Nick's Picks

IESB: You’re going right from I’m Not There where you have to put your spin
on a character set up by other actors and right into Batman where the Joker has been done by not
only Jack Nicholson but Cesar Romero, etc as well
as the comics. Does it compare at all?

LEDGER: I really don’t know. It’s like chalk and cheese. My preparation
process for this and my process for the Joker are completely different. I mean,
for the Joker I locked myself away in a hotel room for six weeks. I just
formulated a voice and a posture and found a real psychology behind the Joker. I
really put a lot of work into it. And the experience also on a production scale,
by the way, is obviously a completely different shoot. Batman is just such a
machine. It’s huge and I’ve never worked on anything that big. And the movie is going to be surprisingly good! It’s
far exceeded my expectations.

IESB: Were there any specific comics you based your version off of?

LEDGER: Well, The Killing Joke is the one that’s being passed around and
Arkham Asylum kind of. But I really tried to read the comics and put it down.
You know, I was a big fan of Jack Nicholson – still am – his portrayal of the
Joker was perfect for Tim Burton’s world and if Tim Burton had
come to me and he was doing the sequel and he asked me to play the Joker in his
movie, I wouldn’t do it. I couldn’t. Because you couldn’t touch what Jack
Nicholson did. It would be a crime. When Chris came to me, I’d already seen Batman Begins and I really liked it. Because
I’d already seen it, I already knew the world, which he had created. I instantly
knew of an angle. I instantly knew a way into this character. A way to create a
character to fit into this world and so it was fairly immediate. I’ve got
straight away the fact that we’re both on the same page in terms of where we
want it to be. But I guess we have to wait and see. I haven’t seen any of it
yet.