Leaves of Grass – SXSW Interview with Ed Norton and Tim Blake Nelson

Killerfilm sat down with director Tim Blake Nelson, and star Edward Norton to discuss their lastest film, Leaves of Grass. The film is a dark comedy in which Edward Norton plays two roles – Bill, an uptight, by-the-book ivy league professor and his intelligent but still very backwoods pot dealing brother, Brady.

Tim, in many films, characters in the south are portrayed in a manner that is very one dimensional, for easy laughs. This film seems to have a much more layered relationship with southern characters.  As a filmmaker, do you seek to involve yourself with films that act to correct those stereotypes.

Nelson: Yeah, I certainly do. I was eager to debunk southern stereotypes in this movie. I grow tired of intelligence having such a limited manifestation in movies, such as a certain level of formal education. When I wrote this, I knew immediately that the wisest and smartest characters in this movie, would be the ones who either remained in Oklahoma or returned there. So the smartest guy in this movie is Brady, and it’s also stated by their mother. The wisest character is Kerry Rustle’s character, and she chose to return to Oklahoma and write. She gives the Bill character the wisdom that allows him to begin to move forward in his life as it’s collapsing around him.

In order for you to achieve the duality that you had on screen, how did you guys as director and actor help to fascilliate a suspension of disbelief in the audience.

Nelson: Suspension of disbelief in a story like this is pretty essential. You have to be responsible as a storyteller, to make it feasible enough. There are details peppered throughout. I didn’t want to bang the audience over the head with it. An obvious question would be “wouldn’t people know they were twins if they grew up together”, but the truth is they grew up in another town, Hugo, and Brady has moved to Idabel. These stories are all far fetched, but the antecedent material for the movie, like in Menander and Plautus, and Shakespeare. It’s a retelling of a twins genre, and the main character is a classicist. That is all intentional. It’s meant to reflect on those earlier works. The character Bill has done a translation of Platus’s play the Menaechmi, which is a Roman twins play. The suspension of disbelief in that whole question is part of the fun of the movie…

Norton: Any questions I’ve had about whether a red neck from Oklahoma could go on and become a Brown classical philosophy professor ended when I met Tim. As, you can see, one conversation with Tim and you realize Bill is a believable character. I really agree with the idea that there are not just archetypal characters, but types of stories going back to classical drama that have certain structures dependent upon suspending disbelief. But I thought the two worlds it was trying to straddle were kind of delightful. It was not something I’d ever seen before, which is always hard to find. Tim is so authentically rooted in both of those worlds. You know when you are being driven by someone who knows where they are going, and you can feel that when you read a script. That was a big part of the appeal to me. It was clearly a film that only Tim knew how to make, because he owned it all. If there is a criteria that gets me interested in a piece of work, apart from any personal reaction I have to them, if I feel that this is the right piece of work for that director at this moment in their career, that is a big draw. I felt that way with Fincher on Fight Club, that this is the guy to direct this film. I felt that way with Spike Lee on Twenty Fifth Hour. If you feel like someone just knows what this is about to their core, and knows how to bring their personal style to it, it’s going to have that sort of special confidence. To me the only thing I wanted us to be careful of is that the twins never felt like a trick…that you’d stop looking at the seems and that you felt that these were guys inhabiting the same space and interacting with each other in a very extemporaneous way.

Logistically, Tim, how did you do it as a director with your team also acting in the movie. How did you economize those two performances, those that you knew that with the mocap or the green screen that you knew you were getting something that was completely believable in not just the performances but also the technical aspects.

Nelson: Remarkably there is no green screen in this movie. There is motion control. Technically there were all sorts of challenges, but really the soul of it was Edward’s talent. You write these characters and all you can hope for is that your actors will elevate the material. What is so remarkable about Edward is that he is so truthful as an actor, that the source material from within him is so gorgeously accessed that the dramatic base notes in the movie, such as when he is eulogising his brother are just exquisitely rendered. But at the same time he is able to play the loopy comic moments. So few actors have that sort of bandwidth. To play these twins was really quite a juggling act. It takes a mind…a rare mind…to be able to map out a scene as character ‘A’ to leave room so that character ‘B’ can respond. It’s almost a sort of cubist way of thinking. You’re looking at the scene from all sorts of different angles, and he just has the ability to do that.

You had to keep a tight schedule. How did you balance the time but also allow Edward to have the time to explore these two characters?

Nelson: Again a huge advantage having Edward is that he’s directed a movie before. So he knows how hard my job is, and he was always very sensitive to that. We actually finished this movie a day early.

Norton: There is a little bit of a dirty dozen in it. I think you have to…knowing there is no room for error kind of scenario such as a scene when we’re doing the twins on the porch together…it has to be finished that day. I think the thing we did best on this was prep. On a given day like that, if you answer all the questions knowing we’re going into this character first…we’re doing these shots…. you leave yourself more room to play. We had a very clear road map of how we were going to handle it technically. You know, no sitting around saying “well maybe we should try to do X”.

Nelson: We’d get Brady done first, and set a performance with which Edward and I were both happy. That was a collaboration. With someone like Edward you don’t want to say, “This is the one we’re going with whether you like it or not”.

Norton: We quickly gravitated towards knowing that’s when we’ve got it. Sometimes we’d look at each other and say “Lets do one more” you know…to sort of juice this one little moment. Even in something regimented like this, there are fun ways to improvise it. When you start realizing there is not a clean line on the screen past which the character can’t pass. Sometimes in the moment I would have a thought to have one character to go and fake kick the other. Or the mirror shot. That was fun when we realized we could actually have them touch if we did the angles right. So sometimes we’d throw down some improvisational stuff and see if it would stick. I think some of those things are what make you guy “huh?” It only takes one or two moments of people overlapping in converstation, touch, or interacting with one another that feels real, and authentically extemporaneous to do the job of taking away the effect. Also, they do some things now that they didn’t do with twins things back in the day, such as you can do things with moving cameras now that you couldn’t do in the past.

Through the course of this film have you ever tried noodling, and how did you get Keri Russle to play with that?

Nelson: I’ve done nearly every type of fishing imaginable…but I’ve never noodled. And the reason I’ve never noodled is I didn’t want to end up getting bit by a water moccasin. I’m just too afraid of snakes. Getting Keri Russel to do that was about the easiest chore I had on this movie. She had a great attitude about it. She and Edward were fantastic together. You dream as an actor’s director of being able to let moments breathe in two-shots. One of my favorite moments in this movie is just letting the camera sit on Keri and Edward on that porch when he tries to kiss her. It goes on for several minutes, and I never had to cut to a close up. They are just so exquisite together.

Edward, in your career its been relatively rare for you to do movies that are primarily comedies. Did the fact that this was a comedy attract you to the film, and can we expect to see more comedies in your future?

Norton: I don’t tend to say, ‘Oh time for another one…’ of this or that genre. Things flow to you in a strange way, and why you bump into a certain thing in a certain moment. Some people know you in a certain way, and some people don’t. It’s hard to explain. I knew Danny Davito and he knew me, and he wanted me to do Death to Smoochy. I love that stuff. But to me, Fight Club is a comedy. When Fincher sent me the book, and I read it, I called him and the first thing I asked was “This a comedy right?” And he said “Oh yeah that’s the whole point”. So I certainly didn’t imagine myself as a dramatic actor when I’m running around in my underwear. I think Rounders was a comic movie in its own way too. I like things that aren’t superficially one thing or another, mainly. My favorite comedies are ones that are really smart too, and have a whole second level to them. This [film] when I read it, mainly I was laughing a lot at the lines. I remember reading Brady saying “Not the Miriam Webster either, but the motherfucking O.E.D.” There’s always a line or two in a script that you hit it and you almost decide to do that movie off of a line or two. A few of the things in this movie for me were just, that’s too funny. I don’t have any specific plans. Maybe if Seth Rogan calls with a great buddy flick I’ll be there.

Edward, as an actor does playing twins change your approach? How do you go about creating characters are the same yet different?

Norton: For me, its the same as always…just twice. I hear people talk about some actors being intellectual actors, and some being instinctual actors. I think its kinda crap. I think that anyone who knows anything about it knows good actors sort of do both. They do inside-out work and they do outside-in work. You can’t not do both. In something like this, Tim has provided a lot of the inside-out work. He’s given you in the script alot about who these characters are emotional. For these guys it was more outside-in work, not in an intellectual sense but in a tactile sense…like what do they wear and how do they sound, and finding the skin of them. I poked around about twins alot, and what was interesting was that it was very hard to find anybody who as an identical twin that didn’t focus on how much they were alike and really started to powerfully assert that identical twins are endemically alike in many ways. That brought up interesting conversations between us because the script is emphasizing their apparent differences, but then we started talking about all the ways they are the same. That made it a lot of fun. Like we added the line that Bill says, “Oh your still using vinyl” and Brady says , “I don’t go for digital…you can’t improve on the classics” because he’s really the same as Bill. He’s just as committed to a set of classical values. His just happen to be Little Feet and Town Van Zandt.

Tim, did acting and directing simultaneously make it easier are harder to direct the film?

Nelson: I’ve never acted before in one of the movies I’ve directed. This felt like the time to do it. The movie itself is such a platform for the lead actor, its really written for an exciting performance and it really depends on the audience watching an extraordinary actor have a great time pulling off this feat. It made sense to me as a director to act in support of that, and to be around as a side kick to help both characters out of certain problems…

Norton: He tried to punk out on it (laughs). We producers made him do it. We tried to imagine a better face for Bolder, made him, and it was hard to come up with.

Nelson: It was great…it was really fun

Norton: Mainly he just wanted to wear a do-rag.

When you came up with this movie, did you expect it to go along the lines of being a well thought out comedy, or did you expect it to fall into this new genre of stoner comedies?

Nelson: Definitely, didn’t want it to be just a stoner comedy. In fact, I never even considered that genre, either as something to embrace or move away from. Ultimately, that didn’t even enter into my mind. I know it’s being marketing to a degree in that way, and that’s fine. But really life is full of contradictions and life is messy…that’s what Bill learns. Really what we were setting out to do with this movie was create something that was funny and serious and had large tonal ambitions…a movie that could be poignant and funny and then suddenly violent.

Norton: We begged them to push the release until after SXSW. Last night was so great. I really can’t imagine a place where you get a laugh about the noodling, hear people cheer when a Towns Van Zandt song comes on…and then get a huge laugh about the ‘episotomology solving problems’ joke. It was like we were in Heaven. We’re in the place that this film was made for. Unfortunately, in today’s world there aren’t the kinds of theaters that there are in New York and Austin in places like Oklahoma and Louisiana where people really would enjoy this film. So the only way it will penetrate into the theatrical realm is if it does well in places like Austin. So that’s why when they asked us should we platform in New York and LA, we said no lets do Austin and Dallas.

The Richard Dreyfus scene takes place during the sabbath and he charges Brady with the menorah. Are you worried that some audiences might misinterpret it and turn off some audiences?

Norton: We haven’t had that experience.

Nelson: I’m a Tulsa jew and have a religious upbringing. The movie is very much about contradictions and balance. The zionist Tulsa jew who’s pugnacious is a reality. I grew up around it. And I think its really really funny. Drama and comedy are all about being surprising, coherent and true all at once. And what more could you ask for than a Zionist yokel. I grew up around this. You would go into these guys offices, most of them very successful in the oil business, and there would be pictures of them with world leaders…of both parties…it’s what I grew up around.

What did it mean for you to make this movie?

Nelson: This movie has everything I love in it. Classics, my home state, philosophy, literature…

Norton: Orthodontists…(laughs)

Nelson: And orthodontists…You know even my wife and two of my children are in it as actors. And because I love the source material so much, it was really easy to write. And a delight to direct because I had people like Edward to elevate the material, and surprising me with their interpretations of all of this stuff that is so close to me. This was really a lot of fun.