The term 'passion project' brings to mind innumerable failed attempts and growling disappointment. But if you hang on to them long enough, these dreams do come true.

Such is the story of actor turned director Edward Norton who will be bringing his own passion project 'Motherless Brooklyn' to screen via film festivals. Coming off from the success of 'American History X' in 1999, Norton was attached to Jonathan Lethem's crime novel ever since it came out.

In a recent interview, Norton made some parallels between his film and Roman Polanski's classic 'Chinatown', as both movies use the detective's character as a device for social commentary. Norton's stab at the noir genre will be socially charged response to current political climate under the Trump era.

The film is set in the 1950s even though the novel is set in the 1990s. In the support of this decision, Edward Norton has said, `the secret history of modern New York, with all of its kind of institutional racism and the devastation of the old city from neighborhoods right up to Penn Station, perpetrated at the hands of an autocratic, almost imperial force, who was intensely antagonistic to everything we think defines American democratic principle.`

`It came out right when the Watergate scandal is breaking open, Vietnam is ending, [Roman] Polanski's wife has been murdered,` Norton said of `Chinatown.` `You have probably the deepest cynicism that had ever emerged in American society, and that film was responsive to that. ... I think there's a lot of what we're going through now that is provoking also a lot of looking at dimensions of what sits under the surface of what we call American life. [It's] especially resonant when you're going through moments that are giving people deep dismay.` said Norton on the striking similarities between his film and Polanski's.

Edward Norton writes, directs and stars in 'Motherless Brooklyn' which is set against the backdrop of 1950s New York when Lionel Essrog(Edward Norton), a lonely private detective afflicted with Tourette's Syndrome, as he ventures to solve the murder of his mentor and only friend, Frank Minna( Bruce Willis). The movie also stars Willem Defoe, Leslie Mann, Gugu Mbatha-Raw, Michael Kenneth Williams Bobby Cannavale, Fisher Stevens, Cherry Jones, and Alec Baldwin.

'Motherless Brooklyn' will do the rounds at upcoming Toronto International Film Festival and New York Film Festival, before its November 1, 2019 theatrical release date.