YouSaid · the spoken record

Edward Norton

lines on the record: 102
first: 2019-10-31
most recent: 2019-10-31
sittings or episodes: 1
sources: podcast

Every line below is reproduced as it was said and linked to the record it came from. Nothing here is summarised or generated. Directory · Search · Corrections

“becomes monolithic and then it just intensifies your desire to avoid it. And it was fascinating to read it and find and kind of have the sensation of like, this is so much fun. Like, this is such fun language, this characteristic, why they did I put this, you know, why did I give up on this? And then in a funny way, I went back to my cards because my issue wasn't a character issue. It wasn't a language. It was just applauding issue. And I looked at my cards.”
2019-10-31 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #393: Edward Norton — On Creative Process, Creative Struggle, and Motherless Brooklyn · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Well, the really interesting thing was that when I read what I had written. I forgot some of what I had written and I liked it. Like I was reading it as if someone else had written it and it was making me laugh. I kind of had this reinvigoration of the pleasure of it, ironically, because procrastination does a really weird thing to your head when you push something off, it starts to become monolithic. I don't know what that is, but it...”
2019-10-31 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #393: Edward Norton — On Creative Process, Creative Struggle, and Motherless Brooklyn · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Any number, you just can't. You can do it in some measure. And if I'd been willing to make motherless Brooklyn the way I wanted to for $15 million of budget, I could have done it the next day. You know what I mean? But I needed slightly more than that. And so it was tricky. It was just tricky.”
2019-10-31 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #393: Edward Norton — On Creative Process, Creative Struggle, and Motherless Brooklyn · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“You know, pursuing projects where my agenda was will this be one of the biggest movies ever is that you can make a lot of really excellent films that you're proud of and that people end up not only loving, but seeing is maybe almost like essential zeitgeisty movies like Feight Club or 25th Hour or American Street X, but none of those movies were financially successful. So it's not like I was walking around like some actor on a run of gigantic hits who's considered like, you know, oh, this guy's going to open the movie at 20 million, so we'll do anything he wants to do. You know what I mean? It's just. It's just not the same, and you can't unfortunately collateralize artistic credibility into any kind of”
2019-10-31 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #393: Edward Norton — On Creative Process, Creative Struggle, and Motherless Brooklyn · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Of both things, but people's eyes are just like, you got your chocolate and my peanut butter in your chocolate. They're like, what the hell are you talking about You know, it's really, you're definitely like describing something. The trade, it's like to say that its execution dependent is an understatement. Mostly people are like, you know, Please bring us the next one. You know what I mean? And when you're saying to people, will you give us me tens of millions of dollars to make this, you can't walk around in a huff like how can this be so tough? I understood why it was tough. I understood why it was tough. And also the upsides of not pursuing, let's call it, a careerist.”
2019-10-31 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #393: Edward Norton — On Creative Process, Creative Struggle, and Motherless Brooklyn · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Eyes start crossing, and you go, okay, not Chinatown, LA Confidential. That one was much more accessible. It's not Rain Man. He's got full-on autism. It's Forrest Gump meets LA confidential. You start going, is that Rain Van meets Chinatown? That's too tough. Forrest Gump meets LA confidential. The more accessible version.”
2019-10-31 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #393: Edward Norton — On Creative Process, Creative Struggle, and Motherless Brooklyn · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Honestly, I think No one can ever take for granted That someone should just hand you money to make a film. I never know. It doesn't matter if you've been nominated for 10 Academy Awards or it doesn't matter. It's risky. It's risky. And when someone's coming at you with, I'm going to do a big scale 1950s period film. Like a dense kind of the Chinatown story about New York City and its urban development. Oh, and at the middle of it is a guy with Tourette syndrome, an obsessive compulsive disorder. It's sort of Rainman meets Chinatown. People's eyes just...”
2019-10-31 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #393: Edward Norton — On Creative Process, Creative Struggle, and Motherless Brooklyn · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“It was like the producerial struggle, the writer's struggle was over, but the producerial struggle was at least five years of both of us hammering on it and trying every equation of casting and financing and everything to get it made, and all thwarted throughout. We were constantly thwarted.”
2019-10-31 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #393: Edward Norton — On Creative Process, Creative Struggle, and Motherless Brooklyn · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“There's exceptions to sort of the reductive cliche about something. And people in this day and age are constantly talking about how studios, you know, it's impossible to get original adult stuff made and everything. But I've had these champion, Toby Emmerich's been this incredible stalwart champion of my project for over a decade, like a really long time, encouraging me, pushing me along, helping me actually get through these mental block moments. And then when I actually got it done starting to try to figure out with me how to get it made and he didn't have the collateral to get it made. And then we went through this next period, which was like five years of really struggling to”
2019-10-31 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #393: Edward Norton — On Creative Process, Creative Struggle, and Motherless Brooklyn · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Accid Clever, helpful, but also like, you know, Hollywood and Inside baseball, and honestly, I sometimes think it's probably very boring to most people. But I do think I do think it's always good to highlight when”
2019-10-31 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #393: Edward Norton — On Creative Process, Creative Struggle, and Motherless Brooklyn · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And he was like, well, how about we just agree like. You'll get it done by Christmas, or we'll start having a real conversation about letting someone else take a crack at And it was great. I literally knuckled down and I pulled it out. I looked at it. I talked to some other writers with some focus who I respect, puzzled it out, cracked it, and finished it really aggressively. I wrote like I wrote my college thesis. I wrote the large bulk of the rest of it in like two or three weeks of long, deep nights of just powering it through. And then it was done.”
2019-10-31 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #393: Edward Norton — On Creative Process, Creative Struggle, and Motherless Brooklyn · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Of information for my resolve to get very, very strong again. And I took it out. And he did kind of put a deadline on me. He was like, look, we've been sitting on his thing a long time and this person wants to do it. And I was like, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no”
2019-10-31 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #393: Edward Norton — On Creative Process, Creative Struggle, and Motherless Brooklyn · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“That I should direct it. At a certain point called me and was like, Hey, there's other people who are interested in this, I think maybe, you know, should we let someone else take a crack at it? And I don't even know if that was true. I have a feeling might have just been sticking a fork in me, but it worked. And actually, this friend of mine, he was the studio executive who at that time was running New Line. And he actually did something that I laugh at and in retrospect, which is he cited a specific director. To me, who I think he knew the idea of giving up my project to that person specifically was going to make my skin crawl. And he just, whether it was conscious or not, he hit me with exactly the right piece.”
2019-10-31 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #393: Edward Norton — On Creative Process, Creative Struggle, and Motherless Brooklyn · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And then literally Got sent to a really weird cool script called Down in the Valley, and I decided I'm going to do that. And I'll do it quick. I'm like, I'm going to do that one really quick. It's a little independent film moon. Do that one quick, and then I'll come right back to this, right? And then I did the illusionist. And then a film I had been working on for years to pull together came together, the painted veil. Naomi Watts got free and she wanted to do it. And suddenly it was like, I'm making a film for six months in Prague and then I'm making a film for six months in China. And time just starts to roll by and your mind gets further and further from the thing you're working on. And just one thing after another kept coming in. And then that thing in the drawer that you haven't figured out becomes more and more and more of a block, you know, of lead. It's just like, it's not an active thing. And I think the same person who later helped me embrace.”
2019-10-31 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #393: Edward Norton — On Creative Process, Creative Struggle, and Motherless Brooklyn · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Dangers are around you and where power is and who's got the power. That's what they're thematically, I think, is their strength is they really do remind us there are things going on in the shadows that are antagonistic to us and that if we don't figure out what's going on, damage is going to get done. But I wanted I wanted the puzzle to make sense even you have to get lost but you have to know underneath it what's really going on so that you can emerge from it or bring people out of it in a way that it all is satisfying and it does make sense in the end to some degree and that's why I got hung up and then I did that terrible thing which is I put it in the drawer right to your point I put it in the drawer and I was like I just need a break”
2019-10-31 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #393: Edward Norton — On Creative Process, Creative Struggle, and Motherless Brooklyn · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“In fact, I've tracked it. There's a very specific scene where he's in the car with Faye Dunaway, where he finally narrates his read of what he thinks is going on. And there's only about 20 minutes left in the movie. And by the way, he's wrong. He thinks that what's going on is all about the water. And of course, it's about incest, right? You know what these films that it's not about comprehension, that getting lost in deep convolution is actually part of the point, which is an important point, which is that it's hard to know what's taking place around you. It literally existentially noir at its best is about how difficult it is to see where”
2019-10-31 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #393: Edward Norton — On Creative Process, Creative Struggle, and Motherless Brooklyn · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Absolutely. Important. Absolutely. Anybody who watches Chinatown and tells me. The first time that they have any idea what's going on until about 20 minutes before the end of the movie is lying. You have no idea what's going on in that movie. Zero.”
2019-10-31 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #393: Edward Norton — On Creative Process, Creative Struggle, and Motherless Brooklyn · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“This conversation, I probably started, actually not probably, I started actively writing it the summer of 2003 and I wrote like 60 or 70 pages of what became like 150 page script and they were good like they were good. They were the beginning of the movie as it is now and people really liked it. Like they were like this is really, really cool. And then I got horribly blocked. It wasn't like distractedness. I really. Had it framed out and I had the things, but I couldn't in my mind just sort of puzzle out. A compelling way to get lost in the murk but emerge from it. You know what I mean?”
2019-10-31 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #393: Edward Norton — On Creative Process, Creative Struggle, and Motherless Brooklyn · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Reds, Warren Beatty's great film about American socialists, you know, dances with wolves and unforgiven. He kept citing all these examples of Sometimes an actor is really right for a role. It's really in their wheelhouse and they've come up with a story and they just do it. They take that big swing and he was like, he kind of said to me like, Why wouldn't you do this? Like, why wouldn't you, this mashup is yours. You don't want to sit over someone's shoulder. And he just was like, you can do this. And I kind of did have that moment where I went. You know, why wouldn't I? I do love those films. They have meant a lot to me. Some of them were defining films for me. And it was sort of like. He urged me across the line into getting excited about just owning it.”
2019-10-31 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #393: Edward Norton — On Creative Process, Creative Struggle, and Motherless Brooklyn · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And once I was finished that, which took me a long time, like many, a number of years. Because I went through Writer's block and I got hung up on the plotting and I got distracted by other projects. But when I finally got it done, took a solid eight years, I would say, for me to get to where I was happy with it. Then I reached a point where Was in my own mind going to shop it around to directors that I admired, but someone did something good for me, a studio executive that I was friends with actually sat me down in a bar in New York. 12th Street and was like, dude, you need to direct this. And I was sort of like, oh, but the part is really challenging. And he literally said to me, look, think about the movies that we came up on that mattered to us. Do the right thing.”
2019-10-31 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #393: Edward Norton — On Creative Process, Creative Struggle, and Motherless Brooklyn · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“No, directing, I wanted to, like I said, I'm not really totally joking. I was kind of, it was a greedy actor impulse to grab a great role. I really thought this is a really memorable character and it's a great challenge. It's everything I love to try to take on. And it was like, I just want to play this part. Then I did, I was turned on by the challenge of adapting it. And then I ran into that went through this process that we've talked about. And when suddenly I kind of had this what was for me exciting idea about the mashup and I had Jonathan's hall pass to be that sort of freewheeling in it. I spent a lot of time then researching and working on how to make kind of a literary mashup Not between books, but really just of motherless Brooklyn, but conveying it into sort of a literary version of this history.”
2019-10-31 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #393: Edward Norton — On Creative Process, Creative Struggle, and Motherless Brooklyn · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Is a whole chapter on him too in the Burns documentary called New York. There's a big section which was, that was my first encounter with the story of Moses, was in the documentary in New York. But yeah, and he was titularly, he was the Parks Commissioner. But secretly, he was essentially Darth Vader of New York in the 20th century. He held an almost uncontested imperial power over New York City above any mayor, any governor. He ran New York City like an autocratic Caesar and made almost all of the significant decisions about how New York Evolved from being a 19th century city into being a modern city, the whole physical landscape of New York's transformation in that era was directed by him.”
2019-10-31 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #393: Edward Norton — On Creative Process, Creative Struggle, and Motherless Brooklyn · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Can take Jonathan's phenomenal detective and we can send him in a movie which has to be bigger, has to have bigger scope. We can send him into this, he can become the conveyance into this very dense and complex thing that I was also interested in. And suddenly I had this mashup, this idea of mashing up these two things.”
2019-10-31 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #393: Edward Norton — On Creative Process, Creative Struggle, and Motherless Brooklyn · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And I had always thought to myself, how do you approach that? How do you approach the density of what was going on? And I had sometimes thought it's kind of like the way that Chinatown is about stealing LA being built on stolen water. I always thought like what happened in New York under Robert Moses is sort of its own original sin, its dark history in the 20th century. But yeah, it's too dense though. It's all this urban planning stuff and blah, blah, blah. And I had this moment where I suddenly went, that's what Lionel can be the conveyance into. Lionel can...”
2019-10-31 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #393: Edward Norton — On Creative Process, Creative Struggle, and Motherless Brooklyn · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And somewhere, honestly, somewhere in flying around over Southern California kind of do things, I had this kind of clarity that like. That the way around what was feeling like a tone problem was just simply to set it in the 50s. And once that... Once that thing sort of settled in me and I knew Jonathan was okay with it, then something really interesting happened, which is something else that I had been chewing on for a long time totally unrelated to Motherless Brooklyn was my fascination with what happened in New York in the mid-50s, this kind of really dark part of New York's social history that I was really, really interested in and in one person in particular, this guy named Robert Moses.”
2019-10-31 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #393: Edward Norton — On Creative Process, Creative Struggle, and Motherless Brooklyn · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And let it be a 50s thing. And amazingly, Jonathan was like, I dig that idea. No, he really was. He wasn't like for one second. Think about that. You write a book. People say they love it. And then someone comes along and says, hey, what if we were to transform it, like literally set it in a different time and therefore have to come up with a different mystery plot? Because the book is about the Yakuza and the Japanese search and trade and Zendos and all these things that are highly contemporary, even though there's an old school feeling to the noir sort of vernacular of it. And he was like, I love it. You know, he's like, I love it. Let's treat him like Marlowe and send Lionel into another mystery. And he was like, I get it. I think it's a cool idea. And it's very, um...”
2019-10-31 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #393: Edward Norton — On Creative Process, Creative Struggle, and Motherless Brooklyn · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And I didn't want to do Motherless Brooklyn like the Blues Brothers. You know what I mean? I didn't, which is a great movie. That's just, you know, not what I thought It had within it. I wanted to play Lionel Strait and I wanted him to be a rich, complex, sometimes poignant and affecting. A human being whose loneliness is real, whose isolation is real alongside his humor and stuff. And if we played it ironically, that wasn't going to be there. And so I said to Jonathan, like, In the book, people call him freak show. Would people really even do that in 1999? What this feels like is maybe it let's set it in the hard-boiled world of the books you love, the films we love”
2019-10-31 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #393: Edward Norton — On Creative Process, Creative Struggle, and Motherless Brooklyn · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I think you got to deal with certain structural challenges in this. And one of them is that Motherless Brooklyn has a slightly surreal tone in the sense that it's about guys in the modern world who feel like they're living in a pocket of Brooklyn that has never moved from 1957. And they speak and act like almost like Raymond Chandler's gumshoe detectives. But if you slap that onto the screen and have guys in Fedora's talking that way with Priuses floating by, you have immediately put yourself in an ironic mode, right? You're essentially saying we're being tongue-in-cheek here. Nothing needs to be taken seriously. And if you go in that gear, then Lionel doesn't have to be taken seriously either. And his Tourette's is now a gag, not a complex person. It's a wink wink kind of a gag because the rest of the thing is a wink wink gag.”
2019-10-31 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #393: Edward Norton — On Creative Process, Creative Struggle, and Motherless Brooklyn · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“It's a really, really, really beautiful film. And it's based on, in theory, Isaac Dennison's memoirs out of Africa and Shadows on the grass. There's none of the narrative plot that's in the film is embedded within the book. Those are memoirs, the whole romance, the things. These are all suppositional. They springboarded from the essence of her sort of spiritual observations. Meditations on impermanence, and they created a story from whole cloth. And that's why it's a great film. They understood what the essence was and they turned it into a narrative and cinematic experience that's totally its own thing. And Jonathan Leitham not only loves films in his very Erudite, he really holds that belief that it's better to springboard and create something new unto itself. So when I said to him, like, look,”
2019-10-31 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #393: Edward Norton — On Creative Process, Creative Struggle, and Motherless Brooklyn · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Have to you can't think about, I think, faithful adaptations almost never work. If you're trying to literally transliterate the book into a verbatim as close to a verbatim thing, those are the worst film adaptations. The very best ones, I think, are literally like transposing a piano concerto for guitar. You have to just completely change the waveform of it. And my favorites are ones where, you know, like out of Africa, which is a film by a truly great director, Sidney Pollock, with one of the great performances by an actress ever. And it really holds up. It really, really holds up when you watch it, not only technically, but also thematically in terms of being a film about loss and the desire to hold on to things and possess them and coming to an acceptance of loss and impermanence.”
2019-10-31 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #393: Edward Norton — On Creative Process, Creative Struggle, and Motherless Brooklyn · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“No, sometimes I think people don't even realize the degree to which the sound mix and the music are make or break for a film. You can have a film that's cut the same film that won the Academy Award for Best Picture with a bad sound mix will seem like a piece of shit. Like it really is astonishing how important that layer of varnish is on the whole thing. You can't adapt a book into a film. A book is not a film. It's just not. It functions in the mind of the reader in a totally different way because you are activating imagery in your head in a much, much more surreal way than when you're receiving the sensory, you know, being encompassed by visual and sound in a film. And you have to, you”
2019-10-31 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #393: Edward Norton — On Creative Process, Creative Struggle, and Motherless Brooklyn · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Which there's very little margin for error if something goes wrong. And it sort of atomizes your distraction. Then you get yourself up into the sky and you're floating. And somehow that atomization sustains. I don't find myself stressing once I'm on autopilot and I'm floating along. I look down at the landscape going by. I think about it's real Daniel Kahneman thinking fast, thinking slow. Like once I'm up in the air and I'm kind of ahead of the plane, I get into a very slow gear and a very meditative gear just watching the landscape go by. And it's wonderful. It's like really, really, really wonderful for me. And I think... I get that surfing, I get that scuba diving It's amazing how quickly piloting kind of straightens you out, straightens your head out.”
2019-10-31 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #393: Edward Norton — On Creative Process, Creative Struggle, and Motherless Brooklyn · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So piloting is a great meditation for me. It absolutely eradicates everything but the present moment is very, very, very difficult to be out of the present moment. And there's a function in it that's really interesting, which is take off and landing in particular. I'm sure there's a metaphor in this somewhere, but taking off and landing are extremely, extremely focused things even for a modern airline pilot in a plane that basically flies itself, you are seriously on deck when you're taking off and landing that plane. And I think that experience is so intense, it's almost like this, it almost does what sometimes it takes me 45 minutes of meditation to get anywhere near, which is it obliterates, atomizes distraction, right? Because you must deal with that moment.”
2019-10-31 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #393: Edward Norton — On Creative Process, Creative Struggle, and Motherless Brooklyn · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Me, like, I get them. I think we talked about this the first time I did your show. I think we talked about the things that are meditative, that are not sitting with your legs crossed trying to clear your mind. You know what I mean?”
2019-10-31 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #393: Edward Norton — On Creative Process, Creative Struggle, and Motherless Brooklyn · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“But piloting was really good for me. It was really good to not take a break and just kind of like go on vacation or lounge around because I replaced the consumption in my work with the consumption in learning my brain piloting was like one of the hardest things I ever took on. It was like It honestly made the work I'd been doing feel kind of like play acting. It is. It is. It's like, oh, making up stories and playing dress up for a living or hurling myself into the sky by myself in a plane with ultimate consequences to screwing it up. You know what I mean? It's like. Creative risk and risk of botching a landing are not actually equivalent. You know what I mean? I've always found I get some of my best sort of”
2019-10-31 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #393: Edward Norton — On Creative Process, Creative Struggle, and Motherless Brooklyn · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Get a pilot's license. You know what I mean? And those were dreams I had too. I dreamed my whole life of getting my pilot's license and I was like, I've got the money now, I've got the time. What's my reason for not doing it? I don't have one. And then we get back to the voices in the head because Voices coming the head, voices of insecurity, voices of competitiveness, voices of Aspiration Ambition, maybe more than aspiration, like ambition to Ongoing plaudits, affirmation, applause, you know, like the hunger for achievement. They come in the head, and not to mention that there's the voices from outside, but really the truth is The ones that master you are the ones inside. They're the ones that are saying you need to get more of this. And I think it comes in.”
2019-10-31 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #393: Edward Norton — On Creative Process, Creative Struggle, and Motherless Brooklyn · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Had an awareness that my dad's happiness was often pegged to Bold shifts in the way he was spending his time. And I felt like I'm one of the luckiest people in the world because I get to do work or make a livelihood out of something that play for me. And the last thing I wanted to do when I kind of meditated on it was why do I want to turn this into a career? You know what I mean? Why would I turn this into? Something where it's exhausting me or it's What am I chasing? Like if I'm satiated or if I've just achieved the things I wanted to. What a waste it would be if I make myself a careerist coppertop. You know what I mean? And what a waste if I don't seize while I'm 30 years old on the freedom to The freedom that comes with this gig, the freedom to like,”
2019-10-31 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #393: Edward Norton — On Creative Process, Creative Struggle, and Motherless Brooklyn · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Am I going to play tanks or am I going to play, what was it, combat? It was called combat, right? Or are you going to play Pong or whatever? I've seen him have what I would call The pleasures of staying very feeling Challenged fresh, invigorated about what he was doing through phases of his adult life. And I kind of learned to view those changes as not as risky, but as like refreshing. You know what I mean? I saw even as a kid you absorb when your parent is turned on by what they're doing. I literally remember the new spring in his step, his enthusiasm, him being charged up. And I think as you get older and you have kids yourself, you... Forget almost how important it is, how much a child perceives about whether their parents are happy. You know what I mean? It sounds like the most obvious thing in the world.”
2019-10-31 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #393: Edward Norton — On Creative Process, Creative Struggle, and Motherless Brooklyn · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“It was a little bit, but I. I've had good examples in my life. My dad is an incredibly accomplished person. In multiple dimensions, he's a scholar and a marine veteran and a lawyer. He was a corporate litigator. He was a U.S. attorney. He was a federal prosecutor for Maryland. He was an environmental litigator. He was an environmental organization builder. He's worked at a private equity firm. It's like he's really... He's had a remarkably rich tapestry. In his career, there's a connectivity through all of it. There's an intellectual connectivity. There's a values mission driven kind of thread to everything he's done. But I've really watched my dad over the years. Very fearlessly pull the video game cartridge out and put another one in. He really has. You remember when we were kids and you had your Atari cartridges”
2019-10-31 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #393: Edward Norton — On Creative Process, Creative Struggle, and Motherless Brooklyn · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Were some issues with turning it into a film because it's this very interior monologue. The whole book is kind of this interior narration and it has a plot, but really it's like Lionel in his head.”
2019-10-31 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #393: Edward Norton — On Creative Process, Creative Struggle, and Motherless Brooklyn · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“It was sort of like, why run another five miles until it hurts? I feel good. What am I going to do? Do I want to just keep going until something goes badly? And I kind of got this moment of clarity where I was like, I need to take a break. I really want to take a substantial break. And in 2003, I just, I stopped working entirely. And I focused on getting my pilot's license. And I did that for like six or seven months, just trained did aviation training and got my pilot's license. And it was great. It really cleared my head. It emptied it out. And I sort of got to the end of that. And I thought, I'm ready to work on Motherless Brooklyn. So I had this nice sort of clean slate kind of feeling. And when I sat down to look at it again, I realized.”
2019-10-31 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #393: Edward Norton — On Creative Process, Creative Struggle, and Motherless Brooklyn · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Worked with amazing people. I worked with heroes of mine like Spike Lee. I did two films in a row with Phil Hoffman. And then we did plays next door to each other and we had come up together and that was really gratifying. And I kind of got to the end of that year and I felt. Something very rare for me, which is I sort of felt satiated. I actually felt like I spent the whole year working in a gear. that I'd wanted to work in for a long time and I felt like I'd run a marathon very successfully.”
2019-10-31 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #393: Edward Norton — On Creative Process, Creative Struggle, and Motherless Brooklyn · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I even started to sort of try to imagine the physicality of it and how do you take something that's an interior monologue in a book and reduce it down and select pieces of it and what are the best pieces of Lionel. And my brain was kind of cooking on that for years. When I got around to saying to myself, all right, actually, what happened was in about 2003, in 2002, sorry, I did a run of work. I did a big film, I did Red Dragon with a bunch of great actors, and then I did Spike Lee's, the 25th Hour And then I did a play in New York for the rest of the year. I did Lanford Wilson's Burn This. And it was such a, the whole, the year was an amazing year. It was a very notably vital and satisfying year of creative work for me.”
2019-10-31 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #393: Edward Norton — On Creative Process, Creative Struggle, and Motherless Brooklyn · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“When in phases and in some total, there's no question it's the most work I've ever put into a film. It's one of the deepest dives And longest climbs, whatever metaphor you want to use, I've worked on this one longer and deeper than any creative piece. I've worked on The initial hook, as I said, was character. I was then busy for a while. I had a lot of other projects that I knew were literally going to take me a couple years before I had the bandwidth to really seriously contemplate it. But much like as a function of what we're discussing, the brain works on things. You're busy doing other things, but I was noodling on it. It was rattling around in my head. I would reread the book. I would think about the character, even when I wasn't actively trying to write it.”
2019-10-31 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #393: Edward Norton — On Creative Process, Creative Struggle, and Motherless Brooklyn · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And you being a meditator, the noisy mind, right? It's like the noisy mind literally given name, given form, given voice. It's like, it's not just that we can't stop our thoughts. It's that we actually have a piece of our head that criticizes the actions that another part of our head is implementing. It's amazing. It's an amazing thing that we live with and that most people don't discuss as an openly or actively as a phenomenon.”
2019-10-31 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #393: Edward Norton — On Creative Process, Creative Struggle, and Motherless Brooklyn · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And that we kept in the film. It's one of the... It's one of the details of the book that's really marvelous where His condition The part of his head that has the lack of inhibition and the impulse control problems and literally fights his conscious self, fights the attempts to restrain it, and calls him Bailey. So it's such a schism that He yells, sometimes the voice in his head yells at him and names him Bailey. You think about the ways we talk in our head, like you think about the number of times that you've said quietly in your head. You're such a fucking idiot. Like, why, you know, think about the critical voice in your head aimed at yourself. It's literally right out of.”
2019-10-31 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #393: Edward Norton — On Creative Process, Creative Struggle, and Motherless Brooklyn · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Honestly, as an actor, I just was greedy. I was like, I want that gig. I want the part. No, I want to, because, not because it was like, oh, this is instantly showy. It was more, this is just hard. How would you do this? How do you? Presents all the mediest challenges for an actor. It's paradoxical, it's actually physically demanding, you have to see the humanity of the character underneath it, and it just was like, this would be a field day. I would really like to play the role.”
2019-10-31 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #393: Edward Norton — On Creative Process, Creative Struggle, and Motherless Brooklyn · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Obsessive, compulsive components of it, the vocalizations that he can't control, that are both hilarious and painful and awkward and make life difficult for him. We don't all have Tourette. But I think what Jonathan achieves is everybody sees themselves in it because we all are constantly in a conversation with our own minds. We all Rational center that deals with our behavior and our noisy voices that tell us to do things we know we don't want to do. You know, we all relate to being essentially in an argument with ourself and with the impulses that we wish we could control better. Sot's Is Tourette's becomes Becomes this sort of heat, and Lionel become a proxy for us and the difficulty we have navigating ourselves. And that just nailed me. It just like I was completely. Entranced by it and”
2019-10-31 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #393: Edward Norton — On Creative Process, Creative Struggle, and Motherless Brooklyn · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Mind at the center of the story when he describes this chaotic condition that he has that he has to spend his life navigating. Jonathan Leatham, he pulls off the thing that we all try to do in books, in art, in music, which is the end of page one, you're emotionally bought in, you're hooked, you relate to this character, you feel for him, you have empathy, but you're laughing. You're sympathetic, you're impressed. It's just like he does, it's a zero to 60 emotional buy-in that's very, very rare. Relate in the most reductive sense. And then from there it becomes this study of the mind and how it works. And the fact that his condition is extreme, that he has the physical twitches of Tourette's, the mental...”
2019-10-31 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #393: Edward Norton — On Creative Process, Creative Struggle, and Motherless Brooklyn · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“When I really think about why it grabbed me so much, it's very similar to the experience I had reading Ketcher in the Rye for the first time. Lionel, the character in Motherless Brooklyn, has many of the same emotional hooks that I think Holden Caulfield does. By the end of page one, you're on his side. You're sort of, because he's narrating his own story to you, because from the first sentence, he's telling you, this is how my head works. And you can hear the calm rational.”
2019-10-31 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #393: Edward Norton — On Creative Process, Creative Struggle, and Motherless Brooklyn · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT