Edward Norton Character Quotations

All people are paradoxical. No one is easily reducible, so I like characters who have contradictory impulses or shades of ambiguity. It's fun, and it's fun because it's hard.

I like it when the deeper you go with the character, the more you see the layers start to peel away.

Every little thing that people know about you as a person impedes your ability to achieve that kind of terrific suspension of disbelief that happens when an audience goes with an actor and character he's playing.

Well, I don't feel that I've played so many bad guys, and I'm rot really drawn to villains per se. I think a lot of people relate to some of my characters' inner struggles.

I tend to relate to a character in terms of the arc: what's interesting is where he starts versus where he ends up.

There's a lot of romanticisation of the intuitive actor and method acting and all kinds of notions about getting inside a character and coming out from there.

Remarkably, there's no green screen in 'Leaves of Grass' movie. There is motion control. Technically, there were all sorts of challenges, but really the soul of it is Edward Norton talent. You write these characters when you write a movie, and all you can hope for or depend on is that your actors will elevate the material.

The deeper you go with the character, the more you see the layers start to peel away. It's more challenging to me, but it's also just interesting. Those are the things I like to watch. I like to watch the evolutions of something.

I start to get fixated on a story and a character and an idea, and at a certain point, I really want to do it. It's a compulsion to explore a specific thing, as opposed to a compulsion to direct, generally speaking.

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.

If Nick Broomfield never found anyone with affection for Courtney Love, it's only because he conspicuously avoided the countless friends, colleagues and fans who appreciate her talent and admire her as a person. But then, why would Broomfield have opened up his film to those of us who work with Courtney and are close to her when there are so many bitter left - behinds and desperate attention - seekers eager to validate his attack on her character? Inquisitors in every age, scared of forceful women, have used all kinds of half - baked testimony to whip up chants of 'Burn the witch!'

What we set out to do with this movie [Leaves of Grass] was to create something that was funny and serious and had large tonal ambitions. A movie that could be poignant and funny, and suddenly quite violent. To have a character utterly sideswiped, and to learn that life is about balance.

A lot of people ask, "What do you pull on in your own life from your character?" In all honesty, it's not something that really works that way for me. I tend to look at these things as an imaginative process and a challenge of imagination and empathy, to some degree. I get much more out of meeting people who have lived these lives than I do digging around in my own limited experiences.

I think it's pretty unequivocal, this character does not get off the hook for his actions on any level.