Brokeback Mountain: Our Community's Common Bond > Heath Ledger Remembrance Forum

Heath Ledger in his own Words

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TOoP/Bruce:
A Knight's Tale:

"I've been riding horses since I was a kid so the only thing I had to get used to was the lance. Jousting is tame by comparison with Aussie sports"  "I found the dancing scenes in the film much harder to do. I'm not one of nature's most gifted dancers."


"The past year has just been mad for me." "I haven't really had a chance to let the fame thing sink in or ask questions about it all."

"I felt a bit of pressure when I first saw my face on the poster for The Patriot, you can't help but be intimidated by that."

"I miss Australia, I miss my family, I miss being a big brother."

"All this has been strange for my family but interesting as well because they've been experiencing similar little changes like people calling them up who they haven't seen in 20 years and the press calling them, so they're having to deal with that. It's been a little bit of a shock to them, but they are proud and happy and they are getting used to it."

"If anything you wish that if one place wasn't to change it would be your home town but I was back there recently and they were documenting every meal I had every day." It was in the paper that I ate fettucini on Tuesday, still that's front page news in Perth."
 
"I tend to detach myself and realise that my life is my five best friends and my 20 friends beyond that and my family. All of a sudden over the past few months there are these people around you, these associates and beyond that there's the whole world. It's curious."

"What I have to keep reminding myself is that no matter what they talk about or what they say about you or the pressures, that life in here," (touching his chest) "is what I originally had and what I still have and still cherish. As long as I can keep my head there I'm fine, it's not really a hard thing for me to do."

TOoP/Bruce:
"Why do I act? We need to work to eat. I don't live to work, I work to live. This happens to be something that I love to do. I get a million things out of it, but money is about the most important one."

"I don’t have that much forward planning about what I want to do in the future. But I guess once I find something, like if I’m doing Lords of Dogtown, I really like to flip the scale on the next job I’m doing. It’s almost like you are a switchboard in a sound booth and on one job you use one side and by the end of the job you are kind of exhausted by it, but you didn’t use any of the other side over here so you have to find something that will mean you using this half of your brain, energy wise, and that’s how Brokeback Mountain and Casanova complimented each other. Brokeback was excruciating and Casanova was drinking wine and eating pasta, it was like a holiday. But I’ve got no future plans, I don’t know what I’m going to do next as along as it scares me, as long as it’s something new, as long as I get to scare other people. As long as it’s an opportunity to evolve and grow as an actor and a person and challenge myself."

TOoP/Bruce:
“You want to know the truth? The short story, [“Brokeback Mountain”) was published in 1997. It was optioned to become a movie in 1998. My first American movie was ’10 Things I Hate About You’ in 1999. There were so many actors during the past seven years who have been attached to ‘Brokeback Mountain,’ yet who have been convinced by their managers, agents, publicists, or all three combined, not to do it, because it would ruin their career. I was approached to make the movie, maybe because I was the last on the list, in early 2004 and didn’t think twice about it. The same can be said about Jake (Gyllenhaal). Neither of us needed to have ‘permission’ from our agents to make this movie. It was our decision alone. To be honest, nobody advised me to not do the movie. Fear is manufactured by the studios putting up money. Focus (the studio releasing “Brokeback Mountain) has had a track record with quality hard-to-market films, including ‘Far From Heaven,’ which also just happened to be a film with gay undertones."



“The challenge wasn’t the gay aspect of the movie. In fact, in this year, 2005, I can’t understand why anyone, agent, manager, publicist, would even question any actor taking any gay role. But, back to the challenge of the movie. I age twenty years. That was a huge challenge. As was getting the accent of my character just right, since, as he gets older, his voice gets deeper."


TOoP/Bruce:
"...once I read it I understood what type of Casanova they wanted to make. And so I thought it would be a lot of fun, an opportunity to take what I do not too seriously and I understood that Brokeback Mountain was going to be really hard so that this would be a great way to relax in Venice for five months "(laughs).

"I mean obviously Brokeback Mountain was an obstacle I felt I could never climb, I could never defeat, that it was too tough but ultimately decided to do it. And with that I came out with a real sense of accomplishment which was something that I lacked in the movies that I’ve done before, I’d never felt that I’m accomplished anything. But then in both Brothers Grimm and Casanova there was a lot to enjoy. Brothers Grimm was the first time I’ve been let loose and use my kind of frantic energy and twitching and nervousness and clumsiness and Terry Gilliam is very good at allowing you to do that. He sets you free and creates an environment where you can feel safe enough to be bad – he lets you be bad and he lets you be big, which is fun. And with Lasse on Casanova he created such a lovely atmosphere on the set, with such a great group of people, cast and crew, that it really helped the film."

"I did do quite a bit of research and I already knew little bits of information about (Cassanova), all the obvious kind of things. But I was curious to know more and got hold of all his journals and read a couple of them and flicked through the rest. But there was no real point in tying myself down to historical correctness because the movie wasn’t and the story wasn’t. But particularly after coming off of Brokeback which was so serious and lonely and at times tortuous and I went from that to Casanova and I really wanted to not take acting seriously, not take movies seriously, I just wanted to have fun. And I wanted to come home smiling after work and so by throwing away all the history it allowed me to do that. And it gave me a clean slate so I just kind of created my own character."


"It was a vacation really. I’ve never spent this much time in Venice and it ended up being a four and a half month guided tour of Venice. Every day we ended up being taken to the most beautiful parts of Venice to shoot so essentially it was like filming a movie inside a museum which was really cool. And you know, working with great people, great crew. It was a lovely experience."

TOoP/Bruce:
Q: You have a tattoo on your right arm which reads ‘Old Man River’ What does that mean?


Heath Ledger: It’s got a few meanings, they all have many meanings, and I usually get tattoos when I need to be reminded of something but the answer I’ll give you (laughs) is that it has nothing to do with the song, I just felt there was something eternal about the phrase and I feel that I’m at a stage in my life now where life is just about to really speed up and flash by and so I feel like I am on old man river paddling on a little row boat. That’s my answer for today (laughs). This one (points to left forearm) Is my sisters and my mum, Cate, Ashley, Olvia and Sally – yes ‘chaos’ or Sony when it’s upside down which I discovered when it was too late (laughs). and thought ‘oh great..’

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