He has a bigger picture in mind

Edward Norton is eating a burrito. It seems more a pastime that would have better suited Ed Norton, as he was known before he became famous. Unlike some of his contemporaries, Edward does not use a faux-familiar nickname like Tom, Brad, Matt or Ben; he’s made it clear that he’s not the guy who would ever end up in a Tiger Beat poster or deemed by People magazine the sexiest man alive.

You can even hear the Hollywood cognoscenti struggle with the all-too-human impulse to chuck the formality of his moniker and just call him Ed. But one fears, sitting across from Norton, clothed in a casual black shirt and jeans hanging off his frame, that such familiarity might be taken as reductio ad absurdum, an unwanted winnowing down of his persona. It’s hard to imagine Edward Norton deigning to share his name with a talking horse.

Since he burst on the scene eight years ago with twin Oscar nominations for his film debut “Primal Fear” and then for “American History X,” Norton, a onetime upper-middle-class kid from Columbia, Md., has been posited in public-relations speak as the Gen-Y actor’s actor, the inheritor of the great acting mantle worn by such luminaries as Robert De Niro and Dustin Hoffman. In person, the 33-year-old looks like an elongated choirboy, with a round face, weak chin, watery blue eyes and a lean body that stretches out like Gumby. It’s an actor’s face, perfect in its indistinct opaqueness and malleable as putty.

Hair dramatically changes his visage -- it can rise upward from his scalp to give him fury, or flop around over his forehead to make him seem weak or sniveling. With the addition of a goatee (like in “American History X” or his current film, “25th Hour”), he can appear menacing, and without, he easily dissolves into sweet harmlessness.

At the moment, a tiny mustache lies across his upper lip like a dead caterpillar, an unfortunate reminder of a part (the villain) he didn’t want in a movie (“The Italian Job”) he didn’t want to make but was forced into making (at the point of a multimillion-dollar lawsuit, but more about that later).

Norton doesn’t much relish interviews, but he’s not cold. Caught without a costume, the cerebral Ivy League graduate simply uses words to veil himself. His voice is thin, but he talks and talks, amiably, like a savvy and articulate politician. Still, much of what he says drifts by in a haze of benign erudition, and that seems to be the point.

It’s only in flashes that a more vital Norton pops out. One is the secretly amused, adoring light that emanates from his face when he talks about his longtime girlfriend, actress Salma Hayek (only in context of course, discussing their film “Frida”).

The other is a kind of contentiousness -- mostly clamped down and tightly disciplined -- that nonetheless flickers to life in the discussion of such life-and-death issues as artistic integrity. One senses that Norton enjoys debate and responds more respectfully when not allowed to steamroll. He also appears to have a taste for control. This is why acting, even at the level of being a movie star who can command $9 million a picture, can be frustrating for a would-be Renaissance man like Norton.

“I guess there’s part of me that’s always resented it, if you’re a painter or a writer or a photographer, even if no one’s buying it, you can sit in your room and do it. But to be an actor, you have to have someone else say yes to you,” he says. “You’re beholden. Someone else is allowing you the opportunity, and that annoys me. Again, there’s this sort of built-in vulnerability and lack of autonomy in terms of control of your own work as an actor. I always found that aspect of it very difficult.”

Part of the reason is that, when working, Norton does not merely show up and recite his lines, but impresses himself body and soul on the production. Euphemistically speaking, he’s a man of a thousand questions, approaching each role with his Yale-educated brain, ready for a little deconstruction.

He’s also known to have wielded the pen himself on everything from “American History X” to last year’s caper film “The Score,”of which he says, “I rewrote ‘The Score’ pretty totally.” He also wrote the shooting draft of “Frida,” girlfriend Hayek’s labor of love, although he was denied credit in a Writers Guild arbitration. And of course, there’s the famous tale of how he spent two months in the editing room of “American History X,” which apparently improved the film but led to very public distress on the part of neophyte director Tony Kaye.

None of it is the expected role of an actor, particularly a relatively young one, but Norton thinks the customary terminology to describe relations between talent and directors is basically ignorant of the organic nature of the creative process. “I’m not being defensive,” he says, rising to the debate. “That’s a received set of criteria, about arbitrary assignations of what’s an actor, what’s a director.... It doesn’t mean anything. Some people do certain things and some of them do others.”

Harmony on the set, he says, is way overrated. “People wrestle sometimes making movies,” he says with exasperation. “I think conflict is a very essential thing. If the reasons everyone is pushing each other have to do with a group desire to make things as good as possible, that’s a great thing! And I think a lot of very happy productions have produced a lot of very banal movies.”

Still, the idea of an actor assuming alternate roles (such as screenwriter) gives many in Hollywood pause, for the simple fact that movie stars usually carry so much more power than writers, directors, editors and most studio execs. The industry tends to view articulate, opinionated actors with great wariness, but it does make allowances, chiefly for box office clout and also for talent. As one Hollywood player who knows him notes, “If he were stupid and difficult, that would be one thing. But he’s smart and talented and difficult, that’s another.”

Always asking questions

Even his friends and admirers say Norton can be challenging.

“I think any actor who is reasonably smart is going to want to make sure the person who they’re following into battle has done their homework. Under most normal circumstances, that probing ends three to four weeks into the making of the production. That’s not true with Edward. It continues through 4 in the morning on the last day of shooting. ‘But do you really think ... ?’ ” says David Fincher, who, through a grueling multi-month shoot, guided Norton in an unnerving performance in the controversial “Fight Club.”

“I appreciate that. It’s nice to have a backboard, somebody to ricochet ideas off,” says Fincher, adding, “He’s tough. He’s cruel but fair, as Monty Python once said.”

“Edward tended to intellectualize the material but not his performance,” says director Brett Ratner, who recently directed Norton in the Hannibal Lecter film “Red Dragon.” “He likes to challenge the director. It’s all about intellectual debate. His questions are valid. It’s not easy.... I think it did take some manipulation on my part to get him to do what I wanted. I thought he helped me make the film better.”

“Frida” director Julie Taymor says of Norton, “He brings a certain kind of perfectionism, which has its place, but sometimes you can go, ‘OK, OK, we can’t do another take.’ ” Taymor was understandably wary of Norton and Hayek’s relationship when Norton first volunteered to rework the final draft of the script, but was pleased with the result. “Salma let her writer and director go off and do their work. He did a wonderful draft and it’s sad that it’s not credited.”

To Norton, an actor assuming many hats shouldn’t come as a surprise. “I could reel off the actors who I think are extremely involved in the work they do on levels other than acting and who write and direct and produce: Sean Penn, Tim Robbins and Tom Cruise. You think Tom Cruise doesn’t have a hand in every aspect of everything that he does?” he says.

The actor doesn’t appear to take the set Sturm und Drang personally. Despite their dust-ups during the week, Ratner says that all during the Florida shoot, Norton would call him on weekends to hang out. He fought with Fincher but reveres him,and cheerfully admitted after the film that he hadn’t understood exactly what the director was doing.

He chortles with disarming laughter when asked if he’s arrogant. “Arrogance is the assumption that you know best exclusively. It’s like ‘Broadcast News’ when the guy says to Holly Hunter, ‘It must be great to always be the smartest person,’ and she says, ‘No, it’s awful.’ It’s hilarious. I’ve never felt like that though,” he says. “You’re lucky enough to get in the room with people like Fincher or Milos [Forman], you know you’re not the smartest person in the room. It’s great. I love those situations.”

Indeed, it’s more when Norton smells weakness that problems can erupt. Ratner believes that the actor has something of a savior complex, at least when it comes to movies. “If you’re a weak director, and you’re intimidated by his power or presence, or the fact that he’s the star of the film, you’re going to create damage and make the actor think you have no opinion. Edward’s instinct is going to be, ‘I have to take over this film.’ He’s going to try to rescue the film. That’s a blessing and a curse.”

The entrepreneur

While some might grumble now at Norton’s penchant for being more than simply an actor for hire, it’s that same entrepreneurial spirit that catapulted him out of the life of the unemployed actor.

His early mantra could have been to defy expectations. In his first audition for “Primal Fear,” he pretended he was from Appalachia, a ruse made possible only through repeated viewing of “Coal Miner’s Daughter.” When he tried out for “The People vs. Larry Flynt,” he went off-book to present his own version of his character, the lawyer who argues Flynt’s case before the Supreme Court, a kind of moxie that appears to have impressed director Forman enough that he invited the young upstart to join him for six weeks in polishing the script.

“I’ve always thought people limit themselves in auditions,” says Norton. “Maybe it was presumptuous but I never felt constrained necessarily by the words that they had given me. I always felt I should try to make this better because it’s not Edward Albee. You don’t run across movie scripts very often that have been wordsmithed in a way that you shouldn’t mess with it. Like with ‘Larry Flynt,’ that part of that lawyer, it was a drastically underwritten part.”

Norton doesn’t want to talk about his personal life (which includes a high-profile romance with Courtney Love), but that proviso also seems to include distinctive details about his childhood, his artistic influences and much of his life before fame. He claims that any public knowledge about Norton as a person will impinge on his effectiveness as a chameleon-like actor. The facts on the surface are relatively straightforward: He’s the oldest son of an environmental lawyer and an English teacher, and the grandson of master developer James Rouse, who created the nation’s first shopping mall.

He attended Yale, where he studied Japanese and history, rowed heavyweight crew. He acted but didn’t appear to have taken the incestuous Yale drama community by storm. His college friend Stuart Blumberg recalls that Norton played Mouse and he played Moonbeam in one college production of “A Midsummer Night’s Dream.” “We were side players, so we had an hour when we were not on stage. We’d go to Naples [a local pizza parlor] and get drunk in the middle of the show.”

Norton’s goofy side isn’t aired in public very often. He sang “I’m Through With Love” to Drew Barrymore in the 1996 Woody Allen film “Everyone Says I Love You” and played an innocent children’s show host in this year’s little-seen black comedy “Death to Smoochy.” He was also allowed the lofty sum of $32 million to direct “Keeping the Faith,” a 2000 romantic comedy about a priest (Norton) and a rabbi (Ben Stiller) who fall in love with the same woman.

Norton sounds vaguely embarrassed that he made his directorial debut with fluff. He says, however, that he needed to try directing, “to satisfy the part of myself that wanted to have more total creative control over the telling of a story. It helped me relax, in a way. I think probably since doing that, I am more conscious of, beyond just [an actor’s] hard work, what a director needs in terms of your moral support.” The film is also dedicated to his late mother, who died of a brain tumor in 1997.

No coming to Lee’s rescue

One film that Norton didn’t think needed rescuing was “25th Hour,” Spike Lee’s moody tale about the last day in Monty Brogan’s life before he goes to prison to serve a seven-year sentence for dealing drugs. As played by Norton, he’s a callow but surprisingly sympathetic white-collar pusher, a charismatic screw-up just discovering the bitter taste of shame.

Lee is one of those directors Norton admires, calling him the “the most underappreciated great American filmmaker.” Norton cut his salary to a reported $500,000 to make the $15-million film a reality. Lee, in turn, took Norton’s searching style with equanimity. There was a two-week rehearsal period for Norton to get it all out of his system, and after that, the 37-day shooting schedule didn’t leave a lot of time for hyper-analysis. “I understand the questions are coming from a good place,” Lee says. “He’s trying to make anything he does the best it can be.”

The film, which opened Dec. 19, has polarized viewers and critics. Some found it trite and unconvincing, while others said it was profound, a wrenching look at a man who’s just coming to grips with the reality of his wasted life, intertwined with a homage to a city wracked by the devastation of Sept. 11. Although Norton chafes at this interpretation, it’s also the latest in a growing series of films by Norton that deal with what it means to be a young man in America at the turn of the century. The oeuvre, which also consists of “American History X” and “Fight Club,” is not pretty, filled with misguided men struggling with consumerist culture, seduced by false idols, fueled by rage and testosterone, often blinded by their own self-importance, and running headlong into the ramifications of their actions. It’s untethered masculinity casting about desperately for meaning and connection.

He takes pride in the careful selection of every movie he’s made, shunning most mindless commercial fare, in an attempt perhaps to live up to his advance billing as a great American actor. This is why the situation with “The Italian Job” is so painful.

Norton fairly quivers with indignation when asked about it. He fastens his gaze on the listener and, clearly enunciating every word, says: “My contract with Paramount explicitly forbids me from discussing the film or the nature of my employment without their permission and they have very definitively not given me permission to discuss it.”

The fracas dates to “Primal Fear,” when Paramount, in return for casting the unknown, extracted from Norton options for several more films at modest rates. It’s a common studio practice, and, according to several with knowledge of the deal, Norton’s contract initially called for several options in the $100,000 range, but was later renegotiated for one option at $1 million, now almost 90% off his movie-star rate.

In the intervening eight years, the two sides haggled about what the film should be until, finally, this year, the studio demanded he star in “The Italian Job,” a remake of the Michael Caine heist film starring Mark Wahlberg and Charlize Theron. The studio threatened to file a multimillion-dollar lawsuit if he balked.

Paramount Vice Chairman Robert Friedman says, “We’ve been trying to work it out, and it was getting to the point where legally we had reasons we needed to exercise the option.”

For Paramount, the deal has worked out fine. The studio cut $8 million out of the budget and, says Friedman, “Norton’s acted very professionally. We’re thrilled with him.” Of course, there’s an alternate explanation to describe an Edward Norton who simply shows up and goes through the paces, no questions asked. This is the Edward Norton who doesn’t care.

This is probably Norton’s bigger point -- at least about himself. He has spent the last several hours determinedly trying to stay two steps ahead of the interviewer, a process occasionally foiled by his natural loquaciousness. “Some people have sort of tried the difficult angle, but I don’t think that’s it because I’m too fundamentally enthusiastic about the whole enterprise,” he says finally.

To Norton, being difficult is performing like a jaded paycheck-grubbing automoton. Contorting his sentence to make a point, he says,

“To me, being difficult is not being enthusiastic, and talking about it and trying to improve the performance.”

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Faces in Norton’s gallery of characters

Primal Fear

In his screen debut, Norton was nominated for an Oscar for playing a not so naive altar boy accused of murdering an archbishop. The performance awoke Hollywood to his talent.

American History X

Norton spews violent racist tracts as a neo-Nazi who repents. Norton spent two months in the editing room, sparking a controversy, and his second Oscar nomination.

The Score

Norton cavorts with acting greats Robert De Niro, above right, and Marlon Brando in a routine heist film. When not performing, he tinkered with the script.