Here's my card.
“[Heath Ledger] did it very, very precisely. I don't know how he resisted looking back. You know all the cork explosions and the lightweight material that the special effects guys were blowing behind him. I think he wound up with bits of cork in his hair at the end of it, that's how close he was to everything that was going off, but he never looked back, he never betrayed any sense of, you know, worrying about what was behind him and all the rest. Once he jumps into the school bus there’s an angle we didn’t actually use it in the final cut. We mounted a camera in close-up on him in the school bus, once he’s in and sat down, and you see him never look back, never look at the building that”s collapsing, you know, immediately just to his left. It was a pretty marvellous angle but it didn’t quite work for what we needed from the sequence.” - Christopher Nolan on the deleted scene of the Joker in The Dark Knight
daily-joker reblogged
Christopher Nolan reflects on Heath Ledger’s Joker in The Dark Knight on the 10th anniversary of the actor’s death.
“…He would sort of give me hints about what he was going to do. We would talk about it a bit. And I would try and be an audience for him and sort of engage with him, what he was doing. But a lot of it was about unpredictability, and I think he wanted to play his cards close to the chest. He would very gradually reveal to me the ‘voice’ and the way he was going to do things – but not in one go, like, ‘Here’s the Joker.’
“We watched him sort of develop it, with the wardrobe and the makeup, and I kind of got to be a part of that creative process, which was great fun, but on-set, there were always moments like that clapping or things he would do with his voice. His voice was so unpredictable. He created this bizarre pitch. I’ve seen a lot of people try and imitate it since. But we never quite knew if he was going to go high or if he was going to go low. You never knew what that guy was going to do, and that’s what was terrifying about him.”
“I took huge pride in having been in any way involved with this great performer and his legacy. He was an extraordinary person and an extraordinary actor. And for him to be recognized in that way, I think, was very meaningful for his family and meaningful, I think, for film history. What he contributed, and he contributed in many different ways to film history, but that it be marked in that way, I was very proud to be a part of it.”