Did Heath Ledger finish vocals on 'Dark Knight'?
Jan 26, 2008, 10:01 PM | by Kristen Baldwin
While the late Heath Ledger's family and friends tend to the sad details of his burial this weekend, a debate is ripping through Internet fan sites about what will stand as Ledger's last completed film, the Batman Begins sequel The Dark Knight (due to open on July 17th). The burning question is, how complete was Ledger's post-production work on the maniacal character of the Joker?
On Jan. 25th, E! Online gossip columnist Ted Casablanca posted an item quoting a "studio insider" saying that Ledger had done "zero" post-production looping on the movie. (Typically, an actor re-records many lines for a film long after principal photography wraps, in a process called "automated dialogue replacement," or ADR. It's an especially extensive process when many shots have been filmed on location, since all kinds of incidental noise can interfere with the dialogue's clarity and can require up to three-quarters of the lines to be re-performed on a dubbing stage, with the actor looking up at the film images and matching his or her own mouth movements.) But Ledger's vocals are perfectly clear in the bits of footage so far released—trailers and a prologue bank-robbery sequence shown with IMAX prints of I Am Legend. Fan websites like Ain't-It-Cool-News, Superherohype.com and Batman-on-Film.com are full of assertions contrary to the Casablanca report, saying that in fact Ledger was done with all significant looping. Ledger himself, while promoting the Todd Haynes film I'm Not There last fall, had said he was finished with his work on Dark Knight.
Still, given the way post-production schedules usually run on mega-budget superhero films, it's not out of the realm of possibility that director Chris Nolan might have wanted to call on Ledger for limited additional sessions with more than six months to go before opening weekend. Directors often decide to insert new bits of dialogue in post-production for the sake of clarity and economy. Doing anything like that now with Ledger's Dark Knight role would require hiring another voice actor to emulate his speaking voice, or creating a complicated mash-up from Ledger's existing dialogue tracks. (Both of these alternate approaches have been taken in similar past situations, as when Oliver Reed passed away before the completion of Gladiator and James Dean died before the release of Giant.)
Dark Knight director Chris Nolan and execs at Warner Bros., the studio releasing the film, were not available for comment, and have not issued any public statements about the status of the movie. EW placed a call to Oscar-winning sound designer and sound editor Richard King, who's handling the Dark Knight audio work, but he declined to comment. According to several other sound-mixing experts who also declined to speak on the record, there's no way to tell what the situation is with Dark Knight from the outside, since the amount of ADR required, and the timetable for doing it, varies wildly between films. (In plenty of instances, looping is not completed until very close to the final release date, perhaps as little as a month or two out.) Ledger had been working in London on Terry Gilliam's film The Imaginarium of Doctor Parnassus, which meant he was close to Dark Knight director Chris Nolan's home turf and might well have been available if needed.
Warner Bros. has temporarily pulled back on some of the promotional material centered on Ledger's creepy whiteface makup as the Joker, keyed to the tagline "Why So Serious"? It remains to be confirmed whether the film's technical wrapup will require a new game plan as well. —Steve Daly
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