Entertainment Weekly talks with director Christopher Nolan about the late Heath Ledger’s fearless, and disturbing, performance as The Joker in The Dark Knight:
Nolan and Ledger hit it off from the start. ”We had the same take on the character,” the director says. ”We didn’t have a script yet, but we had ideas. The idea of anarchy as an absolute. The idea of chaos as the most frightening thing to society. The idea of a motiveless criminal, somebody who just wants to watch the world burn.” Some of those ideas were pretty radical for a summer tentpole with a reported budget of $180 million (before marketing costs). The Joker, for instance, is given no backstory in the film; he simply bursts into Gotham with the terrifying randomness of a drive-by killer. Even as Nolan started folding those ideas into an actual script (with his brother Jonathan and Batman Begins scribe David S. Goyer), Ledger was already slipping into the character’s skin. He spent months working with a voice coach fine-tuning the Joker’s cackling cadence. ”He tried to articulate to me what he was doing with his voice, but it was sometimes hard to understand,” Nolan confesses. ”He talked about ventriloquist dummies, the way their mouths moved, the way their voices wouldn’t appear to come out of them. He said he wanted the voice to have a mocking quality, a sort of disconnectedness.” Ledger also gave plenty of thought to the makeup that would be splattered across his face throughout the film. ”He started applying the makeup himself — just to see what it would look like if he put it on with his own hands,” Nolan says. ”We talked about how streaking the paint could get across the idea of corruption, of decay.”
Related: The Los Angeles Times profiles Nolan
