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Ellemeno:
‘Juno’ Star Ellen Page Reflects On Would-Be Director Heath Ledger
7 Comments  |  Published by Larry Carroll on Thursday, January 31, 2008 at 5:46 pm.
Naturally, everyone in Hollywood these days is still shaken over last week’s tragic death of Heath Ledger. Few, however, had been in touch with the actor recently quite like “Juno” star Ellen Page, who had been in talks to star in Heath’s intended directorial debut, “The Queen’s Gambit.”

“It was talked about,” the Oscar-nominated actress said of her possibly taking the lead role in an adaptation of the novel about an orphan who becomes a chess prodigy. “But, you know,” she sighed, shaking her head, “obviously, that’s not the [most important thing right now].”

Recently, our own Josh Horowitz remembered a touching conversation he once had with the 28-year-old about their shared love of the sport of kings. In his final few years, Ledger had been making plans to slide into the director’s chair with “Gambit,” employing both his movie-making experience and his reported skills as a grandmaster-level chess player.

“It’s just extremely tragic,” Page said of her almost-director. The project has now stalled, of course, but to Page that’s barely a minuscule afterthought in this tragic tale.

“I wish his family the best, and I hope his privacy is respected,” she said. “That’s what’s getting out of control, and it’s becoming too much. Hopefully that will begin to end, that intensity.”

Would Heath have been a good director? Why or why not? Weigh in with your thoughts below.

  Comments (7)    

7 Responses to “‘Juno’ Star Ellen Page Reflects On Would-Be Director Heath Ledger”

Aussie Rob Says:
January 31st, 2008 at 7:51 pm
I think he would have been a great director weather it be while he was young or later in life. R.I.P Heath Ledger an aussie legend.

Erika Says:
January 31st, 2008 at 8:04 pm
I think Heath would’ve been a great director. Unfortunately I never saw the two music videos that he had directed, but judging by the movies he’s been in he probably knew what a great director entails. If you look at the work of Ang Lee, and the director of The Patriot and The Dark Knight (as little as we have seen), he has obviously worked with some great directors and seemed to be a jack of all trades in not just movies but in all arts. From music to painting to acting to directing, I believe he could’ve done anything. Rest in peace…

sharbari Says:
January 31st, 2008 at 9:34 pm
he could have done anything he wanted to and he would have done it with grace, compassion, intelligence and passion. His passing robs us of a truly wondrous talent.
He would have been a brilliant director because he was a brilliant actor.

Brad Says:
January 31st, 2008 at 10:03 pm
Well, I think it was James Schamus who said Heath made the decision to switch the shirts inside out at the end of Brokeback Mountain, symbolizing Ennis’ need to protect Jack like Jack had always done, him. I thought that was a really brilliant idea, and it worked really effectively in the movie. It’s things like that and his genuine interest in directing that make me think he had serious potential as a director.

Sandra Says:
January 31st, 2008 at 10:29 pm
Of course he would have been a great director-thats a given undoubtedly.
He had the privilege of having these gifts from a very young age. It takes a very special person to be able to connect with his inner talents and he recognised them from an early age which is a very big plus.

bruce Says:
January 31st, 2008 at 11:10 pm
I reflect back in my mind over the images of Heath’s work. I see the sensitivity and insight of a genius captured in minute detail in his performances. It is only a logical extension that we would have seen him as a great director. Though we will never know, can you imagine the world without Lucas or Spielberg? I think he would have been that caliber of director.
Sadly, the tremendous thoughtfulness that characterized his style seems to have overwhelmed his emotional capacity to manage it all. I am surprised how difficult it is for me to process this. Here I am a complete stranger to this man, saddened further as I consider the loss to his friends, family, and most of all the little girl who will not even be able to remember her most awesome dad.

fanshawe Says:
February 1st, 2008 at 4:18 am
If his shorts made Chris Nolan feel old, as he wrote in his tribute, he would probably have made a decent director. Too bad we’ll never know.

http://moviesblog.mtv.com/2008/01/31/juno-star-ellen-page-reflects-on-would-be-director-heath-ledger/

Peachy:
Re Margaret Pomeranz, I agree with Fran.  Pomeranz was a big fan of Brokeback Mountain - she thought it a beautiful film.  I think she meant Heath could go on to even greater achievements.  A quote from The West Australian:

Film critic Margaret Pomeranz has described the death as devastating.
Pomeranz said she was shocked by the news of the 28-year-old actor's death.
"I am so upset, I just can't tell you," Pomeranz told ABC radio.
"I mean he is such a talented boy and really, I think a beautiful soul.
"And I think to choose the roles he chose shows such intelligence."

:)

TOoP/Bruce:
http://www.smh.com.au/news/heath-ledger/courageous-explorer-of-masculinity/2008/01/24/1201157557017.html

Courageous explorer of masculinity

Reed Johnson

January 25, 2008

THIS underachieving decade has been a troubled one for the concept of masculinity.

As much as any serious actor of his generation, Heath Ledger grappled on screen with the shifting, clashing ideals of what masculinity might mean in the 21st century. He wrestled, painfully and often movingly, with trying to reconcile manhood's competing claims of duty, honour, love, sexuality, work and loyalty.

Ledger seemed to steer away from the boozy "I-love-you-man!" sentimentality that so many young male performers fall back on in order to reassure their fans that underneath whatever emotionally layered character they may be portraying, they still have that ol' swagger.

He had a basso profundo ruggedness about him, a cragginess that had begun to nip at his youthful beauty. But he was not afraid to show a deeper vulnerability, a self-doubt that apparently mirrored the actor's own soul. "I like to do something I fear," he told the Los Angeles Times in 2005. "I like to be afraid of the project … There's a huge amount of anxiety that drowns out any excitement I have toward the project."

Ledger gave vent to obsessive, over-the-top emotional states that Western popular culture, since at least the Romantic period, more commonly has assigned to women. His brave, emotionally naked performances, typically shorn of protective irony, exposed him to risks that some other stars avoid.

Even, or perhaps especially, at his most tight-lipped and stoic, as the lovesick cowboy Ennis Del Mar in Ang Lee's Brokeback Mountain, Ledger conveys the sublime inner torment that comes from willingly sacrificing everything, even your sense of self, in exchange for a few stolen moments with an object of desire.

Marlon Brando and James Dean remain the gold standard of ambivalent masculinity in postwar Hollywood. A handful of young actors will keep trying to express those ambiguities. But one wonders when another image of a male character, or two, will take hold of the imagination as firmly as the poster design for Brokeback Mountain.

The movie's representation of the ultimate American rugged individualist, in tears, gives rise to powerful, uncomfortable emotions at a time when America itself has been humbled and, in the eyes of much of the world, emasculated.

Los Angeles Times

Katie77:
Wow.....what a compliment he gives to our Heath........and to the movie BBM.....

he found words to describe Heath that I've never heard before, but oh so true...oh so true.....

TOoP/Bruce:
http://blogs.telegraph.co.uk/arts/reellife/jan08/heathcandy.htm

Heath Ledger's real tour de force
Posted by Tim Robey on 04 Feb 2008  at 14:00

I'd been planning to rewatch Candy, Australian director Neil Armfield's harrowing 2006 drama about the relationship between a pair of heroin addicts, even before the news came through that its leading man Heath Ledger had died of a drug overdose.

In the days after his death, news story after appreciation after obituary singled out Brokeback Mountain as Ledger's crowning achievement, and nothing should be said to put a dent in that: it was not only his moment of greatest acclaim and exposure but, by any reckoning, a wonderful performance, fine-tuned and gruffly moving, in a film that had caught the popular imagination like no other in 2005.

My thoughts, though, kept returning to Candy, a neglected film outside its native Australia, and a follow-up vehicle for Ledger that had blown me away at the time of its brief UK release. If Brokeback's Ennis Del Mar was, and will always remain, Ledger's most iconic part, was it not possible that this was his real tour de force, the moment when he stretched himself most as a screen actor, dug most deeply? Feeling like a bit of a hearse-chasing opportunist, but justifying it in some way as an act of mourning, I bought the DVD to find out.

I wasn't wrong – watching this painful, personal, and oddly lyrical film is the best way I've found to work out one's feelings about the death of its star. Not only is his work as the cowardly, feckless hero Dan every bit as startling as I'd remembered, but it stands up now as the most open, revealing performance of his career, and the one which gave us the fullest sense of his capabilities.

Ennis Del Mar, quite by design, was a closed sort of performance. Closed if not closeted: Ledger is hiding himself from us, and the other characters, in the vast majority of his scenes. Until the very last moments of the film, which we spend alone with him and Jack Twist's shirt, the point is that Ledger's Ennis has spent most of Brokeback backing away from his feelings, or at least not fully owning up to them. The performance was a careful retreat into mumbling, self-imposed solitude, and a kind of emotional autism.

But when Ledger's Dan gives into the bliss of a pure heroin high in Candy, or watches and waits in the car while his girlfriend (Abbie Cornish) sells her body to buy them their next hit, or slumps whimpering in the shower while his entire frame screams at him to fuel the addiction, the mixture of emotions that plays out on his face is extraordinarily frank and complicated. Ledger's acting here is such a naked high-wire act it's almost embarrassing, which is exactly as it should be. Dan has nothing to hide except his own weakness, which he hides abysmally, and no public image to project except the one that's slightly less off his face than he typically is.

Far outclassing his perfectly adequate co-star – who, for reasons that puzzle me, won the greater share of acclaim for this – Ledger responds to every challenge of his part with conviction, sensitivity, sympathy, hilarious candour, frightening believability, and a spark that stays alight, deep down, even when the character becomes a virtual shell of himself. It's hard not to be curious about what well of personal experience he may, or must, have tapped in this performance. But it's even harder to deny, having seen it, that Ledger was an amazing actor.

Posted by Tim Robey on 04 Feb 2008 at 14:00

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