Edward Norton’s intense, cerebral presence in a film has always been a fairly reliable indicator that you’re going to see something good. In recent years, though, Norton’s onscreen performances have become infrequent. He has been acting less and spending more time on various tech-related business ventures. But the balance, for the time being, has swung back towards film with the impending theatrical release of his long-awaited adaptation of Jonathan Lethem’s detective novel “Motherless Brooklyn,” which Norton, a three-time Academy Award nominee, wrote, directed and stars in. “I can exercise the acting impulse at the highest level with a lot of the best people when I want to,” Norton says. “But I’ve got a rich life beyond that too.”

Where does acting fit into your life these days? It seems like it’s not the priority it used to be. I love the work when it’s good.1 When something like “Birdman”2 comes along, I’m on MDMA creatively. But the experience of doing these things is not novel anymore. It’s also just not real life. I don’t want to look back on my life and see the large majority of it colored with me playing pretend instead of actually doing things. That’s not to pooh-pooh the work or knock anybody else, but I don’t think that actors are better for working more. If you take a Daniel Day-Lewis or Sean Penn, the fact that you see them a lot less means that when they return there’s a potency to their acting. There’s a point at which any actor starts to become their own pollution.

What you were saying about how you want to feel about the things you’ve accomplished in your life — how does your involvement in a data-science company fit in with that?3 Put it this way: For me, some of it is the appeal of an intellectual puzzle. I am not a data scientist or an engineer, but I think I have a sense of where there are opportunities. That was the appeal of Uber4 to me early on. I hate the New York taxi system. It’s a cartel. It’s run by crooks. It abuses drivers and gives horrible service. Ride-sharing comes along and outperforms that corrupt model. There’s improvement to civic society through these apps.

Given your interest in civic society,5 what do you make of the way Uber has affected cities? Does any form of car-based transportation within urban environments need to grapple with the challenges of congestion and pollution and the nature of employment? Of course. But the New York City medallion system should be canceled tomorrow. It is not egalitarian. It is terrible economically for the drivers. It drives empty cars around polluting and congesting the city. This notion that Uber is not an improvement off of where we were is absurd. Does it need to get better? Absolutely. But there is no way you can tell me that the experience of riding in a New York taxi is anything other than debased compared to ride-sharing services.

I get good cabbies and bad cabbies. Come on. The cabbies now are the people who can pass the test. Have you ever asked an Uber driver if they would go back to driving a cab? I guarantee you there’s not one who will say yes. Not one.

Edward Norton in “American History X” (1998). Alamy

It’s no spoiler to say that your version of “Motherless Brooklyn” is pretty different from the book.6 Given how much you’ve changed, what was it about the book that you were willing to spend years turning it into a movie? The fantastic emotional hook has always remained the heart of it for me. You’re inside the tumultuous brain of this guy, Lionel, afflicted with Tourette’s syndrome and obsessive-compulsive disorder. But you instantly have this affinity with him, because you know him inside the calm center of his brilliant mind. And there’s also a great tradition of films, be it “Forrest Gump” or “Rain Man” or “Good Will Hunting” or “A Beautiful Mind,” which create an emotional alignment between the audience and an underdog whom you root for not despite their affliction but because of it. There’s a positivity in that. Especially now when at a mass-market level so much of heroism is being defined by this high-fructose corn syrup IV line that’s about sitting back and people coming in and saving us. What’s more nourishing is when people can identify with the vulnerabilities of a character and get empowerment as the character rises. Also, if you go back and look at “Forrest Gump” it’s a more politically toothy film than you remember.

Is it? It is. You think “the lovable idiot who floats through history,” right? But the history he floats through is a cutting look at the way America tore itself apart. There’s all this mordant observation about how badly people treat each other, but Forrest Gump becomes this polestar of kindness.

It’s just funny because there’s no way “Forrest Gump” would be made today, let alone be a hit. Can you imagine that pitch? Or the social media reaction? Everybody’s got all kinds of opinions. “Chinatown” is also a great movie, right? And it’s in the noir tradition of looking at what’s going on underneath the sunny narrative of American life. But would “Chinatown” be made today? If you make “Fight Club,” if you make “Birdman,” somebody’s always going to be lazy and be like, “I don’t have it up for this.” But they’ll do 3 hours of “Avengers: Endgame.” So would “Forrest Gump” be made today? Maybe with the right people. Would “Chinatown”? No way. If you wiped every critic’s mental hard drive and put “Chinatown” in front of them, they’d take that film apart. Talk about opaque and convoluted. You just drift in the hypnosis of that film because it’s this beautiful rendering of Los Angeles — great characters keep appearing and unfolding, and Jack Nicholson is magnetic. But that movie is about the unknowability of anything, the impossibility of affecting anything. It’s the most cynical movie ever. You’re telling me anybody’s making that movie today? No way.

Millions of people were watching “Mad Men” every week. That show could be considered more than a little opaque and cynical. “Mad Men” is cotton candy compared with “Chinatown.” I’m not saying it’s not interesting, but it’s a different beast. “Chinatown,” you have to sit and be patient. If you’re looking for pacing, if you’re looking for plot, those are not the pleasures of that movie. The pleasures are the maturity, the fineness and the obliqueness.

Hearing the way you talk about storytelling and the film business — even just your use of “high-fructose corn syrup” — makes me wonder if your starring in “The Incredible Hulk”7 was bound to involve some friction with Marvel. Well, no. I loved the “Hulk” comics. I believed they were very mythic. And what Chris Nolan had done with Batman was going down a path that I aligned with: long, dark and serious. If there was ever a thing that I thought had that in it, it was the Hulk. It’s literally the Promethean myth. I laid out a two-film thing: The origin and then the idea of Hulk as the conscious dreamer, the guy who can handle the trip. And they were like, “That’s what we want!” As it turned out, that wasn’t what they wanted. But I had a great time doing it. I got on great with Kevin Feige.8

Norton with Brad Pitt in “Fight Club” (1999). 20th Century Fox/Photofest

Didn’t he put out that statement about you?9 Yeah, which was cheap. It was brand defensiveness or something. Ultimately they weren’t going for long, dark and serious. But it doesn’t matter. We had positive discussions about going on with the films, and we looked at the amount of time that would’ve taken, and I wasn’t going to do that. I honestly would’ve wanted more money than they’d have wanted to pay me. But that’s not why I would’ve wanted to do another “Hulk” movie anyway. I went and did all the other things I wanted to do, and what Kevin Feige has done is probably one of the best executions of a business plan in the history of the entertainment industry. As a Disney shareholder, you should be on your feet for what they pulled off.

Marvel may have had a good business plan, but what about its films? I want to like them more than I do. I’m not going to comment on that. I’m saying that Kevin had an idea of a thing that you could do, and it was remarkable. Now it didn’t happen to be on a tonal, thematic level what I wanted to spend my time doing. Conflating that into a fight or a judgement is grotesque. Picking fights between other people for clickbait is grotesque. I’m not being hyperbolic. It’s part of what’s problematic in our country. We are letting ourselves be polluted by fake fights manufactured by other people for other agendas. Whether it’s Russians manipulating us into intense arguments with one another over fabricated [expletive] or stupid entertainment journalism trying to get clicks. It’s like, I did Bruce Willis’s Comedy Central roast, and I made a joke at my expense. I talked about how I tried to do what Bruce did and make a big movie but I was an idiot because I tried to make the script better.10 This is a joke making fun of myself but they’ll turn it into, like, “Edward takes a dig at Marvel.” No, I’m taking a dig at myself at a roast. People have to grow up.

That joke is based on a perception that you can be tough to work with.11 I’m curious about what that perception means for you. But you’re talking about things the roots of which are from 1998 when I and my friend David McKenna developed “American History X.”12 People take things that happen between fervent people who care about the work and who end up shaking hands with each other and they make it into drama.

I watch everything and I read everything when I research. That perception exists beyond whatever happened with “American History X.” You’re not reading anything that’s any more authentic than people reading a Russian trollbot’s story about Hillary Clinton and a pizza parlor is authentic. You’re going “there must be something to this” just like some guy in the MAGA hat is being engineered by the G.R.U. into feeling antagonistic with liberals. You’re wasting your time engaging with the matrix that’s trying to foment negativity. The fact that there’s a certain credence to it in your mind — is it possible that there’s literally nothing to this?

That’s what I want to understand. I’m trying to get at what it actually means for someone to have this reputation. Does it mean an actor who pushes back with directors? Does it mean someone who adjusts the screenplays? Honestly, I find the whole line a little boring. You’re pulling on a narrative from things when I was 28 years old. That’s not even a contemporary meme around me.

Norton with Gugu Mbatha-Raw in “Motherless Brooklyn,” which he directed and adapted from Jonathan Lethem’s 1999 novel. Glen Wilson/Warner Bros.

Let’s move on. I rewatched “American History X” and “Fight Club,” and it’s impossible to see them and not think about how they resonate with the culture today. Have you been surprised at the way those movies’ themes have metastasized? Not in the slightest. We’ve got a real problem in this country with the ripple effects of people feeling thwarted, marginalized, emasculated, neutered, left behind. The irony is that a lot of people have said to me about “American History X,” “Wow, I was fascinated by the almost-Shakespearean idea in it that in a smart person, rage can be a fatal flaw.” But back then you were able to relegate that rage to jackboots and skinheads and swastikas. Now it’s dungarees and button-down shirts. It doesn’t even need extremity around it. “Fight Club” was coming at things from a more satirical angle, but everything that we’re seeing today in terms of an irrational, almost self-defeating willingness of a certain sort of white nativist lower class to find identification in vituperative, celebratory-of-violence assertions is fallout from feeling marginalized. When people feel that they can’t get out from under, you get identification with regressive ideas about whose fault that is.

Earlier you mentioned how an actor can become their own pollution. Is that at all related to why you’ve dialed back?13 It’s a combination of things. Jim Houghton14 and I launched an $80 million fundraising campaign for the Pershing Square Signature Center up on 42nd Street two months after the financial crisis in 2008. I was completely consumed in that project. I was also building my first company around that time, CrowdRise.15 Very quickly we had 100 employees and were raising venture capital money and then selling that company. I was writing the script for “Motherless Brooklyn.” I had a kid. In that same period I was investing in Kensho.16 I was the one of the largest stakeholders in that company early on and concurrently built a fund that ran all the secondary trading in it. Then in 2015 Daniel and I built a parallel data science company called EDO that’s working on media data.

Can you explain what that means exactly? The core of what EDO is doing is this: The entire pricing structure around television advertising is pegged off data from Nielsen. It’s basically a measurement of notionally how many eyeballs got on something. They can’t tell you what happened as a result of that. EDO can measure in a granular and finance-grade way what a television ad did in terms of actions by people that specifically correlate with purchase activity. This all grew out of observations on my part that this system through which creative product is advertised and put out is a wildly inefficient one of spraying and praying.

What would change about the TV and movie business if that system were more efficient? Everybody wants a more accurate metric of the effectiveness of the inventory they’re selling and the ads they’re placing. Having that is exciting to me because, in trying to get money pulled together for “Motherless Brooklyn,” I would be sitting there going: “What am I not seeing? What’s the perceived fear in this?” And it all has to with the dollars that have to be spent on marketing and the uncertainty about that spending when a film doesn’t fit a mold. It would be nice to not have to beat your head against the wall for five years to make something. Netflix is an excellent example of what I’m talking about: They’re the most data-scienced entertainment content studio in history, and as a result they’ve de-risked it for themselves. They don’t have to worry about the marketing per se, and that’s why they stole 100 billion of market cap from the traditional entertainment complex.

Maybe this question is premised on a category error, but I’ll ask it anyway: Is there any commonality between what you think you’ve learned about human behavior from being an actor and what you’ve learned about it from data analytics? Does one of these ways of understanding people sit within my brain while I’m doing the other? No. Does working on acting and working on data affirm that people are fascinating? Yes. There are things that people do that signal their intent more credibly than what they say about themselves. And maybe I’m reaching to answer the question in an interesting way, but within that observation is something that’s not far off from what really great acting is sometimes. Which is the mining of the paradoxes that exist within people.

What example comes to mind? People talk about Meryl Streep as one of the greatest actors in film history, which she is. She reveals the façade and what’s going on underneath at the same time. There are echoes of that in this bizarrely granular world we live in of incredible amounts of data about people’s private actions. What people believe they’re doing in private is very different from the ways they express themselves when they know — or suspect — that they’re being seen.