Edward Norton and Evan Rachel Wood in Down in the Valley. Return to The 24 Finest Performances of 2006.

It's been a big year for actor Edward Norton. Three pictures, two of which he co-produced, saw release in 2006; the haunting, underseen Down the the Valley, in which he plays Harlan, a sort-of cowboy who romances alienated teen Evan Rachel Wood; The Illusionist, a sleeper hit thriller where he plays the implacable title role; and The Painted Veil, a China-set 1920s romantic drama in which he is a cuckolded physician who vindictively drags his wife to a cholera-infested province, where the couple eventually find their own humanity and affinity.

I first met Norton, who was a part of the stellar ensemble of Woody Allen's quasi-musical Everyone Says I Love You, in 1996. We met again on the set of 1998's Rounders, where we both became friendly with that film's screenwriting team Brian Koppelman and David Levien (who went on to, among other things, co-produce The Illusionist). We've been cordially acquainted since, which I'm obliged to disclose on those occasions when I actually interview him. This particular talk took place in early November 2006, and parts of it appear in the January / February 2007 issue of Premiere magazine. Norton is very passionate about all aspects of his life, but he particularly enjoys talking about his work, so here's a much expanded version of our talk.

PREMIERE: One thing that came up when having social conversations about movies, up until recently, was that a lot of people asked me, "Hey, what's Edward Norton been doing?" because you hadn't been seen on screen for a while. You were in 2005's Kingdom of Heaven but wearing a mask the whole time. And now, in 2006, you have three movies, all indies. Was this the result of a period of retrenchment, where you decided that this was how you were going to work, and is this pretty much how you intend to continue working for the foreseeable future?

Edward Norton in 25th Hour.

EDWARD NORTON: It wasn't premeditated. I think it was a function of simply the way that we were able to get those particular films made. If a major studio had had or even bought The Illusionist, then I'd have been working with them on it. It's really funny. Peter Biskind called me once when he was doing his [book on latter-day independent film] Down and Dirty Pictures. He said, "I'm doing this [thing] on independent cinema in the 90's... You're such a fixture of that, your generation coming up in that scene." And I said, "Peter, I've never been in an independent film." Every movie I had ever made up until that time was a studio movie. I have had many good experiences working with studios. Studios have made some of I guess what are called the edgier films that I've made, like American History X, Fight Club, The People Vs. Larry Flynt, and The 25th Hour. Every one of those films, pictures that are probably my favorites, was made by a studio.

Down in the Valley was just not a film we felt we could get made in the studio system. Then, fortunately, we found a really fantastically supportive patron, literally an individual, who wanted to make it for the reasons we wanted to make it. And then The Illusionist and The Painted Veil were both made with Bob Yari's company. But it's not a reflection of a predisposition, or a shift in my thinking about how to get movies done. I tend to look at things in a very ad hoc way, you know.

As far as three releases in one year is concerned... it creates this illusion that you weren't doing something for a long time and then you got incredibly busy. That's actually not the case. I made Down in the Valley in 2004, and The Illusionist and The Painted Veil in 2005.

One thing that's interesting to me, in terms of line delivery and such, is your approach to the physicality of each of the characters. The way you look physically as Harlan in Valley is extremely different from the way you look as Dr. Fane in Veil. And that's very different again from Eisenheim in The Illusionist. I wonder about the process of determining the way you alter yourself physically in subtle, subtle ways from picture to picture.

Harlan is a cowboy and he's got what appears to be, at least in the beginning, a kind of a languid, loose-limbed kind of fluidity to him and it's like you want to manifest that in the way those old Richard Avedon photos of cowboys are. The men in those pictures are just lean and ropey and liquid. And yet he's dangerous. He's sort of like a coiled spring in a way. Eisenheim is a very tightly held character. It's funny because the period services that too. People were corseted, they were in waistcoats, they were in frock coats, the arms were tight. It's amazing, amazing what wardrobe does to your posture. I think you can slide into a character if you find the right shoes.

Edward Norton in The Painted Veil.

On The Painted Veil, Ruth Meyer, our great wardrobe designer, was fitting me for clothes and we were looking at Walter's suits, which were in the Edwardian fashion. I asked, "Should they be this snug?" She said, "No, but you're going to have to lose those shoulders. Englishmen did not have bodies like that in that time." She said literally you've got two months to drop all the muscles in your shoulders because they just didn't have them, they didn't go to the gym the way we do.

When did you first encounter The Painted Veil?

Ron Nyswaner, the screenwriter, and the woman I produced the film with, Sara Colleton, sent it to me. I had never read the [W. Somerset Maughaum] novel. This version of the novel is very different from the book in a number of ways. The novel I think he has a much more dim view of people's capacity to make those changes. Maugham's pretty cynical. The book is almost totally claustrophobic. There's no China in the book at all, you don't even know what Walter goes off to do with the cholera epidemic. There's no sense of a larger picture, no sense of the historical context. Maybe Ron and I worked the most to let the characters transcend themselves romantically in some sense, more than was in the book, but [director] John [Curran] really did his research and he found this whole other layer to it which was this moment in 1925, an incredible moment in Chinese history. I think a kind of huge energy swept through the country after the shooting of these workers in Shanghai by the British troops. It was a great move on John's part to anchor the film in that moment, because it added this whole second level that makes it a somewhat cautionary tale or at least an examination of the folly of Western people like going in and telling others how to run things. [My character] Walter is that guy. Walter is the person who strolls into another place knowing nothing about the culture or the history or the traditions or anything and just says, "If you guys would listen to me, it would all be so much easier."