“This was a collection of photos that I felt represented each world that we were in. Edward and I looked at the look book I made, so we referenced that a lot,” she says. “I didn’t go into this thinking a lot about noir films.
Roth says the idea throughout was to tell the story shine through, as did it in Chinatown, rather than “hit you over the head with period details.” Pictures’ drama “MOTHERLESS BROOKLYN,” a Warner Bros. There was something more compelling in seeing that image instead of dolling up the set with stuff.” Caption: MICHAEL KENNETH WILLIAMS as Trumpet Man in Warner Bros. You don’t have a lot of stuff in the background filling up the screen, it was more Jack Nicholson in a hat with a bandaid on his nose. If you look at Chinatown, it’s very pared down. “What I took from Chinatown was a lack of ephemera in the background. “Maybe halfway through our prep, Edward started bringing up Chinatown, although that film was set in the 30s,” Roth says. If there was a spiritual cousin to this ambitiously complex caper, it would be the seminal 1974 noir standard-bearer Chinatown, which turned sunny Los Angeles into a shadowy, serpentine cesspool of corruption, rape, and murder. Motherless Brooklyn is a mid-century noir, with Norton’s Lionel on the case from essentially the opening seconds. “More of the unseen people you don’t normally see in Life Magazine celebrating college graduation at Yale on a lawn party.” Caption: (L-R) GUGU MBATHA-RAW as Laura Rose and EDWARD NORTON as Lionel Essrog in Warner Bros. “I took a lot of photos from the documentary world, like Helen Levitt,” Roth says of her initial approach to the material.
Norton’s story of a seemingly overmatched detective taking on a man reshaping New York City in his own image required a crack team of collaborators, including production designer Beth Mickle and costume designer Amy Roth. That would be Moses Randolph (Alec Baldwin), based largely on Robert Moses the real-life world builder-or destroyer-depending upon whether you lived where he wanted to lay down a highway. In Norton’s telling, Lionel’s case involves a man so powerful, most New Yorkers don’t even know his name. Lethem’s most indelible character, a gumshoe with Tourette’s named Lionel, remains (played by Norton), but the setting, story, and stakes are all different. That direction included setting the film some 45-years earlier, in the mid-1950s New York. Edward Norton’s Motherless Brooklyn takes the spirit, and many of the characters, from Jonathan Lethem’s excellent 1999 novel of the same name, but from there goes in an entirely new direction.