Ahoy, squirts! Quint here to introduce a new spy, Deacon Spires, who saw an early screening of the Edward Norton/Naomi Watts starrer THE PAINTED VEIL. I saw this flick in preparation for a Naomi Watts interview that ended up falling through, but the film isn't as much of a pain to sit through as I was expecting a period marriage drama to be. It actually has a very interesting twist on the whole thing, where the infidelity happens at the beginning... in a love-less marriage, and the characters have to grow to love each other after that.
Anyway, this screening Deacon went to had a surprise appearance by Edward Norton, who popped up to do a Q&A with the audience. Deacon dutifully transcribed the Q&A for you folks, so stay with him after the review to read that. Enjoy!
Hey Quint,
This past week I had the pleasure of taking in a preview screening of Edward Norton’s newest film “The Painted Veil” here in Toronto at the Cumberland theatre.
I have to admit. At first I wasn’t entirely keen on going as the plot of the film is adapted from a 1925 novel by W. Somerset Maugham set in the 1920’s about a young couple who get married for the wrong reasons and relocate to Shanghai, where she falls in love with another man.
The Cumberland is a theatre where I’ve taken in Toronto International Film Festival classics like “Undead” and “Evil Aliens”, so to sully that with what seemed to amount to little more than your average “chick flick” seemed almost reprehensible.
The screening was free however, and it did star Edward Norton who I’ve admired as an actor from the moment he leapt on to the screen with his terrific turn in “Primal Fear”, so I figured I’d give it a shot.
Luckily we arrived at the screening early enough to be able to line up inside, as other less fortunate souls were forced to wait outside, or as one person in line said were “Sent to their deaths” as the stereotypical Toronto winter was bitterly cold that night.
After a few minutes of waiting we were let into the theatre and given an introduction to the film by the screenings host Richard Crouse, a movie critic featured on a Canadian show called “Canada A.M.”. It was during his introduction to the film that I first learned that following the film a Q&A session with Edward Norton would take place which was very exciting.
The film itself is directed by John Curran whose previous films include “We Don’t Live Here Anymore” and “Praise” and stars Edward Norton (Walter Fane), Naomi Watts (Kitty Fane), Liev Schreiber (Charlie Townsend), and Toby Jones (Waddington).
While the film began in much the same way as countless other romantic dramas, the change in demeanor of Norton’s character after discovering his wife’s infidelities creates a much more interesting film.
After confronting his wife about the affair Walter lays down an ultimatum which leads to their relocation to a remote part of China that has been ravaged by a cholera epidemic.
The icy cruelness that comes out of Walter towards his wife is handled brilliantly by Norton and is a real treat to watch. One line in the movie serves as the perfect dividing line between the meek, caring Walter and the bitter, heartless man he initially becomes.
When Kitty first attempts to defend herself against the charges, Walter steps to her and utters the memorable line “If you interrupt me once more, I will strangle you.” The line was a very jarring moment in the film, as to that point Walter had shown little in the way of confidence or forcefulness. This line of dialogue was actually part of the first question asked of Norton during the Q&A following the film.
Upon arrival in the remote village the story takes on increasing levels of tension because of both the threat of disease and the violent political chaos China was experiencing at the time.
Naomi Watts and Edward Norton were excellent in their scenes together as Walter at first barely acknowledges Kitty’s existence. Through a series of events in the film the two eventually begin to warm to one another, but the scenes in which the hostility hangs in the air is where these two really shine.
It’s also worth mentioning Toby Jones’ character Waddington, who plays a British Deputy Commissioner in the film. He provides kindness and counsel to Kitty as she struggles to adapt to the environment and her husband’s treatment of her. Jones’ does a great job in the role and steals many of the scenes he appears in.
For a person who rarely enjoys this type of film, ‘The Painted Veil’ was a refreshing surprise and I would highly recommend it for the performances by Norton and Watts, in addition to some breathtaking cinematography.
I’ve also included a transcription of the Q&A session that took place after the film. Norton was fantastic as he spent a lot of time answering the questions posed to him and gave a lot of insight into the film and his career in general.
Deacon Spires
Here's Deacon's transcript of the Edward Norton Q&A!
Q1: Edward Norton is asked to comment on a line of dialogue from the film where he tells his wife that if she interrupts him ‘...one more time I will strangle you’ and what it means to him...
A1: Umm. I think it means to "choke the life out of..." and uh actually the first time I read the script I sat back in my seat when I hit that part which .. not that many scripts make me move physically reading them... I think that's what you're getting at is that that's the moment where you begin to see kind of an unsuspected depth of intensity in this guy and I think the layers that peel away from these two people as they experience... I feel like the characters almost get exfoliated by china, they get beaten down and humbled by what they go through until sort of all of their illusions about self and each other have been stripped away and they're forced to actually take a look at each other which is really interesting to confront as an actor.
Q2: Norton is asked what the film means to him...
A2: I'm always a little reluctant to talk about what I think a film is about because I think that's what we give it to you guys to do. But certainly I think the thing that threw all of us into it is the idea.. you know obviously it's part of the fun of cinema to go places like China, or the romanticism of a period is always a lot of fun but you do it because hopefully there's something in it that's still resonant in the story and obviously I think almost everybody can relate to the way everybody goes through the disappointment of confronting the person your in love with's weaknesses or failures.
Everybody goes through pain or... Those ways that men and woman struggle with each other are primal. And as you said I think that forgiveness is a difficult thing to sum up the courage to do, but then I think it can be a very transformative act and I think all of that, you know one of the things I enjoy watching is people watching the movie because you can feel peoples loyalties shifting kind of like... John Curran, I don't know if anybody saw his other film he did with Naomi before this one called "We Don't Live Here Any More", it was a small film, but it was a very savage depiction of two couples... John, like all great filmmakers has a very wise eye about relationships. He knows enough to depict them without judgment. He's very good at showing how people's strengths are their weaknesses and the way that nobody's really right or wrong sometimes.
Q3: How long were you in China and were there any special challenges you faced while filming?
A3: John and I were in China about five months and the filming was four months of that. It was a great adventure but it was fraught with many things.. There was no way to predict certain things that happened. You're dealing with the inherent inefficiency of working through translators.. We had Australian... Those guys really need translators! *laughs*.. We had a camera crew that were Kiwis, sounds guys were Australian, the wardrobe designer was British, and we had mutts like me and John and then all of our Chinese cast and crew.
The Beijing crews all speak Mandarin, and people that came on from the south speak Cantonese, and then out in the river towns they spoke a dialect that I wasn't exactly clear what it was called. John being John was shown many places that had roads and were accessible but he didn't feel they captured the compositions that he wanted in the river valleys and so he kept pushing further and further out and ultimately we were working in places where there was no word for pavement. It was worth it because it looks like unlike almost any place I had been. Making a movie in a place like that it's like an Army operation, half of it is the logistics of just getting all the people and things where you need them to be and that was challenging.
Q4: How faithful is the movie to the original novel?
A4: Ron Nyswaner who wrote this adaptation originally did it very faithfully, it was a very faithful adaptation of the book. Over the years he and I, I think by stages kind of expanded the scope of it progressively through a couple of stages, first emotionally sort of in letting the characters actually transcend their limitations a little further than they do in the book and then quite a bit further and then... The novel never really leaves the house in China, it's all in her head and even what Walter's doing you only hear from what she hears from other people. It's very claustrophobic.
Obviously we didn't want to go to China to film the inside of a wood cabin. When John came on, John I think was most responsible for saying look 'Let's not be vague about China, let's anchor the story in a specific historical context' and China in the 1920's was a very chaotic place, it was very akin to what's going on in the Middle East right now, it was basically torn about by factionalism and warlords from different regions like is depicted in the film and the nationalist army was just starting to form up and control the east. There was a lot of shooting of protesting workers, they gunned down a crowd and a huge wave of resentment swept through the country and lots of farmer's were killed out in the provinces. John initially looked at that and said 'Well that doubles up on the Cholera in terms of the climate of tension and fear he's taking her out in to.
As we worked on it, it was kind of impossible to ignore to that we started to have to deal with the issue of Westerners mucking around in other people's countries and telling them how to fix it at the point of a gun and umm.. It reminded us of something but it eludes me.. *laughs* All of that creates a texture for the film which is nice for me because it adds depth to that character he's also, he's not just concerned with his relationship with her, but he kind of stands for something that I think we recognize in ourselves almost, which is that connection of the rightness of our own ways. You know it was a long progress and the good news for us was that Ron, a lot of times a writer will move on to other things and Ron stayed with us the entire way. His faith in us and his willingness to stay with the project was really significant because the voice of the piece could stay consistent. All the ideas we had Ron executed them and really kept an integrity to it.
Q5: Norton was asked how his experiences with two other method actors (Robert DeNiro and Marlon Brando) in the film "The Score" helped him as an actor.
A5: Oh.. I'm only just finding out that I'm a method actor.. *laughs* I don't even know what that means... (Original person who asked the question then says 'I read it on the Internet!' which also drew big laughs from everyone including Norton) Well then it HAS to be true! I could find out a lot about myself if I got on the internet and did more reading.
When someone calls and says these people are going to be in a movie, if I said 'What is it?' and they said 'Oh, we're going to read the phone book..' I'd be like 'Oh yah.. I'll come for that' .. I'd do that one to be in the poster, you know what I mean? It might have been nice if it had been something with a little more depth to it but.. Like I said I didn't really care what it was, I was gunna go and work with those guys just for the story. It was fun! We shot that in Canada in Montreal and had a wonderful summer in Montreal which is great. I'm not trying to be flippant. I had known both of those actors for a while. Marlon was this kind of.. Like the fat man on the hill.. He would have people up and you would visit him if he called you and he was sort of lonely in his old age. There were a lot of us who checked in on him now and then and I never thought that I'd ever get to work with him. I think that was his last film. That was kind of thrilling. De Niro is just everything that he's cracked up to be. All the things you imagine it would be like working with him. He's very meticulous; I liked seeing a kind of guy who as much as he's done it he still marches through the drudge work of it. He does all the detail work and he's very good at looking at a scene that's fat and stripping away what's not needed in it. It was a huge privilege to mix it up them.
Q6: What is it about this material that kept you fired up enough and interested enough to continually come back to it?
A6: A lot of the things that we’ve been talking about… You know you don’t run into stuff that’s complicated and rich like that every day. I mean it’s not like you’re choosing between phenomenal parts. When you get a good one, or you see one that you think you understand on some levels you hold on to it. In part too, to be totally honest, everybody can imagine when you’re watching a move like ‘Out of Africa’ or ‘Lawrence of Arabia’ you think ‘Wow, that’s gotta be so fun to make a movie like that’ and again you don’t see these great epic films all the time. For me I just thought I wanted to make one of those kind of movies and have that kind of experience and worth with an international crew and go somewhere. It felt a couple of times like we were cooked on it. It just wasn’t going to come together and I definitely had a few moments where I thought, I’m banging my head against the wall on this, it’s just not happening and maybe we should just move on. But, eventually we got Naomi and she was so responsive to it, so that sort of re-invigorated me. It did re-affirm for me that sometimes you just have to persevere with something.
Q7: You were a natural on that horse in the film. How did that happen? *laughs*
A7: Well I did this movie the year before called “Down In The Valley”. I spent a few months really working with rodeo riders and barrel riders and I got decently trained. That’s preamble to saying that the reason I looked so upright in that horse is that about three days before we shot the sequence on the horse I went out to check the horse that I had trained to do a few of these things specifically for those shots in Beijing to find that they hadn’t brought that horse. They were trying to hand me off another one and I was in a bad mood and so I got on it, which was a stupid thing to do and I knew better. Through a series of circumstances another guy ran his horse up the back of my horse and that horse threw me off really badly. So my back felt a lot like this mic stand and they put me in a brace and so that’s why I look so.. *laughs* We were in the mountains so there was nowhere really to go, we finished the film after about two weeks. I went to Hong Kong and I found out I had broken my spine in three places. So I can’t really ride a horse very well.
Q8: What country was subbing for Austria in the ‘The Illusionist’ and how much fun was it working with Paul Giamatti?
A8: That whole film was filmed in the Czech Republic. It was mostly in Prague and the surrounding countryside. The castle with the animal heads is one of the old hunting lodges. Prague is a great city. It’s magical in its own way. Paul Giamatti, I did a play with him when I was 19 and he was 21. He was really good then. He was kind of the guy who intimidated everybody when we were in college. He looked exactly like he looks now when he was 21. I was barely shaving and I saw him in college play George in ‘Who’s Afraid of Virginia Wolfe’, you know he’s supposed to be like a 50 something year old man and I was looking at it like where’d they bring this guy in from. He was 21 and he was incredible.
Q9: How do you know when you’ve nailed a character that you are portraying in a film?
A9: I guess when you guys tell me. *laughs* I have no way of sensing sometimes.. If I’m lucky by the end of the first week on a movie I don’t feel like a fraud anymore. I usually feel in the beginning like a complete pretender, like cold, I can’t explain it. Some of the only times I’ve ever rolled into the shooting of a film feeling really ready were the very few times that I did a film where we did a rehearsal process. ‘25th Hour’ we rehearsed hard for a couple of weeks because we only had 35 days to shoot the film. It was great, I loved it, it was the theatre actor in me and I really, really prefer to have some rehearsal sessions. But you learn to trust that you’re doing fine and that if it’s a disaster you’ll all see it. If you’ve all made some terrible choices or judgment calls you can go back and do it again.
Every one of them is extremely different for me.. I never.. That’s why I was semi-joking about being a method actor. I’d probably feel much more confident if I had a plan every time I headed into one of these things. They’re just so different, it’s impossible to approach all pieces of work the same way. Sometimes it’s totally like an external thing of saying… Like on ‘The Illusionist’ the character almost seemed like a super hero to me, where he was so enigmatic. One of my biggest problems was that I kind of wanted to do it because when I read the stage performances and found it so cool and I didn’t know if I could pull that off. Then I started thinking about this and I realized everything he is described as, I don’t feel like I’m that guy. I actually ended up digging up one of those old.. Remember that Marvel comic called ‘Dr. Strange’? ‘Dr. Strange’ was this magician that had mystical powers and had black hair that was swept back and a widow’s peak and a black beard and I took it to this make-up artist I worked with and I said ‘I think that’s what we’re doing’.
I tried some black contact lenses just to see if I could get sort of shark eyes, but it didn’t work. As soon as they put you in those frock coats, all of a sudden you start to feel like that guy. On that one really, truly, the way he looked and the clothes and the boots and the hats and the capes and all of it, Paul Giamatti and I talked about it like the wardrobe has to work for you on a film like that. Those people didn’t move, they would never sit like I’m sitting here.
They were adults and they were upright. There was formalism to everything. Putting on a beard and putting on a cloak helped me on something like that. In ‘The Painted Veil’ it was a much more inside out process for me. I think that it started with me and Naomi kind of writing letters. I think we both felt like the challenge in these characters was to commit to their weaknesses in a way. I do find that sometimes when you start getting into a character you start to defend that character unconsciously. Maybe you if you don’t guard against that you don’t commit to that character. Naomi had to commit to the idea that ‘Kitty’ is shallow. She does have a narrow view of the world, she is all the things Walter says about her and he is all the things she says about him. It demands a kind of commitment to their flaws so we started, not as the characters, but over a year or so we just started writing to each other a lot about what our own experiences had been.
It was almost confessional; we did it with John too, talked about those moments. Tried to act out those experiences in our own lives to some degree which was interesting for me because I tend to gravitate to things that are very exotic to my experience. I’ve never found that my own personal experiences are a very deep reserve of insight for me. I generally go at it as more of an investigation kind of a process, or a process of trying to absorb what someone else’s reality is and then do it justice, as opposed to pulling on my own stuff. This film was interesting because I found that I related to the dynamic of these two characters and it created some interesting moments for me and Naomi.
We got into a place eventually where things came up and out in these scenes that weren’t in the script. I think Naomi may have made up that line ‘For someone as smart as you, you have so little sense of proportion.’ I think she just said it one time and it was brilliant. There were a couple of things in that scene that I thought just sort of came up and out of this long process of thinking about the characters. But I definitely felt at times more personally, like I was exposing myself more than in my other roles.
Q10: Do you have any interest in directing?
A10: Uhh. Sure! Yah.. I did it on one film. There’s things I’ve intended to do, but some of these other things got in the way. I was seriously thinking about doing something, but when this finally came together then… You know.. Life marches on. But I’ll do my best.
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