance does make people feel, "There's someone else out there who relates to my experience, or who just helped me understand my own experience a little bit better." And I think that's still got enormous value.
I've always thought of acting as more of an exercise in empathy, which is not to be confused with sympathy. You're trying to get inside a certain emotional reality or motivational reality and try to figure out what that's about so you can represent it.
We are thrilled to be collaborating with Edward on this labor-of-love. They're a very daring company and have a great knack for communicating with audiences about challenging films.
She's not just one of these kids who's very natural,
Life, like poker, has an element of risk. It shouldn't be avoided. It should be faced.
Lewis and Clark's expedition is as great a story as you could ever hope to tell, and like so many people, Brad and I have both been drawn to it for years, ... We both always agreed that compressing that story into a feature-length film ruined the spirit of it ... so we sat down and said, 'How can we really do this justice?'
I think a lot of people in their average day actually imagine two sides of a conversation at one point or another. I think that the mental trick of holding two sides of a conversation in your head is actually something that we all do.
I do subscribe to the maxim that generally comedy is like jazz. Either you get it or you don't. You can't learn it and you can't be taught it. I don't think that if you are not a funny person, you can fake it.
David Fincher is probably the best comprehensive director in terms of being a manger of a process that must drive forward. He has such confident command of cinema language and visual language and script and performance. He knows more about f-stops than any cameraman, he knows more about lighting than any gaffer, he is a wonderful writer, and he can give you a good line reading. Under pressure, he is the kind of guy who you will just dive in with and trust and follow because his vision is so intense.
What has always been most interesting about acting to me personally is that it affords you the chance to shift gears, both in terms of the experiences you get to have through doing it, but also the different kinds of things you get to represent.