Edward Norton Returns Again

Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard

Edward Norton returns to Armchair Expert for a deep dive into his innovative barge-based pollution control technology, family legacy, and reflections on career autonomy. The conversation blends personal stories, environm

Key takeaways

Norton's barge tech removes emissions equivalent to 65M cars yearly

Transcript preview

Welcome welcome to armchair expert I'm Dan Shepard I'm joined by Monica Norton Hello Hello It's not true we're not married no because he's married to my friend Shauna Shauna Yeah Yeah for people who don't know the backstory Shauna Edward's wife That's right producer extraordinary Yes introduce Kristen and I and then you'll hear a funny story about when we had babies which maybe you've already heard but we revisit it Yeah, that's true. Yeah, very serendipidus moment happened. Because she had a dinner party. This is not the the if you miss it originally Shauna had a dinner party where you two met. Yeah birthday dinner party for Jonah I think at a restaurant. There's only like eight of us. Do you remember which restaurant? It was on Melrose it's kind of a famous fancy restaurant of Melrose but I can't think of the name of it. Like Jones like Dantana. It wasn't Jones or Dantanas. Yeah, or Beverly could also bet on Beverly. And that whole zone. No, further from East, it doesn't matter West. The point is Edward Norton is our yesterday's an Academy Award nominated actor and filmmaker Fight Club America History X, Primal Fear, Birdman, he has a new movie out. We're continuing on with our Invite Week because we love the movie so much. Yes, so good. So we're, we're pushing on. strong and hard to talk more about the invite and to hear all good things from Edward Norton. Please enjoy. You have a cream top? Did you drive from Malibu or from Hollywood? I was in Santa Monica working and then I came here. What are you working on? I am raising a lot of money right now. Okay. For that cargo company? Shipping the mission. Yeah, have you seen this thing? Mm-mm. He has a barge company, right. And it has a 13-story crane on it. 15. 15, sorry. Get it right. Get it right. I imagine in the crane game, it's all about those originally it was a construction site concrete delivery. Oh right. It was for the delivery of concrete up into high stories of construction sites. Yeah, so they're built for a ton of weight, right? That concrete once you've got 13 stories of it in a tube. And all we're doing is bringing gas down. Yeah, yeah. So he has these barges and then there's a 15-story crane on top. And when a ship is in port, it hovers above the smoke stack of the ship and sucks up all the carbon monoxide, or it's the nitrous oxide sulfurous dioxide and particulate matter all these diesel waste we don't even actually deal with the CO2 obviously people have their opinions and there's a lot of debate about CO2 and atmospheric CO2 and all of it right yeah but there are no regulations on CO2 right now for the ships or just society we don't make you be compliant with zero CO2 but we do have this super interesting because even the Trump EPA regulates nitrous sulfurous dioxide because it kills people that's what gives you lung cancer so you could call it the smog that's the stuff that creates the smog that's really really bad for people I think the stat I heard is that the emissions off the ports in California drive like six and a half billion of respiratory health costs in the state every year like cancer asthma yeah yeah yeah well the number I heard you talking about which is crazy is that you've only been doing this for what a year or something how long is this is operational operational for three years but you were saying maybe it was in the full duration of its deployment but maybe you were just saying a year that it was the equivalent of 65 million cars just last year yeah okay so in one year oh my God it's sucking the equivalent of 65 million cars operating for a year yeah it's a lot those things fucking billow poison huh the ships are really really I mean you know a lot about cars so you actually know what a catalytic converter is yes the catalytic converter is the catalyzer it basically is taking things that are poisonous Dioxide and sulfurous dioxide if you catalyze nitrous dioxide into nitrogen and oxygen then it's just air you're good which is wild when you think about it that bonded it's horrible for us. Oh chemistry's endlessly fascinated right it's like oh this shape is good the shape plus this shape is your dad you're dead I know it's amazing I don't even think people totally grasp what a good job we've done on cleaning up cars obviously there's some stuff coming out the pipe not as clean as an EV or something like that the average are just not even in the realm of what they were when we were kids. Totally. You and I probably came to LA somewhere approximate to each other. 95 for me. Yeah, 95 is the first time I came to LA to shoot Primal Fear. Oh that's not here. Yeah, here in Chicago a little bit. Yeah, I so have it in my head as being Chicago. 95 is when you came? Yes, ma'am. He was shooting. You were eight years old. Oh, God, shut. She's eight years old. She's. Crazy. Well, I was. Well, I was only 18. You never saw the San Gabriel Mountains in the mid 90s. People will even say and it sounds hilarious like I'll be traveling and people like, oh how's the smog there? I'm like, dude that's such an 80s like you that's so 80s that you're thinking that like I don't ever see dirty air. Be quiet Tom Hanks. That's enough. You know we've never talked about your grandfather. I got super interested in your grandfather today. What's his last name? Raus? World War II, yeah? He served in the Navy and Naval Strategic Command at Pearl Harbor. And when did he get into city planning and all the civil engineering? It's funny to bring him up because I was just talking about him with someone. He's a very, very interesting person. He was like orphaned when he was in his early teens and he and his brother, they lived this extremely like Huck Finn, Tom Sawyer like existence, kind of rootless and parentless on the eastern shore, the Chesapeake Bay. They had older. who they would bounce between but often would just cut school and go off and live on an island crabbing and fishing and he became extremely well known and they teach classes about him at Harvard now and everything you had to like live with him to know what an extremely eccentric person he was he really did like to go out and trap muskrat and make a stew out of it among the many things he did he gave Frank Gary his first commissions oh really Frank Gary's first building that wasn't Dennis Hopper's house was my grandfather's 1967. Oh wow, wow, wow. I have a photo of my granddad and Frank, where Frank is so young and he has this unbelievable, he looks like Ron Jeremy. Oh, perfect, great. The Hedgehog. Frank credited my granddad with his, if you go and Gary Architects today, my granddad's office building, built 1967 is the one in the lobby. Anyway, Frank told me something that resonated with me, which is he came to think that he was colorblind because he had a great feeling for space, and community spaces and open spaces and all these things he was known for. But Frank said he had the worst instincts about color and the funny thing was I always thought he was eccentric. He would wear like green pants and a modest jacket and you might have thought it was prepy but he was like the furthest thing from prepy. He parked cars and hustled pool to pay for night school, played really serious poker and never took his Navy pay because he won so much money playing poker and he was one of those people who had an edgier life, I think than the life that he became, I think than the life that he became, you became, you know respected. Yeah, yeah. You know, he'd go to like a serious meeting and you have lures in his hat and I think people thought he was sort of being intentionally folksy or homespun and it really, really wasn't. It was genuine. Yeah, he was really, really funny person, but he was this incredibly accomplished kind of visionary thinker about cities. He was on the cover of Time magazine in the 70s or early 80s for his ideas, which is wild. Monica, he invented the very first, are you ready for this. food court in a mall. Oh, so he built a ton of malls, right? Lots of malls. And he built these like festival spaces or installations and cities that were supposed to bring people together. This is interesting digression. Who knows if there are more than 10 people interested in this, we'll go there. In the 50s he was on Eisenhower's Housing Commission and I am told he was one of the first people to predict that the interstate highway system, which was being built in the 50s, would encourage low density development outside the cities, and the cities. class would sort of leave the cities for what became the suburbs and that this would lead to kind of an economic hollowing out of the cities. I don't know if it's true that he coined the phrase. He was an early user of the idea of suburban sprawl and we all talked about suburban sprawl now, we grew up in it, right? Yeah, yeah. But he talked about suburban sprawl, he kind of predicted the hollowing out of the cities and in the 60s and in the 60s when all the cities were going bankrupt, basically because the middle class had kind of left for the bedroom communities. a visionary. Even in the 60s and 70s he was arguing for the need for more city planning, the revitalization of urban downtowns to bring the middle class back to the town center. He talked a lot about the European tradition of the town center and the marketplace and how we needed to find a way to both in our suburban planning actually build communities, not just developments and strip malls. But then in the urban centers, downtown Boston he did the Fannual Hall, Quincy market. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Baltimore, he completely redeveloped the Baltimore Inner Harbor. He did the pier in New York? South Street Seaport. Yeah, yeah. Which wasn't super successful. Well, what I liked about reading about him is he went on to admit, it didn't work in some cities. No. Some of them they were smash hits and they still stand and then the others the city didn't take to it. Which is fascinating. Because in those cities, there wasn't as much suburban sprawl, like people stay. I think. I think the opposite. I think the opposite, it was so depressed. and it's sports and a lot of things go into it restaurants museums and live entertainment I bring him up because you have what seems to me I don't claim to know you well enough to make this observation but from the outside it seems that you have among the loosest grasps of anyone I've ever met with their career you hold it so loosely from my perspective you mean like creative life like in films work how you've navigated as we just said 95 so 30 years of doing this you're seeming confidence to be patient your willingness to wait to something that you want to do your refusal to get more money when you decide to not be in the Avengers you're not done you're like okay I'm gonna wave goodbye to like 40 million dollars right like oh there's 40 million bucks probably more than that like a down he lives seven or eight of them yeah So there's just all these moments I've just kind of observed over the years. It's such an enigma to me, because I'm so different. Do you know what I think is so funny about? Number one, I was just talking to someone we both know on the phone. I said I was coming over here. Yeah. We were both admiringly talking about how good at this you are, because you're such an autodidact. You're one of the people I know who I think most authentically, I know, most authentically, you're one I thought Sean and I will be going along we listen to a lot I said this in the car coming over here I was like have you noticed one thing decks does which is he seeks affinity with a lot of his guests even to the point we laughed one time because there was one person you kept saying that's like this and they were like I don't think so affinity meaning like a similarity yeah find yeah to a fault you have an instinct I feel like to connect yes through shared I know we can find bedrock right we actually know each other if I come in and you're like we are so different I'm like hey where's the affinity no no no no no no there's so many things were kidding we're so similar to no I like the we're but of course when there are things especially if I think I'm similar to somebody right and then they have these behaviors that like I can't personally imagine being confident enough to do or just having the peace of mind so when people do things that I do weirdly feel similar to you that are so outside of how I operate curiosity to me. Yeah. Like now I really, because I know we're the same, right? We're human beings, we want to be loved and adored and we love our children. You know like we're all the same. So when there's these like splinters I get so fascinated with how are you somehow having this loose grip on all this and I was strangle holding it. How we look out through the skin at other people and our inability to necessarily see ourselves? Yeah, yeah. Is wild to me because I really might have said the same thing about you if I was talking to someone we've known each other a pretty long time. Yeah, 20 years. Yeah, and in different phases I know we've talked about both of us perceiving that the other didn't like each other. I was like, God, this guy really doesn't like this guy. I'm so dumb. But I feel like you're on a journey that to me looks from the outside like enormously confident carving of your own path to find entirely by the stuff that's so idiosyncratic and particular to you, not only your passions and gifts and everything but you, but you've succeeded, multiple lanes, maybe all of us in our mind are restless and self-critical and tend to not almost like tally the wins. We tally the dissatisfaction. Yeah. And we don't see what others see from the outside that looks like confident, non-attachment or whatever you're saying. You say we're lightly, right? It's also complicated too, right? Like, are we talking about what snapshot of me and you? No, exactly. Right. Like, yes, today I agree with what you're saying. nicely but if I take a snapshot in 2014 I'm pretty panicked. What are we doing now? The answer to your question is not that you need a reassurance but in a weird way I don't think I have any lightness of hold on my aspirations my ambitions my endeavors when you say from the outside it looks to you like I'm sort of confidently waiting only doing the things I want to do. This is not true. Okay. First of all, I think we have talked about this. No actor turns off the actor's narcissistic brain. The joke that how many actors did it take to screw in a light bulb, 100, one to do it in 99 to say I could have done that so much better. Don't think for 10 seconds that I am capable of shutting off entirely the part of my brain that goes, why didn't I get sent that? Well that's reassuring. It is reassuring. I would have liked to have read that. I'm really excited that they're calling but I can tell there's this urgency to it and what that means is someone else dropped or it couldn't show up okay fuck it I'll make it good you know what I mean I'll show them also I don't want to add success quite young and that makes a difference when there's a lot of struggle it's gonna cause a little bit more of like a tight tight grass right so I can't help but come up with a hypothesis for this observation that may or may not be correct but one is I thought Maryland. Yes, he was very successful. He was really wild. He didn't trust money at all. He had an oldsmobile his entire life. He lived in a very small house and he gave away all of his money. He was an extremely like man of the people kind of guy. I would say the most significant financial thing he bequeathed to his grandchildren was he paid for a solid good college. He made it so that none of us came out of college with debt, which is huge. But that in his mind was that's the leg up I'm gonna give you. That was that was, that was pretty much it. He gave enterprise community partners which was his low-income housing and that's why you were in Japan you were working for that company yeah yeah because I kind of went to Nick Kroll admirer in this similar way where it's like he seemingly has only been motivated by what makes him laugh the hardest there hasn't seemed to be any dirty calculation of how he could get more money from the outside but I interviewed him as like his dad's is a billionaire right or close to it but yeah like he went to school in the limousine and he'll be the first as me he's like yeah money he's like money he's like I think that liberated me in a lot of ways. I think that's fucking stupendous if someone can take that privilege, childhood, and turn it into just pursuing their creative interest. I don't think I'm as relaxed about how things are going as you think I am. Okay. Also I'm not accusing you of having grown up with Kroll money. People did, but not me. I remember in 1992, 1993 in New York, I had an actual like little financial ledger book and I decided to go through the exercise of like if I want to like if I want to be able to be able to be able to be able to be able to be able to be able to be able to be able to be able to be able to be able to be able to be able to be able to be able to be able to be able to be an actor in New York and just weight tables or do temp jobs I have to know exactly what it actually cost to be here so I started this exercise I wrote down to every subway token every muffin that I bought I tallied every single thing so that I could understand how little can I live on do you remember what the tally was in 93 to live in New York in the way I was living I needed to make about 11,000 bucks a year I had found an apartment was 400 bucks a month impossible a rent stabilized department was 400 bucks a month I mean it was out a system for myself. I thought I can exist in New York City if I knew what my nut was and I knew what I had to make. Here's where we're similar that was my same strategy in LA. Yeah like made eight grand a year for 10 years because that's what it took. By the way the thing when I throw back on myself at that time was if I had to have a car and gas in that mix I wouldn't have pulled it off how could you get by an eight grand if you were buying gas? Honda Civic Civicicicicicicicicicicicicicicicicicicicicicicicicicicicicicicicicicicicicicicicicicke on that mix. The apartment would be less. And I drove like 80 miles a week. Do you know what's funny is on the highway the other day? On the 101 I turned to my right and I saw a Toyota Corolla FX16 GTS, which was my used car that I had It's the weirdest. It's like a trapezoid For no amount of money what I have said that any of those could still be operating on the road Toyota The memory drawer that opens though when you see the car you are late teens in to get a 91 Honda Civic DX in doing it up just because like I lived in that car for 10 years and I'm like I need to honor that fucking trusty little girl. It was probably your car that you saw. So tell me still. So great so there's not that and then my other thought was simply you're not going to be able to even comment on this observation but Monica can. You're in the rarest situation where it's like your talent's fucking kind of undeniable and it was undeniable right out of the gate. I do. I do think you're got to buy you some abatement of the anxiety. You know you were just so validated and you were just so obviously brilliant at this that I don't think you were wrestling with what Monica and I was like well I'm not getting hired am I not good. Am I not good? Like I don't want to know if they're good or not. Yeah. You're just going and you hope it's not that you're not good but you don't fucking know and I think that is a big source of the anxiety too. I also don't know if you're or do people think I'm good? I think you think like am I portraying this character correctly am I embodying this like you're not really it's not very external it's more internal and that's what makes him so good. I relate to that I can't remember if we've talked about this or not but I've always felt there's only two categories of actors I think some are iconic and I'm not saying good or bad but I think some people have qualities that we enjoy so much. Clint Eastwood. Yeah, Harrison Ford, and again for a set of qualities that we need from them. They're almost like Greek mythology, right? They personify something that we want and it can be dark, it can be light, it can be stalwart, it can be hilarious. And then there are people who are in the Joseph Campbell sense, they're the shape shifter. We need iconic performers because they represent something, they distill something for us and then people who are, I don't even want to say character actors, but it's not them, they're a vessel for a thing that channels something else. had any conviction that I could function as anything other than someone who absorbs things sort of that shamanistic idea of the sucking up of something and finding the way to put it through yourself and express something with it right? You're like a mother bird you like go out and you eat and then you come bring it puke it all back into our little baby's mouse. it's an excuse to go dive into Pete Seeger's world and learn banjo or whatever. It's an excuse to marinate in a thing, soak it up, find some way, with the writing, whatever, find some way to get something across and sort of inhabit a thing without the consequences of making that your whole life. And in that sense, it's a joy ride of diverse, weird, strange experiences. The other thing that it does definitely to me. is I honest to God, it's not am I good at it, it's at a certain point you know I've worked with in this magic trick not just the magic trick of acting but the magic trick of how that interfaces with the larger magic trick of making a film that works or that has something to say or anything but the way I like working on it tends to also translate into something that I actually enjoy which is I don't feel that having done anything well earns me a sense of certainty that I'm going to do it well on the next one because I'm always like this one might be the one that I fuck up. Would I be right to imagine Pete Seeger right like you're just dumping stuff in there and I don't know what those things are whether you're reading a biography or you're watching video of him or you're learning to play the banjo and while you're dumping it in there are you just kind of waiting for the magic collect like, oh, there it is. I often feel something close to a mounting sense of maybe not panic because I've learned to trust myself, but I will often feel a mounting feeling that I have not cracked it, uh-huh, and that we are getting awfully close to the beginning of the thing. The blast-off. Yeah, and I do love if and when the moment happens that something slides over into this feeling of the suit fits. I've got it right? Sometimes I find it's a different mechanism with each thing. Pete for sure one of the things was just his voice, his vocal intonations and the rhythm and for me the way he spoke and the way he sung being thin and Pete's teeth his hair his things the clothes he wore in a weird way that's like that's the easiest we don't even have to invent it because we got copious photographs and that's like mechanical almost. For me there's something about the way there's something about the way the way and the rhythm of the way he spoke was a part of what made him seem like a druid to other people because he wasn't like their peer he was this other thing he was like their druid impersonation is always a challenge or a tricky thing yeah so what one of your gifts is you're kind of a mimic I am a good mimic yeah you're like a mimic so there's that aspect but I watch a lot of mimics do things and there's also not three other layers beyond the mimicry but yeah clearly that's just like one of the components and musical training. She hears voices, music, all of it in very compartmentalized pieces. She can see each component of it. She can hone in on one little tiny aspect that's actually defining the whole thing, but that I would miss. It's almost like the key to the mimicry, right? I'll go even a little more technical. I think someone who's got a good ear like Kristen does, you can pretty much sing anyone. I have noticed that people who are good at that and I've noticed that when I hear someone, I'm going to try to slide into it. I kind of intuitively know what is happening mechanically. I know where Owen's voice is, is it back here or is it up here? I know where Woody's is. I know where Bill Hurts is. And it is actually like a physical locating of what part of your face are resonating. Yeah, yeah, yeah. A lot of the way a person sounds has to do with how rooted they are in their breath or not, whether they're speaking from the forward part, the forward part, the back, the back. And I kind of think people who are good at it may just have who knows why. It's not just the ear because you hear the same thing. Right. It's like an instinct for how to shape the cavern of your mouth. Yeah, that's a great piece and it makes so much sense because right Kristen like learned how to sing through her chest, through her head, locating her voice in all these different areas to get a different outcome and being very aware of that everything you're talking about, like the machinery of making noise. They tried to teach it too like in theater school like I had voice class I couldn't I was like what do you mean? What do you mean put it up here like I can't do that? Maybe it's genetic or something I will say to though when I was a kid I didn't feel particularly interesting But other people seemed really interesting to me and if someone was interesting to me or an actor or something I used to just spend a lot of time Imitating people that I thought were interesting. Yeah because then you would be interesting. I have certain actor friends who I just trust, who I go all the way back with, who I know I can sit in a room and be really goofy and not feel self-conscious. Yeah, yeah. And I will work and work and work on a thing. I read Pete, my friend Peter Lewis is a terrific actor. I'll work scenes with someone and someone who will go, oh, I heard it and get it wrong and whatever. But I will do a lot of work in front of a mirror. Yeah. I was doing death to Smochi with Danny DeVito. in my own mind who my source was for this character who wears a calorie shell and a flannel shirt and won't give sugar to kids and is all these things and I was doing it we're in the first couple days of the movie and I think I said my voice is horse right now but I think I looked at Catherine Keener and I said something like hang on a second there Nora because you know you're hall if you heard a halt hungry lonely tired that's you and I'm not getting sucked into your negative energy and Danny pops up and I was like it's going to come to you and he was like what is that what are you doing he was like what are you doing he was I love it but you know it was just Woody Harrels. Yeah and I just decided that Sheldon Mopes was Woody it took Danny a couple days too where he was like oh my god oh my god sometimes you do things without thinking about them but when you talk about what is mimicry and you realize it is the interface between ear and actual location of a thing right? It's like how does Steph Curry hit the shots he hits? There's a lot of muscle training, muscle memory and also he just perceives the distance to a degree of perfection that we can't really even imagine in our minds. You know to him there's a clarity about how far he is from that and it translates into motion. It's just unreal. Well and if he told you how it had happened, neurologists would say that probably can't happen. I remember that great chapter in Malcolm Gladwell book where it's talking about the great hit How do they hit? They know the time frame between it leaving the hand to before it's crossing the plate, right? They know that duration. And the guy's like, oh, I can always tell if they drop their shoulder and they do blank, it's gonna be a fastball because they have to start swinging the second it's leaving their hand virtually. Hitting the majorly fastball is the most astonishing. I don't think what anybody anybody says. That's the single most incredible interface between the brain and the body in sport. There's a million things that are hard, like Nordicic. I'm not sure anybody's processing information and making a physical decision to do something virtually impossible. Yeah, oh, it was in blink, that makes sense. So what they found was if all the things the batter said were true, they can add that up. They know the duration of the cognition, right? They've measured it in an FMRI. And what they can conclude is none of that stuff's happening. There is not time for him to see the shoulder, compute it to here, move it to the motor control, make this decision. They know that that that that's impossible. of their brain fires that doesn't do any of that computation that the batter thinks is happening. They get an emotional intuition about that pitch and the great hitters have a really good emotional intuition and I bet Steph Curry would explain what's happening but I bet there's something completely emotional that's happening that allows him to do that in some weird way. That's what we're talking about too because at a certain point anyone who uses their body and their voice as an instrument, whether it's a mimicking someone or singing. I agree it's emotional. I mean if I'm imitating someone honestly the feeling I have it's not really analytical it's joyful.