The one movie Edward Norton needs everyone to watch: “You just have to see it”
Documentaries are a bit like toasted sandwiches, to be honest.
You never really think about them, then you’ll have a brilliant one out of nowhere (ham, cheese and red onion) and decide you’re going to have them all the time, but then you forget that idea; however, a great documentary can be just as good as a great movie, as Edward Norton will attest to.
Now and then, a documentary will become wildly successful thanks to word of mouth, and literally everyone on the planet will watch it. They’re usually the Netflix ones, like Tiger King, Making a Murderer or Don’t Fuck With Cats, but there have also been some enormous hit documentaries released in cinemas too.
As of now, the highest-grossing one of all time is Michael Jackson’s This Is It, a 2009 film released in the wake of his death, with another made about the Grand Canyon in 1984 in second place and Michael Moore’s Fahrenheit 9/11 in third, all three of which brought in more than $200million at the box office.
There have also been some superb examples released recently, not least Netflix’s Cover Up, about the investigative journalist Seymour Hersh, and the powerful, Oscar-nominated The Perfect Neighbour about the shooting of a mother told almost entirely through police bodycam footage.
Norton, who is widely recognised as one of the finest actors of modern times, has a particular favourite, as he told the Tim Ferriss Podcast: “I love Bennett Miller’s film, The Cruise. It’s about a guy who’s a tour, he’s a tour guide host on the open double-decker bus. He’s in New York City, he’s a poet”.
“You just have to see it. It’s great. I really like that one.”
Edward Norton on The Cruise
Made in 1998 in black and white, Miller, who went on to direct movies like Moneyball and Capote, captured the story of Timothy ‘Speed’ Levitch, an eccentric, couch-surfing bus guide and amateur comedian and filmed it using one of the earliest hand-held digital cameras, producing a film that would go on to influence many filmmakers at the start of the 2000s.
Norton also mentioned a documentary maker from these shores, adding, “I really like Adam Curtis’s films, a great British documentarian. He’s got that four-part film called The Century of the Self, and then a three-part one called The Power of Nightmares. I think those are absolutely brilliant films, like dense but really eye-opening.”
Curtis is probably best known for his 2016 film Hypernormalisation, an almost four-hour-long feature offering up the idea that for 50 years or so, the world has really been run for the financial benefit of corporations and for them to make as much money as possible, with governments keeping people in check in order for this unfair proliferation.
Aside from appraising documentaries, the actor, meanwhile, is likely to have another hit movie on his hands this year with The Invite, an Oliva Wilde-directed comedy co-starring Seth Rogen about two couples having a dinner party that rapidly spirals out of control. Early screenings of the movie sparked a bidding war between studios to distribute the film, which was eventually won by A24.
