Related movies

• American History X
• Down in the Valley
• Fight Club
• Unforgiven

Related people

• Sam Shepard
• Edward Norton
• David Jacobson

Edward Norton Q&A

Mark Salisbury catches up with the star of 'Down in the Valley'.

May 26 2006

Edward Norton's latest film, 'Down in the Valley', about a disturbed LA man who thinks he's a cowboy, represents a labour of love for the star of 'Fight Club' and 'American History X': as well as acting and producing, he collaborated on the script and even editing with writer director David Jacobson.

What drew you to the project in the first place?

I remember reading it the first time and it was strange, much more strange and surreal than it is now. I hit the end and got an emotional strike off it, and felt that [David] had such a compassion for these lost people. And I thought this idea of what would happen if you tried to play out western themes in the west as it is today, not the west of our imagination or of movie myth or of the period west, was really compelling.

How did you work together on the script?

When I sat down with him I asked what had interested him about it. He said he was really interested in this landscape of bankruptcy: no aesthetics, no culture, no spiritual anchoring and no family. Where do kids get any sense of their identity? David grew up [in the San Fernando Valley] and felt that very strongly. He said, 'I'm really interested in the way fantasy can be an incredibly creative act – it can even propel you out of a bad place into a good place, but if it just crosses this one little tangible boundary it can become lies and become incredibly destructive.' The more we talked the more I kept saying to him, 'You've got more than that here, I think you have to confront that the people in your script are the products of a place and you're avoiding the place in some ways.' It's called 'Down in the Valley' and needs to be about the west as we recognise it and these people need to be bent by a place that people of our age will recognise.

One of the reasons I liked the film was because I had no idea where it was going from one minute to the next.

I felt that too and that's really rare for me reading a script because they are so fucking predictable. So many movies are predictable too and deliver themselves neatly concluded. It's very rare that people have the courage [to do something different] because the truth is, audiences don't like it. Even critics, they say they want unpredictable experiences, but the truth is they recoil from them often when they get them, at least initially. The idea of making the film filled me with a nervousness, and that's kind of an interesting place to work from.

Your character, Harlan, remains something of an enigma. You hint at his background, but never offer any real explanation for his actions.

I always felt that was part of what was compelling about Harlan; he's this grand mystery in a way. We filmed some things that explained him much more, but when we showed it to people in that form, the guy who founded the theatre company I'm in hit it right on the head. He said, 'I don't want him martyred, I don't want him rationalised. The stranger he becomes the more hypnotised I am by it.' And I thought that was just very true. The next day David and I cut all this stuff out.

Do you think that this film, along with 'Three Burials' and 'Brokeback Mountain', represents resurgence in the western?

Everyone keeps saying the western's dead, but it's not. [But] if it's going to be vital, it's going to have to be re-imagined as something that's commenting on a world that people are recognising as something they can see themselves in. The period western doesn't have a lot to say to most people today. There was that interesting phase with 'Unforgiven' where you started having the first revisionist westerns, people looking at the old west, saying, 'Maybe the old west wasn't what we thought it was.' Maybe now, if it's going to stay interesting, it's people saying, 'We're not going to look at the old west at all any more, we're going to look at the west as it is.' [The person] who really started doing this before anybody was Sam Shepard. There's one thing we put in this – the cowboy roping the chair in the motel room – that is straight out of [Shepard's play] 'Fool for Love'.

'Down in the Valley' is out today.