Edward Norton on His Favorite Roles | The Big Interview

In what role did you have the most fun and or felt you learned the most? I mean, I've had a lot of fun with a lot of roles. I mean, anytime you're learning a skill set, I mean, a tactile skill set, it's fun. I mean, it's fun to hang out with Johnny Chan and the greats of like the poker world and do these long, long, long coaching sessions. Make you a better poker player? Absolutely. And I think that's just fun. That's just pure fun. But so, you know, making a comedy with Danny DeVito and Robin Williams and Jon Stewart and Catherine Keener, that's fun, too. You know, that's just that's one kind of fun. And then there's a different kind of fun in the sense that like making films like American History Acts or Fight Club or The 25th Hour. You know, there's some things that are fun because, you know, I grew up on a certain kind of film. There were certain kind of films that just rocked my world. You know, Spike Lee's Do the Right Thing or Raging Bull. There are certain films that you see that when you're young and you realize this is something entirely different from a casual entertainment. This is like a mind expanding experience. This is shifting my view of the world or this is making me feel like someone understands the way I feel about life. You know, I mean, you can feel that way from a Bruce Springsteen song or you can feel that way from watching a film. And I think that when you get into making films, if you were affected by films like that, you know, your aspiration is to make one of those. Sometimes you make things that are hard. The doing of them is hard. Making American History Acts was really hard. It was a guerrilla kind of experience. You're too young to train here. End of story. Quit wasting our time. Making Fight Club was hard just because it was a very technically challenging, long film, but it was great, great fun. The gun, the bombs, the revolution has got something to do with a girl named Marla Singer. Sometimes you get a sensation in the midst of doing something that we're making this for us. This is going to be for our friends, for our, for the people our age. We're still men. Yes, we're men. We're on something here that feels like, you know, generational, like the graduate or something, you know what I mean? Like that maybe our parents won't even understand, but that our friends will and they will love it for that. And I think when you get, you could work 50 years in the movies and make 80 films, and I think if you get to do a couple of them that become real touchstones like that, you're very fortunate, you know? And I feel like I've gotten, I've been very, very lucky in terms of getting to have a few of those kinds of experiences where even in the doing of it, we sort of had that sensation that this is something that the people of our generation are going to really relate to. The last film I made as an actor, I had as much fun of it as I've ever had making a film. It's probably the 30th film I've made, and I had as much fun in the doing of it as I've had on any film I've worked on. It was with this director, Alejandro Iñárritu, who's a terrific filmmaker, but the way he approached the making, the actual making of the film, it's called Birdman. It was as inventive and original an approach to making a film as I've ever been involved with. I've been doing this for 18 years. I've never gone through the process of making a film that was this unique, and it was electrifying.