E-mail a friendEdward Norton
airdate October 30, 2009
Edward Norton is one of Hollywood's most sought after commodities. With two Oscar nods before age 30, his acting credits include Fight Club and Keeping the Faith—his directorial debut. He also produced the HBO documentary By the People. Although interested in acting early, the Yale grad worked in Japan for his grandfather's company before beginning his show business career. Norton supports numerous causes, including the Maasai Wilderness Conservation Trust and programs that improve the quality of life in low-income communities.
Actor-producer describes the takeaway from his documentary for President Obama and his advisors. (1:50)
Full Interview (13:00)
Edward Norton
Tavis: Pleased to welcome Ed Norton back to this program. The two-time Oscar nominee has moved behind the camera for his latest project, a much-anticipated documentary about Barack Obama's ascendancy to the White House. The film is called By the People, the election of Barack Obama. It makes its debut on HBO November 3. Here now some scenes from Ed Norton's By the People.
[Clip]
Tavis: Mr. Norton, glad to have you back on the program.
Edward Norton: Great to see you, Tavis.
Tavis: Good to see you again. First of all, I'm laughing because I'm thinking shouldn't you be training for (laughter). Why are you out promoting a film when you're about to run a marathon (laughter)?
Norton: Exactly. You know, I either wake up early or get in my miles before dinner, right?
Tavis: Yeah. So you're running in the New York Marathon?
Norton: New York Marathon on November 1, yes.
Tavis: First time?
Norton: First time. I've done a few.
Tavis: I've done a few. I've done and completed, I might add. Don't ask my times. We're not gonna talk about that, but I've completed three of them. I did the L.A. Marathon three times, so I've done that before.
Norton: Wow.
Tavis: Thank you. Why you doing this one?
Norton: I'm actually doing this one for an environmental cause, an organization that works on African conservation issues and community development issues that I've been involved with for many, many years and I'm on the board of. We decided, instead of doing sort of dinner party fundraisers this year, that we were gonna do something that engaged the people we work with in Kenya more directly.
Since Kenyans are great runners, we decided to form a team, a charitable organization team, for the New York Marathon. So the organization is called the Maasai Wilderness Conservation Trust and we work with Maasai in the Maasai tribal areas on conservation and development issues. Three of the Maasai warriors from the community we work in are coming over to run the marathon with me, yeah.
Tavis: Now there's Kenyan time and there's American time (laughter).
Norton: Yeah (laughter).
Tavis: If you run this marathon in Kenyan time, I'm gonna be very impressed.
Norton: And if the Kenyans run on American time, they won't open their mouths or sweat or anything. It'll be like a stroll, yeah. They'll call it the New York Strollathon.
Tavis: (Laughter) Yeah. Those Kenyans can move. Well, congratulations in advance.
Norton: Thank you. Well, like you, I'm looking to finish with honor. That's what I call it.
Tavis: I didn't say I finished with honor. I just said I finished. I said nothing about with honor (laughter). I just said I finished, yeah.
Norton: Well, we're doing it to raise support and, if your viewers are interested in tuning in, we have a site called www.maasaimarathon.com and you can sponsor our team and we're excited to build kind of a wide community of sports.
Tavis: I learned the hard way that, if you're gonna do this once, much less two or three times, you might as well do it for a worthy cause. You're gonna punish yourself, so you might as well do something good by your -
Norton: - it's very much my motivation at this point. When my shins feel like a sledgehammer has taken to them, I'm thinking about the many people who are kicking in their support and that's what will keep me going.
Tavis: Well, congrats in advance on that.
Norton: Thank you.
Tavis: Back to this documentary. I've been dying to ask you one question above all else. When you signed on to be a producer for this documentary, what was in your head? We all know now what became of this campaign, the historic nature of it, et cetera, et cetera, but nobody knew that necessarily when he first announced he was going to run. So what was in your head when you signed on to do this? What did you think you were going to get?
Norton: Well, I want to give full credit to our directors, these two women who approached my company with this idea before Senator Obama was a candidate really just saying, you know, this guy represents our generation more than our parents' generation. He's the first, you could say, from our generation that has taken the national stage in a very dynamic way.
What they really proposed initially was a long-term almost like political journal following his experiences as he entered the Senate. So they actually proposed it to us in 2005 and I approached then Senator Obama in the early spring of 2006 about the idea of just chronicling over a long period of time his whole first term in the Senate, his experiences, how his encounter with the realities of politics and government ran up against his ideals and aspirations.
He was very receptive to it, as was Robert Gibbs who was his Press Secretary then at the time. That's how we embarked on it. We embarked on it really with no thought that it would be a film about a campaign or a candidate.
Tavis: So your timing could not have been propitious.
Norton: We really caught lightning in a bottle in that sense. The interesting thing is that Amy Rice and Alicia Sams began filming that spring, went to Kenya with him that summer on that trip, and they caught an inkling that the candidacy was being seriously considered late that summer and came back to us and said, "We think this is gonna happen now and we're afraid that, when it does, our access which had become very comfortable and familiar at that time would be cut off."
So I spoke with Barack again in the fall and said, "Listen. You know, understandably anyone who starts to advise you about this will insist that you stop what you're doing with us." I said, "I implore you to consider what an opportunity it will be to be inside your candidacy, how much your candidacy will put a prism on the country, reveal so much about where we are in so many ways."
I said, "Look at it as a document for posterity, not to affect the campaign, not to exploit it in any way, but let us continue." Amazingly, he did. He really personally stood up for the idea when many of his advisers said, "We don't think this is a good idea" and he defended it in a very personal way for us.
Tavis: Having said that, though, did you get pushed back when things got a little tricky during the campaign? There are any number of times I can -
Norton: - absolutely. You know, we were not making a film for the campaign. We were not advocates for his campaign. We were trying to make a true documentary. We were trying to document the experiences of him, his senior advisers and also the rank and file of the people who made this happen, the movement, in some sense, and chronicle their experiences as these things occurred.
So we weren't on their team and we knew that meant that, at times, we were gonna have to continue to plead our case for a special kind of access. We formed very good relationships with Robert Gibbs and Davis Axelrod and David Plouffe, but, yes, absolutely. Many, many times I'd say, "If I had a role as a producer, consistently it was to call and keep asking them to allow us to keep the cameras as close inside the process as possible."
Tavis: As you look back on this project now, and I'm sure there's a long answer to this question, but the short answer is what to what you saw uniquely from your perspective?
Norton: Well, you know, our filmmakers were the ones out there day to day, month after month, with the campaign. You know, I was really working sort of doing what a producer does, trying to make things easier for them -
Tavis: - begging (laughter).
Norton: Raise money, begging for access, all those things. But I think for me the thing that, when I look at the film, I'm happiest about is that I feel that, you know, people will assess his presidency as a separate assessment of history, but the achievement of his election will never be diminished as an achievement.
It was a moment of global political significance and I think, when I watch the film, I feel that what Amy and Alicia achieved with this documentary is they gave you a window inside how that actually took place, how that history actually came to pass and how it was experienced by Obama and his own team.
You know, when you set out to make documentary in some sense, that's what you hope you'll get the chance to do is chronicle something important that happened that gives us a piece of our own history.
Tavis: There's a scene in the movie that basically says this to me and I think will probably say it to those who will get a chance to see it on HBO. I know this because I've been in campaigns before, but it's fascinating to hear a candidate say that he or she, while they're making this history, don't have any time really to assess it in the moment.
Norton: I know exactly the moment you're talking about. It's a throwaway moment, but it's a great moment when one of the two filmmakers, Alicia, says to him, "Have you had time to think about what's happening to you?" He just says, "No, but I will." I got chills at that moment.
Tavis: I raise that only because I suspect that, while you were not on his team, so to speak, you were not doing this for the campaign, I suspect in some way this will be reflection time for him, for his family and the entire campaign to look back on what actually happened.
Norton: You know, we showed it to President-Elect Obama and Michelle and Axelrod and Plouffe and all those guys that now the country's familiar with before the inauguration. They said exactly that. All of them said that it was incredible to be able to actually pause and look back at it because, in the moment that it was happening, each victory or new step or the demands of the next moment were so intense that they never had time to pause and look back.
I think in some ways, I hope that that's echoed in the way that all of us at large - it did happen. When it happened, you know, it surged forward and now here we are dealing with healthcare and Afghanistan and all of that. There's value sometimes, I think, in looking back on things that you haven't had time to be reflective about.
Tavis: Finally then, what do you expect, or put another way, a word that is thrown around a few times in this film, hope. What do you expect or what do you hope the viewer will take from the process of seeing this?
Norton: I'm always very careful, even when I make dramatic films, I really believe this and I think I learned it from people like Spike Lee, who we talked about one time. I really think that my favorite kind of filmmaking poses questions to people rather than dictates to them what they take away from it.
I think the great thing about a film like this, what the achievement of what our filmmakers have done, I think, is that they met people who will have very different reactions to this, I think. I think some people will, you know, look at it in light of how they feel about how his presidency is going; they'll look at it and remember the emotion they had when we came through it.
People will take away many, many personal responses to it, but I feel pretty confident that down the road what people will take away from it is that it's an absolutely unprecedented amount of access to an actual candidate as he went through the experience. I don't think there's ever been a film made about a presidential candidate that is so intimate with him and his senior staff.
Tavis: I think in that regard then, what you really have here is again not just a documentary, but to your earlier point, this is posterity for the campaign, obviously.
Norton: Absolutely, yeah.
Tavis: But I think, years from now, there'll be a lot of people who are gonna be studying this piece as they try to reflect on what happened in the year 2000.
Norton: On how we came to this moment. You know, there have been great political films about campaigns, but very few of them detailed a candidate as he went through his debate prep or at home with his family or reflecting on the campaign as he's going through it. It was very unprecedented in that sense.
Tavis: Well, thanks to you and the two sisters who did it. Glad to have you on the program, Edward.
Norton: Thank you very much.
Tavis: The new film, By the People, will premier on HBO on November 3, as if you need my encouragement. I'm sure we'll all be checking this out to see what happened behind the scenes as his campaign was underway.
Back to October 30, 2009