Edward Norton's Incredible Doc: Behind His Barack Obama Film "By the People"

Edward Norton is worn out, and no wonder — the guy's just done two marathons. One was on the streets of New York, with Maasi warriors as his running mates, and the other was on the screen — or behind it — as the producer of the HBO documentary By the People: The Election of Barack Obama.

"When we set out, I thought, 'Oh, this will be easy,' " Norton says of the film. "I learned my lesson."

Norton, his directing team of Amy Rice and Alicia Sams, and his producing partners at Class 5 Films weren't looking to make a film about the inner workings of a presidential campaign. The original idea was simpler: to document a young senator's experiences throughout the course of his term. So they first followed Obama during the summer of 2006 on a trip to Kenya, where the actor's instincts made him feel "sort of tingly."

"Obama walked out of a clinic in a slum and there was this huge crowd, and they just erupted into all this screaming and crying," Norton recalls. "I got this sudden insight that he might have a unique kind of potency as a politician."

That moment didn't make it into the movie (although it'll be on the DVD), because after shooting for nine months, the junior senator changed the game. "We started before he was a candidate," Norton says. "And then we realized he was going to run for president." The access negotiated in D.C. during a sit-down with Obama and his staff pre-candidacy — an easy feat when no one else had wanted it — suddenly became an issue. So while Norton was on set for films such as The Hulk and the upcoming Leaves of Grass, he was playing phone tag with the then-president-to-be.

"It was the project that kept going and going and going," Norton says. "I was perpetually on the phone with Barack or David Axelrod saying, 'Here's where we'd like to be and why.' I think the key to our success is that we started before he was a candidate. The trust factor and the familiarity factor made a big difference. They turned away a lot more famous documentarians than us, and they let us stay in."

Well, at least part of the time. During a stop at a barbershop (depicted in the doc), Obama turns to the press corps, tells them that this is one of his "quiet times," and asks them to leave. "I actually thought he was going to let Amy stay," Norton says, "but he told her, 'You too.' " And once the election is won, there's a brief glimpse inside the hotel suite — but the documentary-makers are shut out once again.