Edward Norton doesn’t believe in doing things halfway. That much is obvious the second he starts talking about Motherless Brooklyn, the passion project he wrote, directed, produced, and starred in after chasing it for two decades. For most actors, the heavy lifting would’ve ended with memorizing lines. For Norton, it meant handpicking the musicians, shaping the score, and convincing Thom Yorke and Flea to write the kind of ghostly ballad that could bend an entire film around it.
“If there’s any style of music that has a heretic quality, it’s mid-’50s hard bop,” Norton said. He saw something in jazz that mirrored his detective protagonist Lionel — a man with Tourette’s who can’t stop his own mind from looping and reshaping words. “Somewhere along the way he encounters this thing that lets him enjoy himself without restraint as opposed to always trying to suppress his impulses.” For Norton, that was the beat. Hard bop as therapy, jazz as survival.
He called up Wynton Marsalis, who assembled a crew of assassins to recreate the sound of smoky Harlem clubs. He hired Daniel Pemberton to stitch together a score that veers between noir murk and twitchy dissonance. And then came the moonshot: Norton wanted Thom Yorke.
“I couldn’t get the idea out of my head that Lionel’s chaotic brain and lonely heart were the same straddle Thom captures — personal longing grafted onto social stress,” Norton said. So he asked Yorke for a song. What came back was “Daily Battles,” a piano-led ghost hymn that Yorke recorded with Flea, his Atoms for Peace co-conspirator.
The song detonated something in Norton’s brain. He rewrote parts of the script. He had Alec Baldwin’s entrance storyboarded around a lyric. He dropped “daily battles” into dialogue, because once the phrase existed, the whole movie felt like it needed it. “It’s funny, Thom hands you this song, and suddenly you’re realizing you’ve been writing toward it the whole time without knowing it,” Norton admitted.
Flea’s trumpet sealed it into the film’s sonic bloodstream, jagged and mournful, like a man circling his own regrets. Then Wynton Marsalis took the same composition and rearranged it as if Miles Davis had just slipped onto the bandstand. “It’s like the song had two lives — Thom’s haunted interior version and Wynton’s smoky club version,” Norton said.
On paper it sounds absurd: Marsalis, Yorke, Flea, Pemberton, all working on the same soundtrack. In practice it’s seamless, as if Norton knew from the start that jazz and Radiohead melancholia could occupy the same noir alley. “At a certain point, what a waste — why work that hard if you’re not going to get to work with your heroes?” he shrugged.
Norton is not shy about fanboying. He doesn’t try to hide it behind actorly seriousness. He just owns it. And maybe that’s why Motherless Brooklyn feels less like an adaptation of a Jonathan Lethem novel and more like Norton’s own jukebox — a shadowy world scored by the songs in his head, now realized by the people who wrote them.
The result is a film where the music doesn’t just sit under the images, it pushes the story around, bullying the narrative into new shapes. The soundtrack plays like a parallel universe version of the movie — Thom Yorke’s haunted waltz on one side, Wynton’s swinging hard bop on the other — both carrying Lionel’s battles, daily and otherwise.
“There’s something about jazz that makes you feel like you can step inside it, like a groove you can live in,” Norton said. He’s talking about his character. But he might as well be describing his own process: obsess over a thing for twenty years, surround yourself with your heroes, and then live inside the groove you’ve created.
Not a bad gig if you can get it.
Listen to the interview above and then check out the trailer below.
