“Things that we are still grappling with in New York are not things that are happened by osmosis. They actually happened because there was a single individual with a very autocratic and racist approach to the modernization of infrastructure in New York,” —Edward Norton.

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Motherless Brooklyn, directed by Edward Norton, is a film based on a crime mystery novel by Jonathan Lethem. It follows an investigator with Tourette’s Syndrome who is on a mission to uncover who killed his only friend. Norton, who also stars in the film, along side Gugu Mbatha-Raw, chose to weave in some of the novel’s missing social and racial history of 1950s.

Watch Norton and Mbatha-Raw explain some of the nuances of the film above.

Motherless Brooklyn is in theaters now.