It’s been nearly two decades since Edward Norton first got behind the camera, for his 2000 directorial debut Keeping the Faith, but this fall his long-gestating passion project will finally be brought to screens. Norton has been trying to do his take on Jonathan Lethem’s novel Motherless Brooklyn even before his last film got off the ground and it will now get a strong festival bow, playing at TIFF, NYFF, and likely Telluride. Ahead of the debut, Warner Bros. have now released the first trailer.
Starring Norton, Willem Dafoe, Bruce Willis, Alec Baldwin, Gugu Mbatha-Raw, Leslie Mann, Bobby Cannavale, Fisher Stevens, and Cherry Jones, the story follows a private investigator with Tourette syndrome who works to solve the mystery of his mentor’s murder. Rather than being set in the 1990s as the novel, the crime story is now reimagined to the 1950s.
“Jonathan’s book is this incredible character,” Norton tells Vanity Fair. “It was set in the late ’90s but it had a quality to it of an anachronistic bubble of acting like ’50s gumshoes. I made the case to Jonathan that film is very literal, and I didn’t think I wanted to make something that felt like irony.”
Check out the trailer and Thom Yorke and Flea’s original song from the film, Daily Battles, below.
Motherless Brooklyn opens on November 1.