In Stone, Norton stars as Gerald 'Stone' Creeson, a convicted killer who covered up the murder of his grandparents with a fire. Stone is eligible for an early parole but he has to convince parole officer Jack Mabry (Robert De Niro) that he's reformed.
At the 2010 Fantastic Fest, Norton sat down with a group of reporters to discuss portraying this convict and how he got into the role of a prisoner once again.
On Donning Cornrows and Cursing:
Edward Norton: "John Curran and I both sort of looked at each other. We were on the fence about many aspects of the character, but then I met a couple of guys in this prison north of Detroit. I was really having a hard time figuring out what I felt the specifics of Stone should be. I really got John’s kind of themes and his sense of these characters criss-crossing each other on their path in a way, but I didn’t know what we were channeling it through in terms of the character. Less than a week before we started, I happened to meet a guy who I was so hypnotized by him that I had John come over and meet him, and then we walked out and John was like, 'If you can get anything like that, that would be amazing.'"
"I got kind of guided. I ended up mining a couple of people in particular, but that look and the voice and everything were one guy in particular. John and I definitely, we looked at each other and kind of were like, 'This is either going to really work or it’s going to really not work.' It was a big swing in some ways but I don't think it’s me per se, but I do think the character, the thing about him is that superficially he looks and seems in his energy to be really not a strong candidate for a spiritual transformation. But the thing that anchors it is that the things he’s saying are really at odds with that sort of presentation that you could laugh at or you could dismiss, mainly because his anxiety is so real. I think the way you can take something that seems a little bit audacious and ground it is if you invest, if you’re not being condescending to the character. If you’re saying his anxiety is really real, his desperation is really real and his conviction that he deserves to be listened to and he deserves to be reconsidered is real, then you’re going to have to look at him from different angles and he’s going to be hard to reduce. I hope that’s part of it in a way."
On What He Learned Through His Research on Prisons:
Edward Norton: "Primal Fear, what I looked at much more frankly was people who are faking things. There were some really notable cases of people who faked multiple personality disorder as a way of getting off on insanity pleas, and there were great tapes of them. Stone is much more about, I think, the idea of imprisonment. The best thing that came out of getting in to talk to these guys was a sense of how they viewed the process of getting judged by other people."
"Apart from that, their language is fantastic. I would say 60% of the lines of Stone we changed based on the ways these guys articulate. They would go through the script with us and we would literally say, 'How would you say that? How would you say that? How would you say that?' Day after day after day, they were just like not only things that were in the script but things that weren’t. At one point, one of these guys was telling me about a fight and how he had to just let it happen and not fight. He said, 'I’m three months out from review. I can’t get a ticket. I can’t get anything. When you’re short time, you have to be a vegetarian.' I said, 'What?' He said, 'Vegetarian, you can’t have beef with nobody.' I was like, 'Oh my God, that’s funny.' There were so many things like that."
Is His Character in Stone Running a Con?
Edward Norton: "Well, I think was or wasn’t he - I think John pitches it in the gray area very purposefully, I think. It’s funny, we’ve had people say very different things to us about what they feel about that which is, I think, pretty much where John was hoping to put it. I have my own thoughts on it but I think John as a director, he’s so intentional in putting things in the gray area and he’s so committed, I think, to the idea of a film that leaves you with all kinds of hovering questions about the nature of spiritual life, how revelation comes to you, how epiphany comes to you and whether things can coexist. As Stone kind of says, has he actually gotten to a place where he’s going to be peaceful whether he’s in or out?"
"I’ve been trying not to put a defined answer on it just because I really respect that. I’ve come to recognize a common quality in many directors that I’ve worked with and whose films I like as a fan is the ones who leave some real ambiguity in the end of a film."
"When we put Fight Club out, we sure had a lot of people telling us, we’ve gotten papers from divinity students telling us what the end of Fight Club meant and they were ideas that we never thought of. I think to me, with a film like this, if you’ve done it well what people end up doing is projecting a lot of themselves into the film and their own issues and their own things. At that point, you’re starting to achieve something really interesting where in many ways people are working out their own sh*t through it. and I’d say that’s a hallmark of some of my favorite films."
"An easy example for me, I remember seeing Spike Lee’s film Do the Right Thing, which was in many ways much, much more incendiary than this film even, but I remember the violence at the end of that film and then he ended up putting up the Martin Luther King quote and the Malcolm X quote and then fades out. I remember literally going, 'But? How? Oh my God. Oh my God, how do I… what?' People were having furious debates about the end of that film and everything. When I look back on it, I think that was probably one of the most thought-provoking films about race at that time that had ever been made."
"I kind of think John said in the beginning when he did this, there were things I didn’t get about it at first and he said, 'Look, I want to put the movie in Detroit.' When the economy tanked, he got really urgent about this film. He said, 'I think that Bob De Niro’s character in this film, there’s many things about people in American life today that I think a lot of people, whether they know it or not, are in this place where we’ve built up these constructs of who we are and we’re telling other people what to do and we’re judging other people on many levels but we’ve got a lot of self-reflection. ' I started calling it our economic downturn film because I liked that John wanted to move quickly and noodle around in those kind of themes. It seemed timely."
On Reuniting with Robert De Niro:
Edward Norton: "I really enjoyed working with him before. I can’t say that we had a really good time on the other one. When you grow up watching his films and think how spectacular it would be if you ever got the chance to take on something heavy with him, I can’t say The Score was that film but I did it anyway just because I wanted to do it. This was, as soon as I got into this, I was like, 'This will be much closer to that hoped for experience with him.'"
"I’ve known him a long time. He engaged with this in a way that, as soon as we started rehearsing, I started thinking, 'Wow, he is going at this.' He was going at it like thick with notebooks and really talking about it. To me, it was very thrilling. Also because it felt like he’s hit a point in his life where his interest in investigating things that are really new territory for him was very real. I thought that was very exciting. There are things he did in this film, not in the scenes with me, that I just thought were tremendous."
On His Career and Getting the Parts He Wants to Play:
Edward Norton: "I need to be less busy, not more busy so I don’t find myself... I kind of think things come toward you that, if you’re lucky, some things come that really are well suited, that come to you for a reason. Some things I guess you have to hustle after, but I kind of feel like if there’s something you feel like you’re not expressing, you’ve got to maybe try to engineer that yourself on some level. But I have nothing to complain about, really."
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Stone hits theaters in limited release on October 8, 2010.
