A lot of what we still struggle with in New York and a lot of what we are seeing in the political landscape today was taking place in a very subversive way back then. I felt like that was the period when a lot of enormous institutional corruption and racism essentially baked itself into the fabric of modern New York permanently. The second big part of the impulse was that I have always wanted to look at what happened in New York in the mid-’50s. I didn’t want it to be ironic and he agreed with that. I told him that I think that film is very literal and that if we try to make a film about the ’90s in Brooklyn with guys acting like ’50s gumshoes, it will feel ironic. One part of the impulse was simply that Jonathan’s characters are written in a very 1950s hardboiled detective style. The novel is set in 1999, but your version is set in the ’50s. I think I said to them, “I may put this on the shelf for a bit but I will get to it eventually.” … Toby Emmerich has to get some kind of award for patience and support of an artist for the years in which he continued to coax me and draw it out of me. I was heading into Fight Club and I knew that was going to take a year or more, and I had another film I wanted to direct. I said to them at the time it wasn’t something that I was going to jump on right away. Those guys helped me acquire the rights to it. They said, “What do you want to work on next?” and I said I read this book and I would love to take a crack at it.
When did you acquire the rights and start work on this film?Īt the time I had just gotten off of making American History X at New Line. 10, 11 and 15.Ĭannes: Alicia Vikander on Henry VIII Film 'Firebrand' and Being a "Huge Jason Bourne Fan" Her character, given the socioeconomic realities of the era, allowed Norton to examine how “a lot of enormous institutional corruption and racism essentially baked itself into the fabric of modern New York permanently.” The film, which Warner Bros. He’s aided in the endeavor by Gugu Mbatha-Raw, who co-stars as a young black lawyer.
The plot sees Norton running afoul of a powerful New York political figure (Alec Baldwin) while attempting to solve the murder of his mentor (Bruce Willis). The result is a period drama - made for a lean $26 million - with all the trappings of a classic noir. Thus began a 20-year effort to bring Lethem’s book to the big screen, thanks in part to Norton’s desire, as both writer and director on the project, to transpose the novel from 1990s era New York to the 1950s. When Edward Norton read Jonathan Lethem’s book Motherless Brooklynin 1999, he says he was “immediately struck” by the protagonist, Lionel Essrog, a detective with Tourette’s syndrome.
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