Edward norton talks about his new film, Pride and Glory, and his documentary on the Obama campaign

Pride and Glory, a gritty drama about corruption in the New York City police department, was originally scheduled to be filmed at the end of 2001—until the events of that September put the film on the back burner. When it finally was completed last year, it sat on the shelf for awhile when the studio that produced it, New Line, was shut down by its parent Warners Brothers.

Colin Farrell and Edward Norton in Pride and Glory

It finally arrives in theaters this week, and star Edward Norton couldn’t be happier.

“I think the timing is great,” he says. “I actually think the best possible thing has happened. Leading up to the election, our whole country is engaged in a large national conversation about the issues of our country. I think people are in a very thoughtful frame of mind right now, doing a lot of thinking about what their priorities are and what our ethics are. So I think it’s a perfect moment for the film to come out.”

Of course, this conversation took place six weeks ago, during an invitation-only press conference at the Toronto Film Festival, at a time when the political dialogue on at least one side hadn’t sunk to the sad state of name-calling where it presently sits.

But Norton’s point remains: Like the classic films that it recalls, from Serpico through LA Confidential and The Departed, this is a genre that resonates with audiences because it speaks to broad ethical issues. Norton stars as Ray Tierney, an inactive police investigator persuaded by his father, the Manhattan chief of detectives (Jon Voight), to look into a failed drug bust in which four officers were killed. The bust involved Ray’s brother (Noah Emmerich) and brother-in-law (Colin Farrell), and it doesn’t take long before Ray realizes that he’s going to be breaking the “blue wall of silence,” the notion that cops never speak against other cops.

Pride and Glory was directed by Gavin O’Connor and produced by his brother Greg from their own story, one that, as the sons of a veteran New York City cop, they had some insight into. (Retired NYPD Detective Robert Hopes also worked on the story and served as the film’s technical consultant.)

Norton points out that in the years between the O’Connor brothers writing their script and the film’s production, Americans were tested by our involvement in Abu Ghraib and by the Abner Louima scandal. The more he thought about the script, he says, “the more I felt like it was starting to have an extra resonance for me, because on some level it’s about the difficulty of speaking truth to power, and the tension between our loyalties to the people who do this service for us and the need to hold them to a high standard in terms of the principles that we’re defending. And so all of a sudden this cop drama had the potential to resonate on things that were going on in the zeitgeist.”

Of course, of lot of viewers will simply see Pride and Glory as an entry in a well-trodden genre. But Norton is fine with that too. “I like doing genre films. Sometimes it’s just fun to play cops and robbers. Sometimes people talk about ‘genre’ as though it’s simplistic or bad. But the flip side is that genre is something we go back to again and again because there’s something in it that we’re fascinated by. The trick with the cop corruption genre is not just to do it with quality, but also to maybe look for a way that you make it reflect your generation’s version of that genre.

“I started to have a special interest in it when I thought maybe this can actually be something that’s reflecting the moment that we’re going through in terms of what the United States as a culture is going through in terms of its own sense of its ethics. That’s the best you can hope for, that in some way you’re dealing with what’s difficult about the way we’re living right now.”

From his debut in Primal Fear through roles like American History X, Fight Club, and even The Incredible Hulk, Norton has always been drawn to ambivalent characters. He agrees that it’s a large part of what interested him in acting. “I think it’s fair to say that almost every actor likes the idea of complexity in a character. We’re all trying to find something meaty to work with or, frankly, that’s hard. You get into this because you want to try to pin down things that are complicated. People are all paradoxical—everybody is grey. I don’t think anybody’s ultimately very easily reducible. But I like any character that’s got contradictory impulses or shades of ambiguity about them. It’s fun because it’s hard.”

Praising O’Connor’s earlier films (Tumbleweeds, Miracle) for their attention to character, Norton says he liked that fact that the character of Ray Tierney on the page gave him a lot to work with. “He actually doesn’t say a lot in the beginning,” Norton explains. “For a long time [in the script] you learn more about him from other people talking about him than from the things he says. It’s just very mysterious. I found myself reading along and going ‘Huh? I wonder what the deal is with this guy.’ That’s unusual because a lot of scripts will telegraph to make sure you understand the character. To leave a lot of empty space in a character is interesting because you have to communicate a lot without a lot of words to work with. That was a particular thing that interested me in this film.”

Off screen, Norton has been involved this year as the producer of a documentary about Barack Obama’s presidential campaign. In March, he told Variety that the inspiration, beginning before Obama won the Democratic nomination, was “how exciting it was to see someone from our generation, not our parents’, make his presence felt in such an inspiring way…It was akin to the way I remembered my dad describing how he felt when Kennedy gave his inauguration speech.”

Asked for an update, Norton says he can’t talk about it while filming is still going on. “We’re making an historical record, not something to play a role in the election, and so we have an agreement [with the Obama campaign] that this is something that we won’t talk a lot about or publicize until the election is over. It’s a fascinating thing to be able to be documenting, but we have to stay off the record until it’s all resolved.”