Edward Norton Once Felt ‘Spike Lee’ Suffered From the ‘Woody Allen Syndrome’
Actor Edward Norton has been a fan of Jungle Fever filmmaker Spike Lee for quite some time. But he likened the criticism the director once faced with what Woody Allen experienced.
What Edward Norton thought about working with Spike Lee
Norton had always been a fan of Lee. Before the two collaborated together, the actor famously wrote Lee a letter about his Denzel Washington movie He Got Game. Norton believed that the film might’ve been one of Lee’s most underrated projects. But he wanted to show the director how much he appreciated the 1998 feature.
“I wrote him a letter after He Got Game, ” Norton once said according to The Gainesville Sun. “I really loved that movie and I thought people missed it. It had a lot of texture and layers. There is a lot of room for the actor and the audience in Spike Lee movies.”
Norton would finally get the opportunity to work with Lee on the film 25th Hour. In the movie, Norton played a drug dealer about to be sentenced to jail for his crimes. It was a dream come true for Norton at the time, who felt Lee was being unfairly targeted by critics. He accused critics of admonishing Lee for being a one-note filmmaker. It reminded the American History X star of the criticisms Woody Allen was given for his movies back in the day.
“The whole thing that’s happening to Spike is b.s.,” he said. “I didn’t want to say this in front of him, but he’s suffering from the Woody Allen syndrome. People say, ‘Oh, it’s just another Spike Lee movie.'”
Edward Norton called Spike Lee’s ‘Do the Right Thing’ the most definitive film of his life
Norton had the same type of praise for his and Lee’s collaboration that he had for Lee’s prior works. Reflecting on the excitement of doing a Lee film, he and his 25th Hour co-star couldn’t help gush about the director’s contributions to cinema.
“It was probably one of the definitive films of my young adult life,” Norton once told Yahoo. “When we were doing 25th Hour, Phil Hoffman and I talked about how much Do the Right Thing changed our goals. It changed our aspirations for the kind of work we wanted to do because it was so… joyful, it was so funny, it was so entertaining. But it was also this really serious dive into some of the thorniest issues of American life. [Lee] was this kid. He was, like, a couple of years out of film school, and he writes and produces and directs and stars in this movie about his neighborhood, and it’s one of the greatest American films of the last fifty years. It was like, ‘Holy crap, what a swing. What an amazing, audacious, original thing – and it’s serious, too.’ It was like, ‘That’s what you’re going for.’ So we came on to 25th Hour pretty steeped in Spike.”
Edward Norton felt Spike Lee was the most rigorous director he’s ever worked with
It seemed that working alongside Lee more than lived up to Norton’s expectations. Speaking with People, Norton revisited his time on 25th Hour, and what it was like working with Lee. One of the things that stood out about Lee was his efficiency and speed as a director. Lee was able to get 25thhour done and less than half the time it took features like Fight Club to finish.
“Spike is one of the most rigorous, prepared artists I’ve ever worked with,” Norton said. “And, as a result, his production moves like freight trains, and he gets more done for less money than almost anyone I’ve ever worked.”
