Keeping His Faith
Edward Norton: The CrankyCritic.com Interview by Paul Fischer

It's hard to imagine that one of the most intense young actors working in films today, could choose, as his first directing gig, a romantic comedy about a priest and a rabbi in love with the same girl. Or as Norton himself put it "The most expensive priest/rabbi joke in history." But sitting relaxed at the end of a day promoting his movie Keeping the Faith, Norton, too, is surprised at how things came to pass. "I wouldn't have necessarily, a year or two, said, that if I went to do this, then I would do this sort of a film," he says laconically. "Sometimes I even look at it and turn to my friend Stuart [Blumberg, who wrote it] and say: Can you believe we did this movie?" But that's what 'we' did, yet not in a calculated fashion,

Norton goes on to explain. "It wasn't a career assessment of: OK, now I'm going to direct a movie, what kind of a movie do I want to direct? The motivations had more to do with the fact that one of my best friends wrote it, we'd been collaborating on things since we were 18 and he's always been one of those people whom I could bounce things off, on a creative level." On this script, Norton feverishly explains, "We started off with our same old thing and just spend a year rewriting this script." Lots of people wanted the script, which Norton was set just to help produce, until ultimately, the actor was persuaded to direct it. "It seemed to have come organically out of this long process of working on one of the many things we'd been working on."

Keeping the Faith revolves around Priest Brian Finn (Norton) and rabbi Jacob Schram (Ben Stiller), who have known each other since childhood. When Anna Reilly (Jenna Elfman), whom they both knew as children, returns to New York, both men find themselves infatuated with her, sparking both rivalry and personal dilemmas: Brian has taken a vow of celibacy, and Jacob is allowed to marry only within his faith. Though known as one of film's more exciting actors, Norton always knew that there was a director lurking in the shadows. "I had an impulse to do that for a long time." But while known for his intellectual approaches to his craft, it's interesting that he should select this "$30m rabbi/priest joke" to direct. "While the script was very funny, it also had within it just enough of this substance of discussion of: People wrestling with faith, commitment and just the experience of having assumptions about yourself that get rattled. I admired the balance of it because it dealt with real things without getting too heavy." Norton adds that the film deals with "religion in a real way, didn't avoid God or these guys' relationships with faith, without being bogged down in it or becoming ponderous."

Norton has had an impressive career in so short a time. Following his extraordinary debut in Primal Fear, Norton's penchant for playing roles as distinctive as those that came before, and with directors with whom most actors only dream of working, from Milos Foreman (The People vs. Larry Flynt) to Woody Allen (Everybody Says I Love You) and David Fincher (Fight Club). He couldn't have asked for better tutelage as a would-be director. His mentor remains Foreman, who turns up as an actor in Keeping the Faith. "I've learned an enormous amount from him, just because he's a friend and mentor. The first real tutelage I had was sitting through the cutting of Larry Flynt with him, and there are things in my film that are certainly very Milos inflected." He also learned a lot from Woody Allen, but despite Faith's comedic tone, Norton denies that his film is Allenesque. "I think the characters in our film are the antithesis of the kinds of neurotic and over-analytical characters that epitomise Woody's work. If anything, our characters are overconfident in their sense of confidence about who they are, and in that sense it's a much more classically screwball kind of convention."

Norton, who has often been compared to a latter day De Niro, relishes the idea of being unpredictable. In this film, as both actor and director, he plays a priest in a film that is both hilarious and profound. "It's fun for me to switch like that. Filmmaking is an arduous process, so it has to be something that's new and different to hold my interest."

What is not of interest to Norton is fame or anything connected to it. He won't discuss - or come close to discussing - his private life, and try to ask him about his position as a celebrity and its pitfalls, and it's not easy to get a straight answer from this enigmatic performer. "I think it's true that these days we pay a ridiculous level of attention to our entertainers, because it's become this kind of poor man's mythology. That makes me believe that movies aren't a frivolous enterprise, in that people do still need to get together in front of some lit thing, like the old campfire, and look at stories. It's our self-analysis, how we feel connected and that's all good. But the result is, that is our most potent kind of collective storytelling, but unfortunately, through the people who are doing it, it's gotten out of control." So the solution, Norton argues, "is to set certain boundaries and I think you can do that in a positive way, without using the finger to get people out of your face. I feel very comfortable with the balance that I've been able to strike." He continues that in press interviews, "there's plenty to talk about without talking about the other stuff."