When I found out that Edward Norton was actually going to do press for The Painted Veil, I knew I had to be there. As a huge fan of his work, and the fact that he didn’t do the rounds for The Illusionist, I knew that if he was going to talk about this film than it must have been really important to him. Since it has only just come out in LA and New York, I know a lot of you will not have heard of it yet.

The Painted Veil is a love story in reverse. The film is based on the novel by W. Somerset Maugham and it’s about a young English couple, played by Edward Norton and Naomi Watts, who move to China in the 1920’s. The reason I said it’s a love story in reverse is the couple are not in love when they get married. Well one of them was, but the other got married for the wrong reason. It’s only when they move to a remote region and discover who they really are that the love begins to grow in both of them.

If you are a fan of Edward Norton, he’s once again great in this role. But for me to single out Edward on his own would be a disservice to the rest of the cast. Performances were great across the board, especially Naomi Watts. Also the film looks great up on the big screen and it really reminded me of a classic Hollywood love story.

Before getting to the interview I would recommend watching the trailer as it does a great job at showing you the lush locals that they got to film in, as it was made in China. Also the trailer doesn’t give the story away, it just provides enough to know if you’ll be interested in this kind of movie.

The junket for this film was a press conference and while most of the Q and A is with Edward Norton, Toby Jones was also there and he answers a question or two. His responses are in blue.

The Painted Veil will be expanding in the coming weeks so look for it soon where you live.

Questions: Edward, what is it about this project that has instilled passion in you for so long and why you'd stick with it?

Norton: Well, three years shorter than Ron [Nyswaner]. Ron ten years. Myself seven years. Toby [Jones] got involved three weeks ago [Laughs]. I guess that simply put anyone who loves movies and you watch David Lean films or a movie like 'Out of Africa' or something like that you cannot help as an actor to think about how fun it must be to have one of those kinds of experiences, what a challenge it must be to make films with that kind of scope. So, I don't think that many of those films get made and I think that a lot of times when they do get made they don't get sent to me. So when I saw one that I thought had that potential in it, it was very hard to stop ruminating on it. On a specific level, just as an actor I thought that it was so good. I don't tend to see my life reflected in movies about people who meet when their dogs tangle up.

Questions: Oh, wow.

Norton: No, no, no. I'm not being specific. I'm just saying that I thought that it was a kind of romance that I actually liked. It touched me and I felt like it was a story about the long struggle of men and women to actually understand each other in a forgiving way and I found that very touching because it is challenging. Reading it, it's like – what's the right way of putting it? It's a challenge to you so that you can say, 'Am I capable of that? Have I done that? Have I been forgiving myself? Have I had the courage to forgive someone ever? Have I gone higher through that?' So when you have that kind of a response to a piece of material to me it's a good place to start because you already begin to see what you can offer through it, what it might give back to people watching it. All of that to me is rare. Those things don't come across my desk every week or every years. So all of that made me very persistent about it.

Questions: Your character was so vicious in some of these scenes. Does help you to get out some of the aggression or passive aggression in your life, those moments in the film?

Norton: I don't think that there aren't any of us who can't relate to the desire to poison our loved ones [Laughs]. No.

Questions: Anyone in particular?

Norton: No. I don't know. I don't think that I use acting as an outlet for things that I don't get to express in life, and yet there is some sort of funny satisfaction in that. Maybe it's a way of venting off things inside of you. I don't know though. Not to sound hifalutin, but I always gravitated myself towards Stella Adler who's really one of the great thinkers I believe about acting. She was always saying that fundamentally she always considered acting to be an imaginative process which is something that I kind of agree with. Other people I'm sure have completely different attitudes towards it, but I'm saying that me personally, I enjoy the imaginative part about it.

Questions: How did you like your character, and was it easy or hard getting the English accent down? Was it tough for you?

Norton: No. I think that those things are almost like a musical ear. I had a dialect coach on the film who I thought – I've never liked dialogue coaches, and on this one I had someone who I actually thought was incredibly helpful. The character, a lot of what I've been saying is true, but anytime that a character emerges in slices and keeps deepening and revealing levels that were not obvious on initial encounter, that's very compelling for me.

Questions: You said a minute ago that you don't meet people when your dogs get entangled. How do you think people go about meeting each other nowadays?

Norton: You know what, I said that jokingly, but actually a really good friend of mine met the love of his life when their dogs got tangled up. So I'm just saying that doesn't happen in real life. It just hasn't happened in my life.

Questions: But how do you meet people then?

Norton: Oh, I never talk about any of that stuff.

Questions: Do you believe in coincidence?

Norton: Sure, yeah.

Questions: Fate?

Norton: I don't know.

Questions: Can you talk about your experience in China, and I know that you've shot in Japan too? Can you talk about your experiences in Asia? Did you miss air conditioning or the food from home? What did you discover or surprise over there?

Norton: I only missed air condition one time the entire time over there. Mostly we had air conditioning. I think that I'd spent some time in China because my father lived in China for a long time. I had not been to the big cities though, Beijing and Shanghai and I had not been where we filmed in South Central China, the mountains there. I had not been there either. So the experience of all the places that we worked were new and fresh to me and really wonderful. It's wonderful to work with Chinese colleagues and initially feel like you're struggling to communicate across the language barrier and then in a fairly short time you find that you have much more in common with these people who also do what you do. They're your brothers in filmmaking and they know the same things that you know and you find the little quirks in the way that they work that are different from the way that you work. But on the whole, I guess that one thing I would say is that I liked it much more than just being a tourist. I liked it much more than just traveling through a place, working in a place and getting to know the people. It's much more rewarding to me.

Questions: Did you pick up the language at all?

Norton: No. I can't claim any facility with Chinese.

Questions: What did you discover in working with Naomi Watts as an actress?

Jones: Nothing specific, I would say, that I discovered that I wasn't expecting having seen her other work. She brings an incredible intensity to her work and yet seems to wear it very lightly when you're working with her. You're not aware of it, but there is incredible focus going on. Maybe that's the mark of great screen acting and the sort of effortlessness of that kind of intensity. It's what distinguishes it maybe from theater acting – maybe. I don't know. I was really struck by her access to that inner life, if you like, of that character.

Norton: I agree with that. I mean, this is one moment out of many, but I thought that when Naomi showed up in Beijing. She was coming off of 'King Kong' and we had to start the first week of the film and we had to do a lot of those scenes in the house in China which are some of the heaviest scenes in the movie. It's the ones where the changes are starting to happen in her where she comes to the shack and follows him into the bathroom to try to start to say, 'Can we work on this?' This was literally the first week of filming and it was very, very challenging to do that without reference points to what the scenes are before that and things like that. She was very tired. I sort of almost watched her, saw her kind of take a deep breath and do that thing that I think really, really good actors do which is instead of combating the state that she was in, she just took it and put it right into the work. She just embraced the way she was feeling in that moment and said, 'Well, that's what this is. I'm not going to try to layer something over the top.' I think that was beautiful because it was perfect for the state that Kitty is in. I think that any actor who is worth anything fights the eternal struggle between what goes on up in here and the releasing of that and just getting into it. So it's great when you're working with someone and you watch them make themselves available to the moment that as it is. It's beautiful and it's great. I really can't say enough good about her. It was almost the most intimate interaction with another actor that I've ever had, certainly. I haven't done a film where the two roles were that inextricably intertwined with each other. I just could not have asked for a better tango partner in a way.

Questions: Is it difficult doing the love scenes?

Norton: Not when you've worked with the people for a long time, not if it's embedded appropriately deep in the process so that there is trust and comfort there. I think that by the time that we worked on that in this film, and it's a modest scene where there's nothing too difficult there, but I think that by the time we were doing it in this film we wanted them to be together. It was nice and it's also very technical. A lot of it is akin to dancing choreography. It needs to be choreographed.

Questions: Toby, can you talk about your character in this film?

Jones: Well, he's a fun character to play because he doesn't seem to belong to anything. He seems to be uprooted and yet he seems to bring something from where he's been and from all different aspects of his life. It's fun to play something like because [Somerset] Maugham gives you clues and objects that he spots in his room, but then we sort of all invented things too. That's the great thing about interpreting a character. There is a side of him that's the best side of being British, whatever that is, and also something where he's come here and instead of composing who he is he's learned from where he's arrived. I think that's part of the blessing and the journey that the two central characters have to go on, how to arrive somewhere creatively. It's how to arrive somewhere and receive it and I think that he's been on that journey in a very interesting way without losing who he is.

Questions: What's next for you, Edward?

Norton: I made a film called 'Pride and Glory,' but it's not going to be out until much later.

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