寫(xiě)在前面：因為看到不少人問(wèn)哪里可以看這個(gè)訪(fǎng)談，我在全網(wǎng)搜索也只在b站看到了一份投稿。里面有不少有趣的內容，諾也談及一些他年輕時(shí)不愿談及的個(gè)人經(jīng)歷，是很珍貴（可愛(ài)）的資料；另外也有些擔心視頻哪天說(shuō)不定就沒(méi)了，所以做了這個(gè)全篇聽(tīng)寫(xiě)。聽(tīng)寫(xiě)和校對的兩只菜狗是藝術(shù)相關(guān)專(zhuān)業(yè)學(xué)生，但并不主修英文或電影戲劇，本聽(tīng)寫(xiě)僅作記錄參考，如有錯漏煩請海涵指正！

聽(tīng)寫(xiě)整理：和麥，校對：唯@您的月亮掉了！ ，另外謝謝拖老師@撒拖 糾正~已經(jīng)修改哩！

完整視頻地址： https://www.bilibili.com/video/av25196988

以下為全篇，祝喜歡諾的各位閱讀愉快~

New School University, the John L. Tishman Theatre

James Lipton:

The next guest, he received British and American Academy Award nominations and won the Golden Globe, Los Angeles, Boston, Chicago Film Critics and National Board of Review Awards for his performance in his first movie, Primal Fear. His work in American History X, earned him Academy Award and Chicago Film Critics nominations and won the Golden Satellite Award. The People vs Larry Flynt, won him Los Angeles and Chicago Critics and National Board of Review Awards. For his singing role in Everyone Says I Love You, he won the Los Angeles, Boston and Chicago Critics Awards. For Fight Club, he received Blockbuster Entertainment, and MTV Movie Award nominations. We have seen him as Worm, in Rounders; Jack and Bryan in the Score; Smoochy in Death of Smoochy; Nelson Rockefeller in Frida, which he wrote; special agent Will Graham in Red Dragon and Father Bryan Finn in Keeping the Faith, which he directed. He had starred in Spike Lee’s film the 25th Hour and received glorying reviews for his New York Theatre performance as Pale, in Lanford Wilson’s Burn This. As anyone watching can see, the actors studio is proud to welcome Edward Norton.

(Applause)

JL: On rare occasions, we go back a couple of generations, to look for the foundation stones on which our guest lies rest. Who was James Rouse?

EN：He was my grandfather, my mother’s father.

JL: And what was he notable for?

EN: He was a commercial real-estate developer, and then became an urban philosopher or...a grewer of (?) urban planing philosophy for his whole generation American developers, and in the later part of his life, he committed his efforts to the problem of urban poverty and specifically well-income housing and neighborhood revitalization.

JL: In the next generation, who’s your father?

EN: My father, also Ed Norton, he’s had a long career as an attorney and specifically as an environmental advocate. He was the head of public policy for the Woman’s Wilderness Society for many years and he founded and directed the Grain & Cane Trusts. (不確定信托基金的名字是不是這個(gè)沒(méi)查到)

JL: Okay, it’s your turn. Where did you grow up?

EN: I grew up in Columbia, Maryland.

JL: What was your mother’s profession?

EN: She was an English teacher.

JL: And just out of curiosity, who was responsible for developing Columbia, Maryland.

EN: That was one of my grandfather's bringing childs.

JL: What school did you go to?

EN: I went to a high school called Wilde Lake high school, it was a very diverse school in terms of the student body. It was a good school. Oh no...

JL: (Showing the high school photo-book)

EN: I should’ve been ready for that.

JL: ...Well let’s see. I have you here on the baseball team...Were you any good?

EN: Yeah, I was a good third basemen.

JL: Oh you remembered the national honor society I see?

EN: That’s possible. Get out, you’ll take all my street credibilities backward. (？我們都聽(tīng)不太懂文化人的笑話(huà))

JL: The show has ruined many of... You were on the debate team.

EN: There you goes, go on then.

JL: And I have a wonderful photo of you here looking very eager and social, studies class? Ed Norton? (校對：一堆同學(xué)名字直接音譯就得了吧)

EN: I remember them.

JL: And here, at last. What a shame you can’t see this, (EN: Oh you are gonna show this? ) this is a junior year photo. How old were you, I wanna back up a little bit, how old were you when acting reared its head? I think you were very young.

EN: I was. I had a babysitter when I was very young, four or five years old. She was a student at the local dramatic art school, that was run by a woman named Toby Bernstein who was in many ways...I can’t overstate what afore she was in our community, she was The heart of the theatre in that area, and that since my babysitter was a student of hers. My parents took me to see her in a play when I was five years old, I would say.

JL: Is that If I Were A Princess?

EN: Yeah, you’ve really done it. It was a musical of Cinderella or something like that, and I remember badgering my parents all the way home about... I think I had this notion that if I joined quick enough I can get in to that play. There were classes for children down to the youngest age and I started taking acting classes since when I was about five years old. I did it very consistently through...I studied with, at that school, with this lady Toby Bernstein, and did plays every year.

JL: What is Classroom? An original absurdist play in one scene, with apologies to Beckett.

EN: WoW...If I remember that was...we had a choice in some English class to either write a paper about a play or to write a play. You know, being a habitual procrastinator, I probably thought I could, at the zero hour, bullshit my way through in some absurdist play easier than a coherent paper. So I wrote a little one, I wrote something in the style of an absurdist play. Can’t believe.

JL: What would you give me not to ask any more questions about this?

EN: No...I,I can, I can. It’s great...I was saying to a friend the other day, sometimes you don’t think about things for a long time, and some one says the certain word, like you said that teacher’s name, it opens the whole drawer in your mind.

JL: Where did you go to college?

EN: I went to Yale.

JL: What was your major?

EN: I majored in history. At that particular moment, the history department of that school was almost unparalleled, there was nothing like it.

JL: Did you studied a foreign language?

EN: Yes, I studied Japanese. I was interested in Asian history.

JL: You ever have a chance to use it?

EN: Yeah, I lived in Osaka for a long summer, about for a month, maybe. I had a job over there.

JL: Did they require you speaking Japanese?

EN: Yeah, that was very conversationally comfortable, I could kind of watch the neighbors and...It’s faded...

JL: Do you remember any of it?

EN: Sure. When I do my press for movies over in Japan, I can usually hold the conversation or...

JL: Can you give the world to hear you speaking Japanese...(不確定到底說(shuō)的是什么啦！)

EN: Oh no no no.

JL: I’ll count to ten in Chinese if you speak to me in Japanese.

EN: I, I’ll count to ten in Japanese.

JL: Go ahead.

EN: いち、に、さん、し、ご、ろく、しち、はち、きゅう、じゅう。

JL: There you go. 一二三四五六七八九十十一十二…I went to twelve.

JL: When you came to New York, did you study acting?

EN: Yeah. A woman, her name was Gloria Maddox, she passed away. But she taught at a guy who named Terry Schreiber’s studio. I studied with her, and then later I studied more protractedly with Terry Schreiber, who was a terrific teacher.

JL: Why?

EN: I've always felt that Terry had a very pluralistic approach, to teach and acting for one of the better word, he was very converse with many of, not all of, the well-known techniques, or approaches, or ideas about acting and studying acting. But he always said, he wanted you to have a full tool box so that faced with a certain kind of material, you could say to yourself, ‘You know what, this will help me with this kind of work.’ and with a different kind of material, use something else. I got an enormous amount when I was studying with him.

JL: Did you ever audition for the actors studio?

EN: Yeah. Several times.

JL: How many times?

EN: I think at least twice. I remember what I did one time. With a friend, I did a scene for Waiting For Lefty. We didn’t get in. Dustin Hoffman told me he auditioned 7 times or something.

JL: Harvey Keitel, eleven. Nicholson, five. Should’ve kept going.

EN: Yeah I should’ve kept going. I auditioned for Yale Drama School too, I didn’t get in there either.

JL: I know you did some of other...What did you do in New York when you began?

EN: I did Waiting For Lefty, I did Italian American Reconciliations, a Bryan Friel play called Lovers, still I think one of the best plays I’ve ever did. It was right around that time, Adele, a good friend of mine, James Houghton, who was an actor and director, he has founded the Signature Theatre Company. Two years before with Romulus Lenny.

JL: Who has been the head of our writing department of this school.

EN: Right. So Jim said that why don’t we get some people together and raise some money, do a full season of Romulus Lenny’s plays with Romulus working with us, and it was such a terrific idea, that it...grew in his company that based around that mission.

JL: When Richard Gere was here we talked about a film, which you made a debut and earned you American and British Academy Award nominations. Do you know how many actors auditioned for the role that you got in Primal Fear?

EN: I’ve heard different numbers thrown around. Deborah Aquila was the casting director in Paramount back then. I don’t know what the number was, but I know she was going all over...(the host raised his hand) You know? Yeah, of course you know. Of course you do.

JL: 2100 actors auditioned for that part. For this film you had to create two characters, two convincing characters. One that convinced them, the other that convinced us, the audiences. How did you construct Aaron Stampler?

EN: It seems to me reading the book that...clearly what was going on was that it was a guy...I mean obviously at the end, it revealed to be a person, who's just lying. It’s all a con...

JL: He’s a very smart liar.

EN: Right. When I first read it, it seems to make the most sense to me was, what he’s doing is capitalizing on his ability to appear vulnerable, to elicit sympathy even from this very cynical, hard-bitten attorney. To me, when I broke it down, I thought to myself ‘Well, this is about eliciting sympathy, to put an action on it.’ This is about one person making another person want to help them, and feel sorry for them and care about them.

JL: I’d like to know, how you fulfilled the ambition of many actors, to be at last in a Woody Allen film was, of course, called Every One Says I Love You?

EN: That year was a amazing year for me professionally. I had the audition for Primal Fear, this tape of the screen test I did was really making around. (JL: It was hot.) It was like a great rock band’s demo or something...and it got around. Juliet Taylor, who’s with Woody a long time, casting, first time I saw her in New York. Actually while we were still filming Primal Fear, I had a few days off and they had me come out and met in...It was a process that I think quite many other people have described as well. You come into that room, you meet them, and he sort of says, (mimicking Woody Allen) ‘We are making a picture...’ They send you out, and then you get the scenes. I can memorize that pretty quickly, almost immediately. He sits in the corner when I threw a lot of stuff in there, I threw a lot of stuff that I thought was...I had some fun with it. I said ‘Hey, you alright with that?’, he was like ‘Great.’ That’s how we made the movies.

JL: What did you sing in the movie?

EN: My Baby Just Cares For Me, a kind of a big number in Harriet Winston's, which was a lot of fun. It was a huge thrill for me, getting to watch the way he works, the efficiency with which he make films.

JL: Is he efficient?

EN: Very efficient and clear. You hear a lot of stories about Woody, but he’s very pointed and clear as a director.

JL: What was your role in the People vs Larry Flynt?

EN: I played Larry’s longtime attorney Alan Issacman.

JL: I got to ask you about working with Milos Forman. What was the experience like?

EN: It was one of the great, creative experiences that I've had. I rank it probably in the top three or four experiences that I’ve had as an actor. On Primal Fear, I ended up working on script a little bit with this terrific writer, Ann Biderman, and Greg. But on Larry Flynt, Milos really let me go to town on my part, because it was a very underwritten part.

I’ve never had anybody turn to me with such...like immediately and say 'Do whatever you want, do it. Don’t ask me any ques(tions).' I like talk about stuff, and I would ask him questions, after a while he turned to me and said, 'One question, you get one question, that’s it.' I existed for a longtime in that film thinking 'I’m either on the first terrible Milos Forman film for he’s lost his mind, or I am gonna get the learning experience in my life here.'

It was the latter, because then I sat in editing room with him and I watch him put that together, and by the time he was done, the hairs are standing up on my arm. Because it was like having my whole conception of how films get made completely blown to bits. It was like this lesson about the plasticity of the medium and how much flexibility you have.

JL: Yeah I agree. Even as a surprise to me, this time, you had a break present surprises, a movie called Rounders. How did that movie come into your life?

EN: That was like a dream...that was one of...they should all be this easy. I think I got sent the script, I read it and I love the part. Two days later I met with John Dahl, I said I’d love to do it.

JL: How did you put ‘Worm’ together? What’s you idea of that character?

EN: He fell into a category of characters that I’ve always enjoyed...the force of chaos in a way.

JL: Any Bugs Bunny in him?

EN: Yeah. I learned something from Spike Lee recently which was I think that Bugs Bunny comes from the dead end kids. If you listen to the way Bugs talks, he really...(mimicking) ‘erm what a moron’. His phrases, his whole cage. He’s really like a guy from Brooklyn. That’s kind of how Worm is, Worm has got great phrases, he’s got his own lingo, he’s street-smart, he’s always escaping the guy with the gun, which is totally Bugs Bunny. So that was in my head, that was just informing me.

Worm actually...more than I have even on other things, the cloths were a real line into Worm for me sometimes...I think if you can find the right pair of shoes, if you can figure out what shoes the character wears, it’s a great place to start. Because shoes change the whole postures and the way you move.

JL: I can’t tell you how many times that has been said on this stage, just one of the biggest surprises in this series to me(?) that how many people begin with the shoes.

EN: It changes everything, it changes the whole way you walk. That’s a great place to start. People talk with a lot reverence about the method, and about becoming a character. I think there’re many cases where it’s great to do it as much as you possibly can, and sometimes you have the opportunity to go further with it than another times. But at certain moments, your responsibility becomes about simulating artificially that which is real in someone else and absorbing maybe the superficiality or something so that you can represent it as it suppose to be.

JL: Hard to do that with emotions, though?

EN: Yes. That’s a different thing but I think...

JL: Then you get into trouble.

EN: But in film especially, and also in the theatre. There were times when the representation of naturalistic behavior is a part of your job. It’s not necessarily... There’re moments that connect moments with emotion. Sometimes living in a states or an environment has a lot to do with the behavior and making it unconscious.

JL: Once again, as it has so often in this series, the subject of random loss comes up. What happened to you in 1997?

EN: My mother passed away.

JL: Were you close to her?

EN: Yeah, very. She was an English teacher and taught Shakespeare in my whole grounding...in theatre and in Shakespeare and in movies, and particularly in Woody Allen actually. It was a part of this on-going lifelong conversation with my mother about movies. It was our favorite thing to do.

She was diagnosed with cancer right, I think, three weeks after I finished shooting Primal Fear, and it didn’t come out. So it was literally in lockstep with this one whole part of my life starting to become thrilling and fulfilling, and this other thing was taking place and fades in my career when I...I probably would have worked a lot more than I ultimately did. I really...I pretty much stopped working, I didn’t work for nearly a year.

Those experiences are bittersweet, they are deep lessons in them and in some ways like amazing gifts in terms of perspective, and it was not easy, and it was extremely bittersweet to not have her, my mother, being able to share in all of this, which nobody, not one single person on the planet, would’ve got more pleasure out of...me doing this work.

I mean it was more perspective than I needed or wanted in that moment but it totally...it saved me from the worst access as what comes along with this business, I can honestly say that I’ve never felt a day of significant stress overwork-related issues since then. You know, the result of those experiences. Because it doesn't...place against those kind of strength is utterly irrelevant.

JL: You earned your second Oscar nomination for American History X.

EN: There was a big...the first really big film I’ve ever got offered, right around that time. It was the first time that I got offered, for me it was enormous amount of money. I didn’t do it and I did American History X instead, because I remembered thinking at the time ‘Man, you may never see this again, you may never see a part like this again.’ This could come off really badly, you could be up there with your swastika scar on your chest, and it won’t make sense. It won’t make point that you want to make. But if it comes off, it’s gonna be something that’ll really kick people in the gut, and in the ass, and make them think about something that goes on out there. I thought that worth taking a stab at.

JL: I’d like to ask you about a complex challenging film, called Fight Club.

EN: That film’s probably...of the movies I’ve done, that’s the one I am most interested in watching again. Because I think it’s such a stunningly, brilliant piece of cinema. David Fincher just made a...once-in-a-generation kind of film, in my opinion. We made it for our crowd. We thought it was about what we were experiencing in the world then, that it was gonna be a big needle right in the eye of a lot of other people. We knew they’re gonna hate it, it will piss them off but we made it anyway, and that was exciting.

JL: You and Brad Pitt. Were you saw eye to eye...(聽(tīng)不清)

EN: Yeah. It was a very profoundly, what’s the right word, there was an enormous creative synergy on that film from the get-go.

JL: Who played the woman in your lives?

EN: Helena Bonham Carter. She was great, she was wonderful.

JL: Didn't she give you some advice, about what to do on the set?

EN: That’s funny, god, you’ve found everything. One time, I pace a lot, Helena was just sit there in her chair, smoking cigarettes, looking like me like I was insane, and finally one time she said, ‘There’s one thing I’ve learned over the course of my career’, and I said what’s that, she said ‘Well, I just want to give you this one piece of advice’, I said what’s that, and she said, ‘If you’re standing and you could be sitting, you should sit. If you’re sitting and you could be lying down, you should lie down.’

JL: When Ben Stiller was here, we talked about Keeping the Faith. I have the impression that for you that movie goes all the way back to West 78 Street.

EN: Beyond actually. Because the guy who wrote it is one of my oldest friends, his name is Stewart Blumberg. He and I met on our freshman year in college, we’ve written many things together. He brought it to me, we worked, we kind of did our normal thing on it for a while. Initially I had no thought to be in it or direct it. So we got a set-up and I was producing it. We realize, you know, there comes a point when a story is your story to tell. You just gotta throw your own hat in the ring.

JL: You were both acting with Ben Stiller in this movie and directing him.

EN: You had him on the show. He’s very funny and can be really warm. He’s a very serious man, (JL: Yes, he is.) and he’s a very, very serious actor. We were in hurry, we were doing 83 locations in 60 days on that film in New York, we were moving fast. He’s a pro, he’s fast and grounded. I don’t know how to say it better, he’s very present as an actor.

JL: How did you work with your DP, did you storyboard?

EN: We have our storyboard and everything. I was very affected by one little thing I read about Martin Scorsese, it’s in that great book of Roger Corman, How I Made A Hundred Movies In Hollywood and Never Lost A Dime. He tells a story about hiring Scorsese to do Boxcar Bertha, Scorsese came in with this enormous sheaf of storyboard, started going ‘I’m gonna do this...this...’ (JL: 500 storyboards.) I think for me, at this point of my life, it was very essential for me to do that.

JL: Were you in the editing room for the edit?

EN: Yeah, of course.

JL: Every minute?

EN: Yeah. I think you have to use your editor, you have to step off and let them work at times. If you stand there literally and watch people manipulate the cut, I think you’ll lose all your objectivity on it.

JL: To whom as the film dedicated?

EN: My mother.

JL: ...Who had faith in everyone.

EN: Yes, absolutely.

JL: I am sure this is an obvious question, what attracted you to the Score?

EN: The poster. I tried to imagine...I wasn’t gonna do it. It was a drama film, it didn’t mean that much to me, but then I tried to imagine myself walking down the street and seeing Marlon Brando, Robert De Niro and...you know, somebody else, and I was like ‘Forget it! I’m doing it!’

JL: To the reality, did Bob fit the expectations?

EN: It lived up to it, in a number of ways. The studio hired me to do a re-write on it, so I got re-work it. I wrote a scene in it for me and Bob. My attempt was to make a metaphor out of these three generations of these thieves, for three generations of actors. I saw him giving the interview somewhere or I read it, where he talked about Stella Adler saying something to him, which was ‘An actor’s talent lies in their choices.’

JL: She said that to me, she said that to everybody whoever studied with her.

EN: You know I’ve learned a lot working with him, I had some very great lessons about working on films.

JL: You have a lot to do in Red Dragon. You crosswords with Hannibal Lector, which is to say is, with Anthony Hopkins. When he was in that chair, he won our hearts, as a person and as an actor. How did it go with the two of you?

EN: This is terrific. When Primal Fear came out, I had wonderful response from Tony. This is really encouraging, compliment in a way. I get to know him in the subsequent years, in passing and then more...

I’ve learned very specific things watching Tony Hopkins over the years. I would watch things he done and then after getting pass the reaction to him, I would really try to dig down and look at what he was doing technically. He’s as subtle a film actors as we’ve ever had. To my mind there’re many great actors, but there are certain people, like Morgan Freeman, De Niro, Tony Hopkins, they have this equality of stillness, an understanding of new level of nuanced that film can record.

Tony is one of those guys who lets you see the wheels in his brain turning when he’s not speaking. That’s the amazing thing, you can see his mind at work, off the lines. I remember having a week when I saw...I was in New York, I saw Shadowlands and Remains In the Day in the same week. I went home and I wrote about it, I tried to break down what I thought he was doing in a way. He had a pretty big impact on me.

JL: I’d like to ask you about Frida. Who acts in Frida?

EN: It’s a huge cast, and a great cast. Salma Hayek, Alfred Malian plays Diego Rivera, Geoffrey Rush, Ashley Judd, Antonio Banderas, myself.

JL: How much of Frida did you write?

EN: In my opinion, I wrote the bulk of what’s up there on screen. I certainly wrote the dialogues and I am not the member of the Writers Guild, so they removed my credit. It was frustrating, not the most important thing in the world but...I wrote the script they got made into the film.

JL: Tell me about working with Julie Taymor.

EN: She’s a really, really remarkable woman and artist. For a longtime a lot of us were talking about that movie, trying to envision it and put it together...when I said I'd be worked on the script, I had certain ideas about how do you present the art in a way that’s not boring, I had certain ideas that I thought we are starting to think outside the box a little bit, but when Julie came along, there is no box. She is not outside the box, there’s no box in her universe. She is in the different realm. She is a visionary artist, which Frida was. Frida has a visionary sensibility, she was not a trained artist, she was a true visionary artist. Julie thinks that way, Julie thinks as a surrealist. That’s just magical, it’s really wonderful.

JL: What can you tell us about the 25th hour?

EN: It’s the film we made, this past friend with Spike Lee, Spike directed. It’s about a person coming to regrets with the consequences of choices and his actions.

JL: That’s 24 hours of the life of you character.

EN: I play a guy who is about to serve 7 years for dealing drugs in New York. It’s about the last 24 hours that he spends in New York, trying to sort through what brought him to this moment. I was very moved by the script. It was the first thing that I encountered after everything that went down here last year, after that horrible fall. Spike was very clear about the fact that he wanted to allowed the backdrop of the film to be New York in a wake of all that. I came of age on Spike’s films. He is, for my money, the greatest, most under appreciated American film maker, I think he is. He is one of the most distinctive, prolific, unique, truly authorial voices in American film. He has hark (?) his own voice in cinema. Working with Spike Lee was a great experience, and challenging for me, because the speed which he moves. He’s quick to say there’s only one can go in the movie, so it doesn’t matter if you have three good ones. It’s more a question of ‘Are you sincerely refining it’ or ‘Are you essentially indulging yourself in multiples’. One of things amaze me is that Spike, he can make a very complicated movie in 37 days, and the way he does that is because he’s disciplined and he moves...It’s tough for me. Sometimes an inspiration hits you and you do something very pure early on, and then you over-manage it. But sometimes there’s a rhythm to something that you’re refining and you do by no.10 or 15 you get it to a place...Especially if you ever had a rehearsal. (JL: You like rehearsal? ) I do like rehearsal. In Spike’s case for instance, we rehearsed many weeks before, it helps you to deliver it quicker. I do like to rehearse, when you don’t get to...I tend to like a few more.

JL: Tonight is your night off, from what?

EN: From, the theata~!

JL: And what’s in the theatre?

EN: We are doing this Lanford Wilson’s play.

JL: Who’s in it with you?

EN: The marvelous Catherine Keener. Two wonderful actress, Dallas Roberts and Ty Burrell.

JL: Who directed it?

YYEN: Jim Houghton, the founder of the Signature Theatre Company. It’s the realization of a long relationship for me with this company. Your role with the actor obviously, in the theatre is...you hold the shape of the drama in your hands...

JL: More than in film.

EN: Yes absolutely, and that’s a very different level of responsibility than you have as an actor in film. It’s wonderful, it’s very invigorating.

JL: We begin our classroom with the questionnaire which was invented by my hero Bernard Pivot. What’s your favorite word?

EN: Summary.

JL: What’s your least favorite word?

EN: Like.

JL: Oh, me too. Whew, oh boy me too.

EN: Ruining conversations.

JL: What turns you on (spiritually)?

EN: Light. I think light is like a key component of centrality.

JL: What turns you off?

EN: Selfishness.

JL: What sound or noise do you love?

EN: The sounds my dog make when I come home.

JL: What sound or noise do you hate?

EN: I don’t like when other people are crying.

JL: What is your favorite curse word?

EN: My favorite curse word at the moment is ‘Chingada’.

JL: What does that mean?

EN: Kind of, kind of the same thing. It’s even better. It’s a great word.

JL: What profession, other than yours, would you like to attempt?

EN: I‘d like to be a pilot. Always want to fly. ( the host raised his hand.) You do pilots lessons?

JL: I’ll give you a lesson. What profession would you not like to participate in?

EN: Finance.

JL: Finally, if heaven exists what would you like to hear the god say when you arrive at the Pearly Gates?

EN: I think I’d like him to say: ‘You are gonna see all the people that you love here.’

JL: Guess here’s people for you to love.

Q: Hello, Edward Norton. I saw you last week and you’re remarkable, and I was hoping you would talk about your process.

EN: I’ll talk about sense memory and some of the ideas behind that. I think it’s a very very interesting exercise, it can be a means of opening up those emotional conduits in you so that things flow a little more freely.

Personally, I always responded more to the idea that the imagination gives you outlet and let into more places. I think there’s nobody whose personal experience is as rich as a human imagination, that’s my personal opinion. I’ve always thought that the fundamental standard (?真的聽(tīng)不出) statement that you are behaving naturally under imagining circumstances, it’s a good basic place to start, it contains the word imagination in it. Sandy’s idea is about exercises, like the repetition exercise, they are really effective. Sidney Poitiers was on the show one time and I saw him, he said it perfectly, he was one of his teachers. He said ‘It really is about getting you to listen.’ I would put that very high on the list of things that good actors do. They actually listen to what the other person is saying. It’s probably one of the cornerstones of it, when I encountered good actors they’re always listening. But for me personally, the repetition exercise, it had an interesting effect on me which was it makes you listen but it also got me out of my head, it got me past the point of analysis, it took you past the analysis of the text. So it had this weird side effect on me, that was good for me, because I’ll get up from the place, I need to get what's out of my head. My best advice is, go out and put as many things in that little black bag as you can find.

Q: Hello, Mr.Norton. I am a first year actor, I was wondering if there’s any areas of acting where you feel you’re limited or you have weakness, and what you’re doing to address them?

EN: That’s a good question. Yeah, I think that every actor has a certain amount of elasticity, some have more than others. I’ve definitely look at certain things and thought, this isn’t me. Not because I don’t want to do it, because I just think I am not the actor to do this. Going a little deeper to your question. There’s definitely things I don’t think I’m very good at. I don’t think I’m super good at earnestness, if that makes any sense. I don’t think I always trust the simplicity of something sometimes, and I’m trying to get better at that.

I found the more I’ve worked as an actor, the more I find myself nailed the back to my seat by performances that contain a lot of vulnerability in them. The older I get, and the more I worked as an actor, the more I appreciate a very naked performance. It’s hard to strip yourself down and trust that level of simplicity, just trust your own humanity.

As an actor, you want to tarted up with drama, or intensity, or gesture, or a lot of color or something. You realize that the hardest thing to do is to trust your own humanity, and let it come through without twist or inflections, or anything. I don’t think I’m very good, I look for the complications in it.