Batman and Joker Cover Entertainment Weekly
Christian Bale and the late Heath Ledger grace the cover of this week’s Entertainment Weekly for The Dark Knight.
Here’s a look at the interview with director Christopher Nolan (via Just Jared):
On Heath’s commitment to his character: ”The guy had serious nuts. What I needed was someone who wouldn’t be afraid of the comparison with Jack Nicholson. And then I saw Heath’s incredible performance in Brokeback Mountain. Such a lack of vanity. This was an actor who wasn’t afraid to bury himself in his character — to a massive extent.”
On having the same vision for the The Joker as Heath: ”We had the same take on the character. 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.”
On Heath spending 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. 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.”
On Heath splattering makeup 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. We talked about how streaking the paint could get across the idea of corruption, of decay.”
Check out more at EW.com. The Dark Knight premieres in theaters on July 18.
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