Edward Norton Quotes

I just don't think most of us are aware how much of what we throw away ends up in the ocean, for starters. Plastic bags are among the worst. The US is actually falling behind the curve on that score. China and many other countries have already banned the production and use of thin plastic bags.

All people are paradoxical. No one is easily reducible, so I like characters who have contradictory impulses or shades of ambiguity. It's fun, and it's fun because it's hard.

I always felt that acting was an escape, like having the secret key to every door and permission to go into any realm and soak it up. I enjoy that free pass.

For me there's always a line or two in a script, when you hit it you almost decide to do the whole movie off a line or two. You almost do it for the fun of getting to say a line or two like that. I don't have any specific plans, you know. I mean, if Seth Rogen calls with a great buddy pic, I'll be there.

I thought Rounders was a comic movie in its way. First time I directed a movie, I wanted to do a comedy. I don't like things that are superficially one thing or another, mainly. My favorite comedies are really smart, too, and have a lot of levels to them as well.

I have this embedded faith in the process through which films of a certain type get discovered on longer timelines.

There is a lot of interesting product coming to market already. Bags and bottles and cups and such made of potato starch and other fully biodegradable materials. In some sense, plastic is more chemically complex. We ought to be able to simplify.

The thing I'm absolutely convinced of, no matter how crazy - technological the world is getting, is that people feel more connected through the good works. Entertainment, and the sort of soporific effect it has on people and their stress, is one thing.

I'm fascinated by the ways in which people express themselves, because their responses are often counter to what they're actually feeling. Like when they're frightened, they tend to freeze. When they're angry, it doesn't always come out as volume. There are wonderful contradictions in the way that people express their emotions.

See, I don't get the sense that you need to direct at all. Sometimes I get the opposite sensation from you, that you're like, "I really should go do something else." But then you are drawn back in by a particular story, like a hangnail in the brain.

Screenplays aren't written to be read, they're written to be made into movies.

In a very philosophic sense I think doing the work is itself a good thing. But at the end of the day, since we're taking other people's shekels to do it, and their work is being able to make a return out of it, it forces you to consider the fact that you're doing it for other people. The whole construct is built around the assumption that it's going to get shared, and that someone else is going to find value in it - entertainment, catharsis, enlightenment, or whatever.

I tend to have a kind of tunnel vision when I'm looking at an individual piece.

I never think that a film should answer questions for you. I think it should make you ask a lot of questions.

You never make all things for all people and can't always pander to the broadest denominator. I keep an eye toward doing the themes that interest me. Do they move me? Interest me? Make me think? When I run across something that is provocative in an unsettling way, it appeals to me.

Young people know how to use these social networking tools, and they know how to use them effectively.

Basically, I think 21st century conservation is moving toward preserving ecosystems by dealing with the needs of people.

I'm not a very methodologically pure actor. Almost every time that I start, I feel completely at sea. Always at the beginning I feel like a fraud, really, because I'm never sure how to get started.

I think technology is having a democratising effect on film.

I don't flatter myself - I'm not a scientist, I'm not a conservation expert.

What we set out to do with this movie [Leaves of Grass] was to create something that was funny and serious and had large tonal ambitions. A movie that could be poignant and funny, and suddenly quite violent. To have a character utterly sideswiped, and to learn that life is about balance.

To me, achieving tone, achieving consistency, is exactly the job of a director. It is to be the fusing, the nexus of a whole bunch of people contributing to the complex life of a movie. There are actors, there's a cinematographer, there're costume people, set people, there are all these things, and you somehow have to be the person in the middle of it who is making it all synchronize into the same magic bubble.

People say you can't make movies about your politics or the environment. And, generally speaking, I completely divide those sides of my brain.

A lot of why I do something is just the novelty of the experience.

People think because I went to Yale that that implies privilege, and it is a privilege in the sense that it's an incredible opportunity.

I'm not particularly precious about the theatrical experience any more.

I like to get into a lot of things besides movies. I've been very involved with a few specific efforts. We built this park in New York and it's been a very successful project... I worked on a conservation project in East Africa... Too much of this type of stuff can get you wrapped up in your own work and I love it.

But look at Avatar (2009), one of the most globally viewed pieces of entertainment to have ever been made - the central emotional event of the whole movie was a tree being cut down. And the entire movie, essentially, is saying, "If we let the military industrial complex trash the place that we're living in, we will have committed an epic crime."

Sometimes their oppression of emotion and the weird way it comes out is more interesting than painting it in bold primary colors.

This place [USA] is exploding with young people who are - they're like Nietzsche's hammer - going to break everything and make something better. The creative energy in this country, and what people are coming up with is very hopeful.

You know when somebody really knows what they're drawing from and you can feel it when you see the movie.

When I look at the directors that I really love, who really develop their films over time, they're almost always the ones who go back again and again and again at the same investigations. I think that when somebody has a theme they go after, it's fun to service that. It's like, "I know you now. I know what you go at." It helps you locate yourself a little bit quicker in their world.

Well, I don't feel that I've played so many bad guys, and I'm rot really drawn to villains per se. I think a lot of people relate to some of my characters' inner struggles.

When I was very small, I had that first-time-you-see-a-play experience, which immediately made me want to act, because it seemed like this incredible outlet for something I was already doing fairly compulsively anyway, which was putting on hats and costumes and doing funny voices. It was a very natural compulsion for me.

Making really great music, making really great films, writing great books is an antidote to all of that. And, as people, as artists, some of the massive disruption that technology is causing is so exciting, the way that people can share creativity now.

I started, with three friends, this website called Crowdrise that's sort of the Facebook for personal philanthropy, a place where anybody can have a permanent microsite of their own to stage creative fundraising projects for the charities and causes that they care about. And we did it with serious intent but without any ambition.

It must be good to be in Germany and France, because I have completely forgotten what it is like to be proud of your government.

There's a lot of romanticisation of the intuitive actor and method acting and all kinds of notions about getting inside a character and coming out from there.

If Nick Broomfield never found anyone with affection for Courtney Love, it's only because he conspicuously avoided the countless friends, colleagues and fans who appreciate her talent and admire her as a person. But then, why would Broomfield have opened up his film to those of us who work with Courtney and are close to her when there are so many bitter left - behinds and desperate attention - seekers eager to validate his attack on her character? Inquisitors in every age, scared of forceful women, have used all kinds of half - baked testimony to whip up chants of 'Burn the witch!'

David Fincher is probably the best comprehensive director in terms of being a manger of a process that must drive forward. He has such confident command of cinema language and visual language and script and performance. He knows more about f-stops than any cameraman, he knows more about lighting than any gaffer, he is a wonderful writer, and he can give you a good line reading. Under pressure, he is the kind of guy who you will just dive in with and trust and follow because his vision is so intense.

Most of the movies that I've made that I really felt good about and cared about made very little money anyway, so I'm not particularly worried about people downloading and sharing them.

I do find myself drawn more to pieces that I feel are wrestling with the way that we're living now, what we're all going through.

I remember as a kid having the offer of a scholarship, that it was going to be like going to Mars, and deciding to stay in my public school.

For Keeping the Faith, I looked at [George ] Cukor's old films like The Philadelphia Story, stuff that's hilariously funny and really smart with a cutting critique in the humor, too. With this, when I read it, I was laughing a lot.

There are tens of thousands of charities and hundreds of thousands, getting towards millions, of people now using it. And when I flip through it, I'm just blown away by people.

Any questions I had about whether a redneck from Oklahoma could become a Brown Classical Philosophy professor ended when I met Tim [Blake Nelson].

When you have a pipe salesman with a business called Macabee Pipes, I'd say you've got your tongue planted firmly in your cheek.

The best films of any kind, narrative or documentary, provoke questions.