Batman: The Dark Knight - Set Visit

Last summer in Chicago, IL., when I was on-set to see some of the filming for The Dark Knight, I noted that actor Heath Ledger, who was portraying the villain The Joker, was tired and looking a little ragged around the edges. This was nothing new, or surprising.

I remember being kind of underwhelmed the first time I met the actor to interview him in 2002. It seemed he saved every sparkle for the screen, and in person he was just a quiet, pensive, regular guy. He often seemed exhausted, or preoccupied.

Hardly warm and friendly towards reporters — but never rude or indifferent, either — I'd come to know what to expect, over a handful of interviews with him. A couple of months beyond this set visit, after it had wrapped and during a junket for I'm Not There (a 2007 film in which he portrays an aspect of folk singer Bob Dylan), Ledger remembered me (the blue streak dyed in my hair helps), and we talked about his serious approach to The Joker for a few minutes.

He reiterated that he had put a lot of effort into the foundation of the character, and he took it extremely seriously. A couple of months later, it was kind of a shock, but not a surprise, when I heard that the intense, hardworking young actor had died due to an accidental overdose of sedatives and pain-relievers.

Now that I have seen The Dark Knight, I certainly see what he was talking about. Ledger transforms the crazy comic book character into a gritty, realistic criminal imbued with a totally believable underlying mental disorder.

On the set, back in August of 2007, Christopher Nolan praised his choice. His take was, "indescribable, really," said the director. "Not to sound evasive, because it actually is quite difficult to explain, but all I can really say is he’s not doing any particular thing. He’s just inhabiting the character in very much the way I’d hoped from a psychological perspective. It really created something that I think is going to be quite terrifying." Even before Ledger was cast, "[The role] was always going to require a very fearless performance from someone not afraid to put forward his own interpretation. And Heath's been totally up for it from the get-go. We’ve been very impressed with the results."

The great Michael Caine, who returns in the film as Bruce Wayne / Batman's right-hand man, Alfred, declared, "We are making a movie about The Joker. We have had Jack Nicholson who is one of the greatest Jokers and one of the most memorable characters in this kind of movie. I have worked with Jack, and I know him really well. You do not really want to follow Jack into anything... unless it is a night club.

"So that for me would have been a worry, because it is about The Joker even though the movie is called The Dark Knight. Heath Ledger stunned me. Jack played The Joker as a sort of benign, rather nasty clown — like a wicked uncle. Heath plays him as  an absolutely maniacal psychopath. You have never seen anything like it in your life.

"Heath is incredible. He is very, very scary. I turn up every month or so and do my bit and go back to London. I turned up and had to do a bit where Batman and I watch a video done by the joker to threaten us. I had never seen him and he came on the television and I completely forgot my lines. I quit. Because it was so stunning. It was quite amazing. You wait and see. It is quite incredible."

Ledger, yawning and fidgeting throughout the roundtable-style interview explained his initial approach to the character, and how he found his inner Joker. "I sat around in a hotel room in London for about a month and I just locked myself away and formed a little diary and experimented with voices and all kind of…" He trailed off, rethinking his answer.

"As for your question, I ended up landing more in the realm of like a psychopath with a lack of empathy. Very little to no conscience towards the acts; which is fun, because there are no real limits on the boundaries to what he'd say, or how you would say something, or what he would do.  It's always a very personal process in terms of how you land in the character's shoes, so to speak."

As luck would have it, the shoes were just nearby for reference. Warner Brothers put together a nice presentation for the press, including the Batmobile and the new Batpod downstairs, and Batman and The Joker's costumes set up on headless mannequins augmented by a few stills from the film. The Joker's costume consists of a bold purple jacket, a dark green banker's vest, a color tie, ragged trousers, and long, hobnail-type boots.

Lindy Hemming, the costume designer, said, "I was looking through images of people who might have dressed like that in the pop world and the fashion world. You can imagine Vivienne Westwood meets Johnny Lydon, Sid Vicious, Pete Docherty. You think of all those people who dress themselves up and are very interested in their appearance and then we added into it the life of him. So whatever it is that's wrong with him, made him be like this, he doesn't care about himself at all, really. He's very sweaty and... He probably doesn't have a proper home. We were trying to make him sort of a... I don't want to say vagrant... a back-story for him is that he really doesn't look after himself."

Ledger said he brought the suit to life with "A combination of reading all the comic books I could, the script, and then just really closing my eyes and meditating on it. You know, Chris [Nolan] and I very much saw in see eye to eye on how the character should be played and that was evident from the first kind of meeting we had a project. We had identical images within our minds and so, I found it, I came back and I'm doing it."

Of course, no trip to the set of Batman movie would be complete without a talk with "the Batman" himself. Again played by Christian Bale ("I signed up for three movies"), the literary confection has evolved and found a worthy, like-minded adversary this time around. "It’s a funny meeting of these two characters where… Batman I always kind of view as having this slight urge towards sadism and having to control himself with that, but the fact is, he’s got an opponent who's a sadist and a masochist. And he loves it. So he can punch him all he wants, and yet he knows he’s actually giving The Joker a great deal of pleasure.

"So he’s a new kind of opponent. And Heath is doing it in a much more kind of anarchic and sort of punk-like fashion and it's been very good and entertaining for me to do these scenes with him."

Ledger said he just "did it" and never looked back. At the time, he had not yet seen what would be his final performance. "I haven't looked at it, yet," he said. "I heard it in the movie trailer and it kind of freaked me out a little bit, but I haven't seen it yet." When asked why, Ledger replied, "I don't know where I'd see it, because we don't have playback. I don't want to see playback, and I just I haven't seen… I don't know, but they put together a trailer of some sort." When I asked if he never saw the dailies, see said, "No, yeah.  I did… I kind of used to. But now I just find that it's a waste of time. When I go home, it's too late."

Ledger put out such an all-out performance, I hope that somewhere, somehow, he did see it and was satisfied. (Read the horror.com review here.)

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Staci Layne Wilson reporting