Edward Norton I Am Sams His Way Through Debut Trailer for ‘Motherless Brooklyn’

Edward Norton is well known as a difficult actor, one who likes to rewrite dialogue, give his scene partners additional direction, and lock directors out of the editing room. It's fitting, then, that he should finally step behind the camera and write and direct his own movie—provided you don't count his directorial debut, 2000's Keeping the Faith.

Motherless Brooklyn looks like it must have been a difficult set to be on, what with notoriously prickly actors like Norton, Bruce Willis, and Alec Baldwin all bringing a healthy dose of big dick energy to the set every day. There's a lot of great actors hanging out as well, like Willem Dafoe, Cherry Jones, Michael K. Williams, and Bobby Cannavale, though, so maybe they can balance out all the egos.

Of course, none of this is to mention Norton's performance as a man living with Tourette's Syndrome, making the actor rely heavily on twitches and sputters. Norton's done this kind of thing before, needlessly impersonating a mentally challenged man in The Score, but at least that was all an act by the character. This is going the whole nine yards, like Sean Penn in I Am Sam. Somebody didn't heed Kirk Lazarus' advice...

All two hours and twenty four minutes of Motherless Brooklyn hits theaters on November 1.