I was a little late to the roundtable for Stone with star Edward Norton. But we still had a long and powerful conversation about the spirituality found within Stone.

First of all, Stone is a profoundly spiritual movie, which may not be indicated in all the trailers for the film. Actually, I would suggest that it is more a character study about how what we believe changes who we are. Because the film is so spiritual in nature, there was a lot that Edward Norton had to say. I'll include the highlights of the conversation below.

At first Norton spent some time noting that the physical qualities of his character don't exactly show him to be a candidate for spiritual transformation. But that is part of the power of the character. You have to look past his cornrows and you can't reduce him to your first impression of him. Stone is a man who will surprise you.

Next Norton spoke about his research that he did for the part. He suggested that as much as 60% of the dialogue was directly altered by real prison inmates that contributed to the film. For instance, one inmate said that he was a "vegetarian" because he can't have a beef with anyone.

The ending of Stone is fairly gray in some areas and Norton discussed the intentionality of leaving the nature of his character in question. How spiritual epiphanies come to a person are varied, and people are complex. So although Stone DOES have a spiritual experience, it could be that he hasn't really reformed his ways by the end of the film. Yet one could read that he HAS fully changed and become reborn as well.

Norton suggests that a hallmark of some of his favorite films are endings that allow the viewer to interpret the meaning. He mentions that Do The Right Thing was a film with a powerful influence on him because of the ambiguous nature of the ending of that film.

About Stone, John Curran suggested that it be set in Detroit specifically because of the economic crash. And he also told Norton that people tend to reflect on their own lives in times of economic hardship so Norton began thinking of the film as their "economic downturn" film.

One reporter noted that Robert De Niro turned in one of his best roles in Stone in years and he asked if Norton had intentionally sought out to work with De Niro. Norton said that De Niro was "going at this" when they started working together and this really was the experience with De Niro that Norton had hoped for.

One reporter asked how Norton used the sounds in the film. And how sound impacted spirituality in the film.

EN: John and I talked about how there was a line where Stone tries to explain this thing he has read and it has a phrase in it "the tuning fork of God." And when John and I were working on it at one point we started talking about making the sound environment of the film actually reflect some of what Stone talks about. I liked the idea of that a lot. We even talked about taking sound ideas and deconstructing them into fragments so that you had a disjointed or fractured sense that... These guys are always saying how loud it is [in prison] and how hard it is to do anything. John talked about the whole environment as a purgatory of some sort and I think he was trying to create these juxtapositions between a little bit of melody and a little bit of harmony but then a real atonal/a-rhythmic kind of... I liked it. It was very challenging when we were looking at different cuts of the film and giving notes because you knew a lot of it was going to be informed by this overlay of sonic environment. And you can usually benefit from testing films and showing them to people to see what they take away. But when you are not able to engineer all that sound until later... I've never worked on a film that was so hard to dry run in front of people because how do you dry run a scene where something is happening and there is supposed to be this enormous thrum of a tuning fork and everyone is going to tell you "that scene is too long," "that scene is boring." But you had to go at it with a certain amount of faith in the idea. We cobbled it together with some friends of mine who are musicians with some interesting ambient stuff they had recorded for an album but hadn't used. Then John brought in his own sounds on his own.

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