Edward Norton
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.Collection: Motivational
Look, you've got a generation of people coming along who are going to form their own new relationship with the idea of supporting the causes that they care about or changing the world. And these people are not going to do it the way our parents do it.Collection: Relationship
Duality is not a story. Duality is just a complexity.
I don't smoke and I don't want to smoke. I am not a fan of gratuitous smoking in films.
Life, like poker has an element of risk. It shouldn't be avoided. It should be faced.
I don't have anything to prove to anybody, which is a lovely place to be.
Instead of telling the world what you're eating for breakfast, you can use social networking to do something that's meaningful.
The more you can create that magic bubble, that suspension of disbelief, for a while, the better.
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.
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.
You can't control everything that comes to you.
If I ever have to stop taking the subway, I'm gonna have a heart attack.
It's better for people to miss you than to have seen too much of you.
It's dismaying to see the unilateralism that the government is doing.
I almost forgot what it's like to be proud of my government.
I always felt that acting was an escape, like having the secret key to every door and permission to go into any realm and soak it up. I enjoy that free pass.
I never think that a film should answer questions for you. I think it should make you ask a lot of questions.
Just because you've made a couple movies, you've done some good movies, you've been nominated for some Academy Awards, whatever, nobody's entitled. It's a business. If they don't see it, I can think they're wrong, but I'm not entitled to a $15 million budget to make a film.
You never make all things for all people and can't always pander to the broadest denominator. I keep an eye toward doing the themes that interest me. Do they move me? Interest me? Make me think? When I run across something that is provocative in an unsettling way, it appeals to me.
Anybody who is running a marathon or doing a walkathon, doing a fundraiser for their school, their company, by far it's guaranteed the easiest and most fun way to quickly set up a fundraising campaign and send it around to your friends and family.
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.
The film industry needs to confront the physical footprint of the way films get made.
Fame is very corrosive and you have to guard very strictly against it.
I do find myself drawn more to pieces that I feel are wrestling with the way that we're living now, what we're all going through.
People wrestle sometimes making movies, and I think that conflict is a very essential thing. I think a lot of very happy productions have produced a lot of very banal movies.
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.
When you're working on a creative thing, everyone has an idea, and they're pushing it. The first time you work with anybody, you have to get comfortable with the way another person pushes hard for what they want.
I have this embedded faith in the process through which films of a certain type get discovered on longer timelines.
Most of the films that I've ever really responded to are ones that I feel were really involved in their times.
I think we really feel like Crowdrise could be something that, 20 years from now, people take for granted because that's just how you do it, like if you're going to raise money for something, that's how you do it.
I get heartbroken flying into L.A. It's just this feeling of unspecific loss. Can you imagine what the San Fernando Valley was when it was all wheat fields? Can you imagine what John Steinbeck saw?
My generation is having its midlife crisis in its 20s.
I'm fascinated by the ways in which people express themselves, because their responses are often counter to what they're actually feeling. Like when they're frightened, they tend to freeze. When they're angry, it doesn't always come out as volume. There are wonderful contradictions in the way that people express their emotions.
I like it when the deeper you go with the character, the more you see the layers start to peel away.
When I'm the one who sits down and looks at the blank page and writes it out all the way, then I'll call it my script.
You know, independent films have been institutionalized, practically. Every studio has got a boutique arthouse label.
I like making movies for myself and my friends and people with my sensibility.
I grew up on the golden age of children's TV.
I tend to have a kind of tunnel vision when I'm looking at an individual piece.
No, I'm not a very methodologically pure actor.
I'm a New Yorker, you know.
If I'm trying to put size on for a role, then I don't do much running.
You always end up getting involved in things because of, you know, the strange things your life brings you into contact with.
Basically, I think 21st century conservation is moving toward preserving ecosystems by dealing with the needs of people.
The best films of any kind, narrative or documentary, provoke questions.
Everyone keeps saying the western's dead, but it's not.
The period western doesn't have a lot to say to most people today.
I read a lot of scripts and so many are clearly a knockoff of one familiar genre or another.
In drama, I think, the audience is a willing participant. It's suspending a certain kind of disbelief to try to get something out of a story.
It's a dream to be in a company of actors.