IESB sat down with Heath Ledger this afternoon in New York to discuss his role in the new Todd Haynes Bob Dylan biopic, I'm Not There. We'll have the full video interview up soon, but Ledger briefly discussed his upcoming role in The Dark Knight.
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If I had any doubt about Ledger as Joker, it vanished as soon as I saw him in person. His hair was grown out for the role and his eyes darted around the room, never quite making contact with mine. At his side was a clothespin that he handled the entire interview, pinching his fingers as he spoke. It wasn't hard to believe that at any moment he would leap to his feet and kill everybody in the room.
IESB: You're going right from I'm Not There where you have to put your spin on a character set up by other actors and right into Batman where the Joker has been done by not only Jack Nicholson but Cesar Romero, etc as well as the comics. Does it compare at all?
LEDGER: I really don't know. It's like chalk and cheese. My preparation process for this and my process for the Joker are completely different. I mean, for the Joker I locked myself away in a hotel room for six weeks. I just formulated a voice and a posture and found a real psychology behind the Joker. I really put a lot of work into it. And the experience also on a production scale, by the way, is obviously a completely different shoot. Batman is just such a machine. It's huge and I've never worked on anything that big. And the movie is going to be surprisingly good! It's far exceeded my expectations.
IESB: Were there any specific comics you based your version off of?
LEDGER: Well, The Killing Joke is the one that's being passed around and Arkham Asylum kind of. But I really tried to read the comics and put it down. You know, I was a big fan of Jack Nicholson - still am - his portrayal of the Joker was perfect for Tim Burton's world and if Tim Burton had come to me and he was doing the sequel and he asked me to play the Joker in his movie, I wouldn't do it. I couldn't. Because you couldn't touch what Jack Nicholson did. It would be a crime. When Chris came to me, I'd already seen Batman Begins and I really liked it. Because I'd already seen it, I already knew the world, which he had created. I instantly knew of an angle. I instantly knew a way into this character. A way to create a character to fit into this world and so it was fairly immediate. I've got straight away the fact that we're both on the same page in terms of where we want it to be. But I guess we have to wait and see. I haven't seen any of it yet.
Stay tuned to the IESB as we post our complete exclusive interview with Heath Ledger in the upcoming week.
t: The only thing that I feel sorta un-okay with is when he said he "tried" to read the comic books. Now, I have complete faith in Heath giving us the perfect Joker performance we nerds have been waiting for and I also know he's not a fan of comic book movies, but as a Joker fanatic I hope he tries to maintain as much of the pure evil originallity of Mr. J from the comic books rather than skimming the books and spit-balling the rest. But hopefully I'm wrong.
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