Moviepone just published an interview with Ed “eternally anonymous” Norton about his cornrow-headed roll as arsonist Gerald “Stone” Creeson in the new John J. Curran–helmed flick Stone, which was shot last year in and around Detroit, and at the old Jackson prison.
In the brief Q&A, the always articulate Norton — who spent time in a Mitten clink interviewing subjects for the role and film script — says he “nosed around Detroit” and saw the 313 as an area “going back to nature. It’s so feral. I’ve never seen abandonment like that.”
That’s certainly an accurate assessment, depending on which zip you’re in. Though not sure how he means "feral."
Norton goes on to explain how “John [Curran, Stone’s director] had this urgency to really try to locate this in the landscape of corrosion, abandonment and decay. He was interested in the idea of superficial structures of morality and marriage, and how Detroit kind of represented that.”
We certainly love Norton. Who doesn’t? And as a movie Stone will most likely sing (DeNiro also stars), but just as the idea of a tiny Detroit revivification gets fewer laughs and derisive snorts from you and your local contemporaries, just when some family decides to stay in their house on your street instead moving to the burbs, the city becomes yet another platform from which to launch pretentious and sweeping metaphysical metaphors on man, America and decay in “superficial structures.”
Christ.
Or, maybe, could be that we’re all just kicked back to reality?
