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'Scars'

2020

QUAINTANCE: Where did the idea to approach The Joker from the perspective of his victims come from?

SNYDER: We’ve done so much with him over the years. It’s always been in relation to Batman. I haven’t really had a chance to do a Joker story where it focuses on him without any sort of Batman presence in it, or to just define him. I’ve had a clear vision in my head of how my take on The Joker — I’ve done it with multiple artists — has worked from Black Mirror all the way through Last Knight on Earth. For me, he’s literally The Joker card to Batman, where he takes on any kind of value he can given Batman’s worse fears. He makes himself those to be able to win or fight Batman, always making him as strong as possible.

It’s almost that he’s making it his duty to challenge Batman with the greatest nightmares of his soul, and through that trial by fire make Batman better or kill him — one or the other. So, I wanted to do something here that really focused on how scary that is as a concept, how wonderfully malleable as a concept, and it’s why I think he’s so enduring, why there are so many version, why he has so many faces, so many looks, and why so many great creators over the years have done so many incredible interpretations over the years.

QUAINTANCE: A lot of times when you write villains, they have really clear and easy to understand motivations, but The Joker maybe less so. How do you approach figuring out what The Joker wants in any given story and why he’s doing what he’s doing?

SNYDER: What I tried to do with each story I told with Batman and him was focus on something I was really afraid of either for my kids or myself, something that was difficult to admit, and then have Batman face off with that thing in its most terrifying form, which was The Joker’s version of it.

For example, Death of the Family was a very personal attempt at that. We were pregnant of our second kid when I came up with that story, and I was terrified of being a bad father, being too selfish to be a good parent. I was thinking to myself, Batman must be wrestling at certain moments with similar demons in the way he has developed that incredible family at that time in continuity with all of these allies. He cares about all of them, but isn’t there some part of him that worries they might be a weakness. That’s where Joker comes in and says, wouldn’t you be the best Batman possible without your family. So, I’ll just kill them for you.

Whereas something like Endgame was much less about my personal fears and more about my fears for the moment, some of the things we all worried about. I was worried for my kids at that time about the kind of violence that erupts out of nowhere, and I felt like it was always in the news, making your daily actions feeling meaningless. The Joker was there celebrating those things, saying whatever you do, it doesn’t matter. There’s no action you can take that’s going to mean anything. Everything is at best meaningless, and at worst cruelty and savagery. That’s it.

I try to take a personal fear of mine at that moment and have Joker extend it to its worst possible version and have Batman face off with that. That’s my approach to using him. I wanted to define that here with something that’s not epic and weird and over-the-top.

QUAINTANCE: Well, with all the different work you’ve done with Joker, what do you hope to have added to the legacy of the character?

SNYDER: That’s a tough question and it’s hard for me to answer that. It’s less about me and what I’ve added. I just hope that I’ve done it justice as an incredible antagonist, one of the best antagonists in all of literature, just by trying to use my own personal fears and be honest about what I find terrifying, and about human nature and the world, having him express those in ways that are celebratory and cruel and evil, making him the demon that really tests us with our own worst imaginings and fears.

I love writing him. I feel like I had him exist in one form or another in pretty much every story I’ve done on Batman, from Black Man even through Superheavy or the beginning of Zero Year. He was the one consistent thread to everything I’ve written, Batman-wise, outside of All-Star. The strain Joker represented through all of that was this underlying anxiety that Batman would succumb to his own worst fears, whether he was the main antagonist or in the background.

And there’s so many different versions. I love Grant [Morrison’s] version where he’s hyper-sane and so he’s always emerging as a new wild version of himself because he reinvents his own personality. I love the [Batman: The Animated Series] version where he’s slightly more sympathetic, more of a common criminal at times, all the way to the more obsessive Frank Miller version. There’s so many great stories too; I just wanted this story to be the definitive version of our take and the way I see him, a dictionary definition for The Joker that has haunted my whole run, regardless of artist.

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'Kill The Batman’

2020

This is, of course, a story from the Joker 80th Anniversary Special, and I think you do something really interesting with the Joker relationship in this, where you address where the Joker is with the idea of where he is mentally without Batman, without Bruce Wayne.

Whitta: I think for me, that idea came from the idea of, you know, all throughout comics and Batman and Joker history, the Joker is really pushing the idea that Batman needs the Joker, you know, "you're nothing without me, you need the other side of the coin." The idea that there is this symbiotic relationship. I liked the idea of flipping that around: What is Joker without the Batman like? He's been trying to kill the Batman for years, but what if he actually succeeded?

So now he's having this existential crisis where he realizes that the only enemy he's ever respected, as he says in the comic, the only audience who ever understood the joke that he was trying to tell is gone. So now he realizes that without Batman, there isn't really anything left for him to do. There's no-one that he respects enough to appreciate what his anarchic criminal comedy routine is all about.

You have him responding to other heroes — Superman appears in the strip, Wonder Woman appears in the strip, yet the Joker is very clearly defining himself as a Batman villain. It's a nice moment in this 80th anniversary celebration for him to say to say "I’m a Batman arch-nemesis. Batman is my guy."

Whitta: I actually think that one of the better Batman movies in recent recent history is The Lego Batman Movie. It's actually really good, and the idea that the Joker desperately needs to be in this relationship with Batman, — I think throughout comics history, that's been expressed far more as 'Batman needs the Joker,' how much he needs to look like a nemesis to fight against, a worthy adversary, but I don't know to what extent that's really been explored from the Joker's side of it. So that, for me, was the catalyst to the story.

This is a Joker story, and you end it with a joke -- which is, of course, a logical idea, but somehow still feels surprising and great. Did you always know you were going to finish with a literal punchline?

Whitta: Oh, yeah. For me, we knew that back in the beginning. We knew that we'd have the death of Batman, and the Joker realizing that there's no point to being the Joker anymore. But until we had that final page turn, we didn't know if we had a story.

You could have a more serious version of this, where he became a cop or something, which would have felt very timely right now, and that could've been a really interesting personal story. But for a short story in a celebratory book like this where we're celebrating 80 years of the Joker, we really wanted to end it in a funny way. What is something that everybody is irritated by? If he wants to continue making people miserable and fucking with people, and playing silly games, this is really where he'd go.

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The Dark Knight: When Empire Met Heath Ledger’s Joker

2008

Heath Ledger: when asked how much we'll see in the film of the man who becomes The Joker, he merely says that, "Most of the villains in the Chris Nolan style of Batman films are normal people or once were normal people."

"It's a combination of reading all the comic books I could that were relevant to the script and then just closing my eyes and meditating on it. I sat around in a hotel room in London for about a month, locked myself away, formed a little diary and experimented with voices – it was important to try to find a somewhat iconic voice and laugh. I ended up landing more in the realm of a psychopath – someone with very little to no conscience towards his acts. He's just an absolute sociopath, a cold-blooded, mass-murdering clown, and Chris has given me free rein. Which is fun, because there are no real boundaries to what The Joker would say or do. Nothing intimidates him, and everything is a big joke.

"I think we all have that in us," Ledger muses, before attempting to describe the physicality of inhabiting his and Nolan's vision of The Joker: "It's kind of like eating raw meat. What that does to your mouth and your eyes, simple little visual things like that. I don't know – I guess the rest is just trusting your research." 

Michael Caine: "Heath Ledger stunned me, Jack played The Joker as sort of a benign nasty clown – like a wicked uncle. Heath plays him like an absolutely maniacal murderous psychopath. You have never seen anything like it in your life. He is very, very scary. I turn up every month or so and do a couple of bits, then go back to London. I had to do this bit where Batman and I watch a video which The Joker sends to threaten us. So I'd never seen him, and then he came on the television in the first rehearsal and I completely forgot my lines. I flipped, because it was so stunning, it was quite amazing. Wait until you see it, it’s incredible.” 

Lindy Hemming (costume designer): “He’s certainly not a dapper, dandy gentleman in this film, Whatever is wrong with him, it means he doesn't care about himself at all, really. We were trying to make him sort of a... I don't want to say vagrant, but his look in this film has a much punkier feel. Anarchic feel. Scruffier, grungier, and therefore when you see him move, he's slightly twitchier or edgy.

"He doesn't even have 'clown' make-up, as such. "He's just somebody who exaggerates the scar on his mouth."

Michael Caine:  "What the director has done, which is so clever, is that the Joker has left the make-up and just let it rot off. It is never renewed. He's got a big, wide mouth and it gradually almost looks like bad skin disease." 

Christian Bale: An antagonist is nothing without his protagonist, of course, and we should not forget that we wouldn't even have The Joker if it weren't for Batman. Still, with Nicholson stealing Burton's movie away from the frowning Michael Keaton, you could forgive Christian Bale for worrying that Ledger would do the same to him.

"I'm not worried at all," says Bale. "That was exactly the problem I had with all of the other movies – after I had read Frank Miller's Batman: Year One and various other graphic novels, I looked at those films and said, 'Well, how come it's always been that Batman's the most boring character?' I've never found him to be intriguing at all. Whereas these graphic novels depicted him as really being by far the most fascinating character. So I feel like we gained that back with Batman Begins. Now we've made him a character of substance, I have no problem with him competing with someone else. And that's going to make better entertainment and a better movie, which is great."

Bale grins. "I don't mind if everybody tries to chew up the scenery!"

Originally printed in Empire Magazine in January 2008

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World Exclusive: The Joker Speaks

2007

Heath Ledger: "I definitely feared it," says Ledger of taking a role that every fanboy around the world demands to see done right. "Although anything that makes me afraid I guess excites me at the same time. I don’t know if I was fearless, but I certainly had to put on a brave face and believe that I have something up my sleeve. Something different...”

"It’s a combination of reading all the comic books I could that were relevant to the script and then just closing my eyes and meditating on it," he says. "I sat around in a hotel room in London for about a month, locked myself away, formed a little diary and experimented with voices — it was important to try to find a somewhat iconic voice and laugh. I ended up landing more in the realm of a psychopath — someone with very little to no conscience towards his acts. He’s just an absolute sociopath, a cold-blooded, mass-murdering clown, and Chris has given me free rein. Which is fun, because there are no real boundaries to what The Joker would say or do. Nothing intimidates him, and everything is a big joke"

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The Dark Knight: How Heath Ledger's Joker Was Born

2020.7

On the occasion of The Dark Knight’s 10th anniversary, we spoke with make-up artist John Caglione, Jr., who was nominated for an Academy Award for his work on The Dark Knight along with Conor O'Sullivan. Caglione had previously won an Oscar for his makeup on Dick Tracy back in 1991, so he came into The Dark Knight with some very relevant experience in the realm of creating grotesqueries. But when it came to birthing a new version of the Joker, the makeup artist quickly realized that he would be crossing into some new and uncomfortable terrain.

“So I read the script for The Dark Knight, and having seen the first one of Chris Nolan’s trilogy, I got the feeling it was going to be more of kind of an organic-looking thing,” Caglione explains. “It was going to be kind of real, not so comic book-y. Going in, and then talking to Chris, meeting him, it became a more realistic approach to the makeup. … What would it be if this guy slept in this makeup? You know, this psychopath. If he didn’t spruce up his makeup for two or three weeks. And, you know, he never changes his clothes in the film. … It was those kinds of organic details that really helps.” When Caglione joined the production, Ledger was already signed on to play the iconic villain. The makeup designer’s earliest meetings were with the actor, director, and costume designer Lindy Hemming, followed by Caglione creating five or six color sketches as overlays of headshots of Ledger complete with green hair, different kinds of clown makeup, scars, and so on. This was followed with some makeup tests with Ledger in London, but as the process continued, it became clear that Caglione had to abandon his artist’s instinct to get everything just right. “You know, you go into it, and you’re trying, as a makeup artist, I’m always trained to do every little detail,” he says. “And you think of a clown makeup, and for the most part they’re pretty detailed with sharp lines, but this had to be the opposite of that. It had to look very broken down, very… very lived in. So, yeah, my first few times were too perfect, so I had to kind of let my hand go. And it was hard, it was really hard to do that. And I remember the first week, the first few days on set, I would look at the makeup, and you don’t know the context of the film and the overall vision, and you’re looking at it as a makeup artist. And I’m saying, this is the worst makeup in the world here! You know? And, it was like, oh, am I doing the right thing?

“And you’re looking at all the great makeups in history,” he continues. “Not just the Joker, but Clarabell and so many other greats -- you know, Emmett Kelly. And they’re always just very accurate, very precise makeups, and then here comes this. Ahhh! But, thank God it all worked out, right?” It’s easy to forget now, but before The Dark Knight was released, the standard bearer of Joker makeups was the Jack Nicholson version from Tim Burton’s 1989 Batman. But Caglione says that as far as he can recall, that design was never really discussed when creating the Ledger Joker. In fact, even the idea of the Joker’s white face being the result of an accident -- which is clearly the case in the Burton film -- just didn’t fit in the Nolan world of Batman. “The first Batman was amazing,” says Caglione. “I love Nicholson’s makeup. And I love the whole approach that Tim Burton [took] … the comic book style of the film, it worked. Everything about that film was great. So, in the back of my mind, maybe subconsciously it was there, but no, it never came up in meetings or discussions. It was, let’s roll up our sleeves and make this thing look like a real person could have done this to themselves. … I think it was always discussed, that this was a possible -- you know, just a psychopath. A real person that just gets into this whole thing. It’s almost like a split personality. And so, yeah, it’s a madman in makeup. It’s that concept.”

Part of the “doing this to themselves” aspect of the character includes the question of those scars on either side of this Joker’s face. Of course, the film itself leaves the question of where the scars came from open to interpretation, as unknowable as the Joker’s ever-changing origin. “I always got the impression that it was self-inflicted,” says Caglione. “But it’s up to you to decide. Was he punished, was it abuse? Was it an abusive situation? It could have been [and] that just tipped him over the edge. Mutilation, self-mutilation. We never really know for sure.” Not surprisingly, Ledger himself was very involved in creating the makeup with Nolan and Caglione. Indeed, he was essential to getting the worn and cracked look of his Joker just right. “It was great with Heath, it was just a great experience,” says Caglione. “He was a great person to work with every day. It was like a dance, because certain parts of the makeup, to get those cracks and all the drippy stuff, you really need the cooperation of the actor’s facial gestures when laying down the makeup and the paint. So we had a lot of fun together on that movie.”

Achieving the desired effect essentially involved Ledger acting in the makeup chair. “He would contort his face or raise his eyebrows,” recalls Caglione. “Or I would even take one hand and kind of scrunch the corner of his eyes to create crows’ feet, you know, draw those wrinkles, and brush grays and white colors over it, and he would relax and you would get all these expressive lines and details that just come naturally. Listen, it’s an old theater trick. They were doing it in the turn of the century, the 1920s in theater. Actors would put white makeup on and scrunch their face and let it go, and then paint little brown lines. So it’s nothing that we really invented. It was a throwback to old makeup techniques.” Another throwback in the design process came in the famous interrogation scene, where things get real rough between the Caped Crusader and the Clown Prince of Crime. “So, Heath and I would always be like, gee, what could we do a little different toward the end of the sequence?” recalls Caglione. “And I remember one time we’re talking about the scene where he gets beat up by Batman. He’s in the jail cell. And at the end of the scene, he wanted to have a different look, Heath. And I was thinking about what we can do with the eyes, the black and stuff. And I went, you know, there was this great villain in the Chaplin films, he was played -- the actor was Eric Campbell, and he always played the big heavy in all the Chaplin movies. And he always had these big, black eyes that kind of had these black eyebrows. And Heath was like, well, let me see a picture. So I pulled it up, and we kind of went for that kind of look. It was a throwback to an old Chaplin villain from the silent screen days.”

According to Caglione, Christopher Nolan wasn’t the kind of director who said “I want you to do exactly this.” Instead, he would offer inspiration and guidance. Take, for example, the paintings of Francis Bacon that he brought to Ledger and Caglione early in the design process. “I think it was his way of saying, let’s blur this, let’s loosen this up,” says Caglione. “Here’s a book, look at it, and maybe you’ll find some inspiration. And it really helped, you know, we turned a corner. He didn’t have to say much, but that was the way it kind of went. And then Heath helped me to relax. The great actors help you relax so you can really bring it, and you can just try different things and feel free to do it. But that Francis Bacon painting, that day that Chris came in and plopped that down and we went through some pages… He said, yeah, maybe look at this picture, look at that picture. I think he actually had some of the pictures tagged with Post-its that he likes. Just for inspiration.” Funny enough, it was a Francis Bacon painting in the 1989 Batman that the Jack Nicholson Joker spared during his gang’s rampage in the Gotham City museum. Coincidence? Who can say? Of course, sadly Heath Ledger passed away before The Dark Knight was released. He went on to receive a posthumous Oscar for the role, but had he not died, the actor could’ve returned as the Joker. Caglione recalls Ledger talking about his ideas for the character beyond The Dark Knight.

“Yes, he did, he actually did talk to me about it,” he says. “He wanted to… start at the Arkham Asylum. And his idea -- I don’t know if he ever talked to Chris. This is just private moments in the chair with Heath, and conversations like, wouldn’t it be great to go back and see what really happened to this guy, how he became what he became? And why he just, you know, flipped out and became maniacal? And he always thought it would be great to go back to the asylum, or even before that. So it was just chit-chat in the chair. … Because I’m sure as an actor, he needs to know the origins of the character; it’s really important to him. “He was excited about the idea of going back in time, and seeing how he became the Joker. You know, the evolution of the character,” says Caglione. “It would have been cool. It would have been cool.”

Indeed, it would’ve been cool. But at least we’ll always have Heath Ledger’s amazing performance from The Dark Knight, and the unforgettable look of the character created by Christopher Nolan, John Caglione, Jr., Conor O'Sullivan, Lindy Hemming and, of course, Ledger himself.

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Joker’ Costume/Makeup Designer

2019:

Awards Focus: With Arthur Fleck, he’s a man that’s living at home with his mother and they are quite destitute. Given those parameters, how did build his wardrobe?

Mark Bridges: In my mind, Arthur’s probably had these clothes for quite a while. They all look like they’ve been badly laundered over the years and they’re hard wearing fabrics like polyester pants.  It would be like Arthur just stuffed all the laundry in the same wash, and all the whites all become dingy. There’s also the idea that he’s outgrown his clothes somewhat, none of it is really well fitting.

AF: Was all that apparent in the script, or did it come from discussions with director Todd Phillips?

Mark Bridges: I remember Todd saying he doesn’t have a lot of clothes, and actually he keeps all his clothes is sort of a pile in the corner of the living room. There’s a funny scene where he asked Sophie to go to see his stand-up show and the camera pulls back inside the apartment, and he’s wearing his mother’s pajama bottoms. He’s like a kid living at home with his mom. And you know, he’s clearly a man of forty.

[Source] 

2020:

DEADLINE: Were your costumes informed by those in the ’70s character studies that inspired Joker?

BRIDGES: I think it was really just a character study. I mean, I’d think about what kind of means Arthur has. He works at a crummy job, he lives with his mother, he doesn’t have a lot of money. When he does his laundry, he probably puts all his mom’s clothes with his, all in one load. Everything that he’s had since practically high school, he still owns, and it’s sort of in a pile in the corner, in the living room of that apartment. So, that informs choices.

DEADLINE: How did you manage Arthur Fleck’s visual transformation into the Joker over the course of the film?

BRIDGES: I think he starts out in a very juvenile mode. He’s schlumping around in his white socks and his little gold jacket, and still being a clown, which takes a little bit of joyful sense—just trying to make a buck, and live with his mom, and enjoy a TV dinner. I think as his medicine changes, he’s unable to get that.

You see, as the world continues to abuse him, he goes darker in his colors. In his last interaction with the social worker, when he’s like, “I only have negative thoughts,” he’s in a charcoal sweater, and it’s taken a turn. Then, he goes to Arkham in a scab-colored knit top. It’s gotten darker. So hopefully, those choices of darker colors reflect what’s going on inside.

And of course, he becomes a little more unhinged in the privacy of his own home, whether it’s wearing his mother’s pajama bottoms, or just dancing around in his underwear. It becomes less this staid, unformed adult and becomes a little wilder every time we see him.

[Source]

2019:

Nicki Ledermann :“The one thing that he was very adamant about was that the makeup itself was not perfect,” said makeup designer Ledermann. “It had to be very childlike, sad, not that skilled because he is not a painter. Even though he’s a professional clown, he’s emotionally everywhere, all over the map. And the mask is just something that he does, which matches the character. He’s like a lost child that wants to be saved and wants to belong and wants to be loved. It’s demented and tortured and in pain and in limbo in some ways. But there is a joy in there too. You see that when he does the dance.”

[Source]

2020:

The director said in a recent interview that the set was very intense, and that Joaquin behaved a bit erratically at times. Do you feel this is accurate? If so, do you think it might've been due to the gritty subject matter and Phoenix's reputation as someone who practices method acting?

Nicki Ledermann : “Joaquin is a very intense actor, but he was also so loved and admired by the crew. Our directors are very strong. There was a lot of masculinity on set, which sometimes can feel intense. It’s a very hard job, but at the same time, it was a very gratifying one. Everybody had a huge stake in it, so maybe that’s what was part of the intensity. But everyone was in love with Joaquin, not only because he’s so talented, but he’s also such an incredible and interesting animal—he really isn’t a person. It’s hard to put your finger on it. He can be nervous, but he can also be very funny. There’s something sexy about him, too, and I don’t mean sexy in a sexual way. People are just drawn to him—men, women, anybody. He has this gift that just draws you in and mesmerizes you, and I think the Joker had to have that. Even with the best makeup and hair and costume design and production design, it doesn’t even come close if the [actor] doesn’t have those qualities.”

[Source]

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Cinematic Faith

2012.11

The overall tone of the film is realistic compared to most comic-book- derived movies.The world around Batman is plausible and not particularly stylized or exaggerated.

Nolan: The term “realism” is often confusing and used sort of arbitrarily. I suppose “relatable” is the word I would use. I wanted a world that was realistically portrayed, in that even though outlandish events may be taking place, and this extraordinary figure may be walking around these streets, the streets would have the same weight and validity of the streets in any other action movie. So they’d be relatable in that way. And so the more texturing and layering that we could get into this film, the more tactile it was, the more you would feel and be excited by the action. So just on a technical level, I really wanted to take on this idea of what I call the tactile quality. You want to really understand what things would smell like in this world, what things would taste like, when bones start being crunched or cars start pancaking. You feel these things in a way because the world isn’t intensely artificial and created by computer graphics, which result in an anodyne, sterile quality that’s not as exciting. For me that was about making the character more special. If I can believe in that world because I recognize it and can imagine myself walking down that street, then when this extraordinary figure of Batman comes swooping down in this theatrical costume and presenting this very theatrical aspect, that’s going to be more exciting to me.

Ra’s Al Ghul is a fascinating character, because he’s not a boilerplate nefarious villain who wants to dominate the world, he’s an ideological villain. He seems to have been ripped from today’s headlines, especially with his rhetoric about the decadence of the capitalist West.

Nolan: With my co-writers David Goyer and my brother [Jonathan Nolan], we decided early on that the greatest villains in movies, the people who most get under our skin, are the people who speak the truth. So with Ra’s Al Ghul, we wanted everything he said to be true in some way. So, he’s looking at the world from a very honest perspective that he truly believes. And we applied the same thing to The Joker and Bane in the third one. Everything they say is sincere. And in terms of their ideology, it’s really about ends justifying means. It was important in Batman Begins to have Bruce go very far down this road with Ducard, to the point where they want him to chop somebody’s head off because he has stolen something. And at that point there’s this almost comic moment where Bruce turns to Ducard and says, “You can’t be serious.” At that point, you’re surprised by how seductive the training and indoctrination can be. And the scales fall from his eyes. But even later when Ra’s Al Ghul returns and is about to destroy all of Gotham, there is a logic to everything he says. I think truly threatening villains are the ones who have a coherent ideology behind what they’re saying. The challenge in applying that to The Joker was to have part of the ideology be anarchic and a lack of ideology in a sense. But it’s a very specific, laid-out lack of ideology, so it becomes, paradoxically, an ideology in itself.

And then you have the anarchy of The Joker, and in The Dark Knight Rises you come back with the followers of Ra’s Al Ghul who are trying to enact his plans by masking it as class warfare.

Nolan: Class warfare but also in a militaristic, dictatorial approach. If you look at the three of them, Ra’s Al Ghul is almost a religious figure, The Joker is the anti-religious figure, the anti-structure anarchist. And then Bane comes in as a military dictator. And military dictators can be ideologically based, they can be religiously based, or a combination thereof.

At what point did you start to think that there was more than one story to tell here, that this could be a trilogy without repeating or cannibalizing itself?

Nolan: I think it was in the months after the first film was released. At the end of Batman Begins, when he turns the Joker card over, I found myself wondering, “Okay, who would that antagonist be?” seen through the prism of Batman Begins. I wanted to see how we could translate The Joker into that world. That was the jumping-off point. And the nature of The Joker’s antagonism was so utterly different to what happened in Batman Begins and was so different to Batman’s relationship with Gotham in particular. So The Dark Knight is very much a story about a city, a sort of crime drama, whereas Batman Begins is more of an adventure story. So it actually felt like a different genre, and then you know that you’re not retreading what you’ve done, you’re expanding it.

——By Scott Foundas in the The Dark Knight Rises Issue

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Christopher Nolan talks Heath Ledger and ‘Dark Knight’ trilogy

2012.11

As discussion moved to 2008’s “The Dark Knight,” naturally the work of Heath Ledger as the Joker was at the forefront. Nolan had met with Ledger early on when he was putting together “Batman Begins” because he was meeting with most young actors in Hollywood at the time. And Ledger politely explained to the director why he would never be involved in a comic book film. Nevertheless, Nolan presented his goals to the actor, then set out to make the film.

The idea of “The Dark Knight” was to follow through on the realism of “Batman Begins.” In so many words, who would the character of the Joker be, seen through the prism of that film? It wasn’t an obvious answer for Nolan, and that kept it interesting.

Eventually Nolan met with Ledger again, this time for the specific role of the Joker. Ledger had seen Nolan do what he set out to do with “Batman Begins” and the interest was finally there, but they didn’t have a script yet. Nolan’s brother Jonathan was working on it, but they knew what they wanted out of the role. And Ledger seemed to be game.

“He didn’t like to work too much,” Nolan said of the late actor, who won an Oscar for his iconic performance. “He liked to do a character and then stop working and let enough time go by until he was hungry for it again. And that’s what happened when he came in; he was really ready to do something like that.”

Ledger spent months and months obsessing on and thinking about how he would play the character. Nolan sent him some materials, like Anthony Burgess’s novel “A Clockwork Orange” and some work by painter Francis Bacon, just “tangential” things that fed into his vision of the Joker. By the time the script was finished, Ledger was so committed, knowing what a high-wire act it would be, that if he didn’t like the script, it would have been extremely uncomfortable. But happily, it was off to the races, and the real work started to go into figuring out how to make the character tick.

“Like a lot of artists, he would sneak up on something,” Nolan said. “So you couldn’t really sit and go, ‘Okay, you’re going to do the Joker. You’re going to show me what it’s going to be.’ You had to sort of say, ‘Let’s read this scene. Don’t act it, just read.’ And he’d sit with Christian and there would be a line or two where his voice was a little different, throw in a little bit of a laugh. And then we would film hair and makeup tests and try different looks, and in that, he’d start to move, and we’d have these rubber knives and he’d choose what weapon and explore the movement of the character. We weren’t recording sound, so he felt quite able to start talking and showing some of what he was going to do. And in that way he sort of sneaked up on the character.”

The voice, though, worried the director at first, he said, because of its odd shift in pitch. “He had figured out this whole thing that was all based on the Alexander Technique, where if you hit a high note, you’re then able to hit sort of two octaves below afterwards,” Nolan said. “It’s a way of lowering your voice. So you had this character who you’d never quite know which way the pitch was going to go of his voice. Just as in his physical movements — you don’t know how he’s going to move; it’s always a surprise — the actual tone of his voice was always a surprise, too. Sometimes it would go incredibly low and threatening and other times it was light, in a way.”

Clips featured were the Joker’s encounter with Gotham’s mob bosses and the interrogation scene between him and the Caped Crusader later in the film, which was actually the first scene shot after the big IMAX prologue. Of that prologue, Nolan recalled that the final shot of the Joker removing his mask was out of focus, so he had to call Ledger back in to re-shoot it. Ledger was insecure, thinking there was something wrong with this incredibly high-wire performance he had concocted, but Nolan had to go to great lengths to explain it was merely a technical issue. Nevertheless, he stuck with the out of focus shot when he got to the editing room, because it was a better performance.

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2019.11

Joaquin Phoenix: “I was going through [the script] and I realized, I said, ‘Well, why would we make something, like, where you sympathize or empathize with this villain?’ It’s like, because that’s what we have to do. It’s so easy for us to—we want the simple answers, we want to vilify people. It allows us to feel good if we can identify that as evil. ‘Well, I’m not racist ’cause I don’t have a Confederate flag or go with this protest.’ It allows us to feel that way, but that’s not healthy because we’re not really examining our inherent racism that most white people have, certainly. Or whatever it may be. Whatever issues you may have. It’s too easy for us and I felt like, yeah, we should explore this villain. This malevolent person.

“There’s no real communication,” he continues, “and to me that’s the value of this. I think that we are capable as an audience to see both of those things simultaneously and experience them and value them.”

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Q&A: 'Dark Knight' Director Christopher Nolan

2008.7

You also seem to be commenting on the impossibility of heroism in a brutal world, because any hero will inevitably be faced with unthinkable choices, and simply by choosing, the hero becomes a monster to many.

The Joker gets pleasure from taking somebody's rule set—their ethics, their morals—and turning them against each other. Paradox is the way you do that. Giving people impossible choices. What Batman is doing is heroic, but it can be seen in another way: as vigilantism, as a dark force outside the law. That's a very, very dangerous road to go down. He's always riding a knife edge in moral terms.

What about Heath made you cast him?

I'd met Heath a couple times over the years about different projects, but nothing ever worked out. One time he gave me a speech that a lot of young actors have given me, where they basically say that they haven't achieved, as serious actors, what they want to before they're pushed into being movie stars. And of all the actors who've given me that speech, he's the only one that I would actually want to pay $10 to see give that kind of performance. And he did it in "Brokeback Mountain." The stunning lack of vanity, the sheer loneliness of that character—it's a staggering performance. So when I heard he was interested in the Joker, there was never any doubt. You could just see it in his eyes. People were a little baffled by the choice, it's true, but I've never had such a simple decision as a director.

You and Heath evidently had lots of conversations about shaping the character.

He'd call me from time to time, just to talk about what he was doing. And frankly, it was pretty hard to relate to on the other end of the phone—when he'd talk about looking at ventriloquist dummies and the way their mouths moved, the way the voice would sound as if it's disembodied.

When you heard him talk about ventriloquist dummies, did you think, "Where the heck is he going with this?"

[Laughs] Well, as a director, you say, "OK, that's kind of frightening." But what you're also hearing in the actor's voice is passion and intensity.

You've said that when you see the Joker, you can almost imagine what he smells like.

Yeah, you feel like there's a grime to him. I showed Heath some Francis Bacon paintings, which have a particular smudged, smeared effect that I thought was very evocative of human decay and corruption.

To me, the most unsettling part of his performance is that tic where he licks his lips.

Yeah, it's almost like this lizard thing. It's very insidious, very creepy. Well, as with a lot of things that Heath would do, at first I thought it was a mistake. Because the prosthetics on his mouth would come a little unstuck. But then it became apparent that he'd really found something.

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Charisma as Natural as Gravity

2008.01

Christopher Nolan: One night, as I'm standing on LaSalle Street in Chicago, trying to line up a shot for "The Dark Knight," a production assistant skateboards into my line of sight. Silently, I curse the moment that Heath first skated onto our set in full character makeup. I'd fretted about the reaction of Batman fans to a skateboarding Joker, but the actual result was a proliferation of skateboards among the younger crew members. If you'd asked those kids why they had chosen to bring their boards to work, they would have answered honestly that they didn't know. That's real charisma—as invisible and natural as gravity. That's what Heath had.

Heath was bursting with creativity. It was in his every gesture. He once told me that he liked to wait between jobs until he was creatively hungry. Until he needed it again. He brought that attitude to our set every day. There aren't many actors who can make you feel ashamed of how often you complain about doing the best job in the world. Heath was one of them.

One time he and another actor were shooting a complex scene. We had two days to shoot it, and at the end of the first day, they'd really found something and Heath was worried that he might not have it if we stopped. He wanted to carry on and finish. It's tough to ask the crew to work late when we all know there's plenty of time to finish the next day. But everyone seemed to understand that Heath had something special and that we had to capture it before it disappeared. Months later, I learned that as Heath left the set that night, he quietly thanked each crew member for working late. Quietly. Not trying to make a point, just grateful for the chance to create that they'd given him.

Those nights on the streets of Chicago were filled with stunts. These can be boring times for an actor, but Heath was fascinated, eagerly accepting our invitation to ride in the camera car as we chased vehicles through movie traffic—not just for the thrill ride, but to be a part of it. Of everything. He'd brought his laptop along in the car, and we had a high-speed screening of two of his works-in-progress: short films he'd made that were exciting and haunting. Their exuberance made me feel jaded and leaden. I've never felt as old as I did watching Heath explore his talents. That night I made him an offer—knowing he wouldn't take me up on it—that he should feel free to come by the set when he had a night off so he could see what we were up to.

When you get into the edit suite after shooting a movie, you feel a responsibility to an actor who has trusted you, and Heath gave us everything. As we started my cut, I would wonder about each take we chose, each trim we made. I would visualize the screening where we'd have to show him the finished film—sitting three or four rows behind him, watching the movements of his head for clues to what he was thinking about what we'd done with all that he'd given us. Now that screening will never be real. I see him every day in my edit suite. I study his face, his voice. And I miss him terribly.

Back on LaSalle Street, I turn to my assistant director and I tell him to clear the skateboarding kid out of my line of sight when I realize—it's Heath, woolly hat pulled low over his eyes, here on his night off to take me up on my offer. I can't help but smile.

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2019.12

Kevin Smith : "It was him killing Thomas and Martha Wayne and the boy was screaming and crying and he turned to walk away and he turned back, shrugged, and shot the kid, What the fuck, man? This world has no Batman."

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'The Dark Knight' interviews

2007 2008

What was it like working with Heath Ledger as the Joker?

Christian Bale: Our first scene was in an interrogation room together, and I saw that he’s a helluva actor who’s completely committed to it and totally gets the tone that Chris [Nolan] is trying to create with this. We’re not going for actors revealing their enjoyment of playing a wacky caricature. We’re treating this as serious drama. You go into character and you stay in the character. I love that. I find that so ridiculous that I love it, and I take that very seriously. Heath was definitely embracing that. When he was in the makeup and the garb he was in character the whole time; and when he took it off he was absolutely fantastic company to be around.

As you see in the movie, Batman starts beating the Joker and realizes that this is not your ordinary foe. Because the more I beat him the more he enjoys it. The more I’m giving him satisfaction. Heath was behaving in a very similar fashion. He was kinda egging me on. I was saying, “You know what, I really don’t need to actually hit you. It’s going to look just as good if I don’t.” And he’s going, “Go on. Go on. Go on….” He was slamming himself around, and there were tiled walls inside of that set which were cracked and dented from him hurling himself into them. His commitment was total.

Were you ever worried about being upstaged?

Bale: No, not at all. Because it was exactly the point that I had a problem with in all of the other Batman movies. Especially after reading Frank Miller’s Batman: Year One and various other graphic novels. I asked myself, “Well, how come it’s always been that he’s the most boring character?” I’d never found him to be intriguing at all. Whereas these graphic novels depicted him as by far the most fascinating of them. I feel like we gained that back with Batman Begins — that he’s a character with substance. So I have no problem with him competing with somebody else. Because that can only make for a better movie, if you have these other fascinating characters arriving on the scene, too.

What informed Heath Ledger’s performance?

Christopher Nolan: Johnny Rotten, Sid Vicious, these kinds of punk influences were some of the things we talked about. We also talked about the character of Alex in A Clockwork Orange. He’s very anarchic and yet somehow has great charisma, both in the book and in the film. We talked about a lot of different influences, and he talked about an extraordinarily diverse set of influences like ventriloquist dummies. The way they would talk and the way they would move and all kinds of peculiar ideas that I wasn’t really able to get a handle on until I saw him start to perform the scenes, and start to show how the character moved and how the character gestured and how the character spoke, with this extraordinarily unpredictable voice. The range of the voice, from its highest pitch to its lowest pitch, is very extreme, and where it shifts is unpredictable and sudden.

The thing with the tongue was…he had this prosthetic that was covering his lower lip and it would come unglued sometimes. I’d seen him sort of sticking it back with his tongue, and it was only after a few weeks of shooting that I realized that wasn’t what he was doing, that he had started to adopt that actually as part of the character. It was an interesting balance, editing the performance, because he has all kinds of interesting facets, all kinds of mannerisms and things. What I like about them all is they all feel that they come from the character. They don’t feel like actorly touches. I read them as genuinely part of the fabric of a real human being.

2007.11

You’ve gone on record as saying you weren’t a huge fan of comic books. What attracted you to The Dark Knight?

Heath Ledger: Yeah. The only reason I wasn’t [was] I grew up in a household of girls. So there were very few Batman comic books lying around. There [was] mainly Archie. So that’s probably the only reason why I never grew up reading Batman.

But I really loved Batman Begins; and the character of the Joker was just too good to turn down. I’ve said this before, but…if Tim Burton was doing The Dark Knight and asked me to play the Joker I wouldn’t have taken it. Because to try and even touch what Jack Nicholson did in Tim Burton’s world would be a crime. So when Chris [Nolan] came to me, and…I knew how Chris was. He had already set up the world for me. I’d seen what world it was that I would be playing in. So I knew it was open for a fresh interpretation. I also instantly kind of had something up my sleeve, which happened to be exactly what Chris was kind of looking for. We sat down and kind of shared ideas, and they were the same. So we just went with it

——excerpt from 100 Things Batman Fans Should Know & Do Before They Die, by Joseph McCabe

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Exclusive Interview with Geoff Jones, Story behind "Batman: The Three Jokers"

2020.08

GJ: “三个小丑”产生源于小丑的本质之谜，以及这个角色与编蝠家族的不同之处。每个人对小丑都有不同的看法。小丑不只是一个人,他是一个想法、一场噩梦或一个影子,一个总是会回来的存在，也是唯一让编蝠侠和他的家人经历过那么多悲剧的对手。“三个小丑”不仅是字面上的也是精神上的。

GJ: 这是一段不可思议的时间。几年前有一个作家对我说,他们应该杀死小丑，因为每个伟大的小丑故事都被讲述过了。就在那之后, 《编蝠侠:黑暗骑士》出现了。小丑是混乱、不可预测、令人恐惧的化身——他是虚构作品中最可怕的角色之一,不仅仅是漫画。他和任何英雄一样都可以被诠释和重新塑造,甚至有更多可能。他是一个活生生的悖论,我们在里面同时探索悲剧和喜剧的纯粹恐怖，在这里我们笑着面对痛苦。这是一个迷人又可怕的世界。有时候,小丑才是唯一理智的人。

(The Joker is not just a person, he is an idea, a nightmare or shadow, an existence that always comes back

He is a living paradox in which we explore the pure horror of tragedy and comedy at the same time, where we face pain with a smile. This is a fascinating and terrifying world. Sometimes, the Joker is the only sane one.)

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“You could feel his heart and his soul. He had so much heart. I think he was one of those rare people who could convey that on film. You could feel it from him. He was able to make you feel what he was feeling.”⁣ - Catherine Hardwicke

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2009.3

ST: You have a very evocative painting that's Batman and Joker inspired (without, of course being Batman and Joker) called "Inhabitants of Hell." What inspired it? DR: Well, the mission was to put something in a "Gotham" themed show happening at M-Modern gallery because they were hosting Adam West's artwork the previous month. It was an ode to Batman to begin with. I wanted to put something really wild in there, as I had already painted Batman before, I knew it had to be different. I thought about the character, how permanent he is in our collective conscience, and a classic theme seemed to follow. I set out to find classic artwork to draw from when I came across the work "Dante and Virgil in Hell" by William-Adolphe Bouguereau. It was the two naked wrestling men "inhabitants of hell" that Virgil and Dante are overlooking that caught my attention. They were nameless souls, locked forever in immortal combat. So it quickly became more like a student project, to reinterpret something from classical art as faithfully as I could. I think it works well, it was definitely a challenge, and anyone who thinks "copying" is easy to do has no idea what they're talking about. Remaining faithful to another original and not being allowed to make up your own forms and colors and brush strokes is extremely difficult. It's always interesting to see how Batman fans react to the piece. They either love it or hate it.

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"There are very few characters that are, to me, as irredeemable as The Joker. There is nothing in him that is good."—Geoff Johns

2020.7