Squaring the Ledger
Front page article from the Sunday Telegraph Magazine (Sydney, Australia)
by Honie Stevens
Sunday 18 November 2007
"You don't grow if you're safe about the choices you make," insists Heath Ledger.
He’s talking about his latest role as one of the many faces of Bob Dylan depicted in Todd Haynes’ I’m Not There, an impressionistic docu-drama reflecting Dylan’s kaleidoscopic life.
It may not have felt like a safe choice when Ledger first read the script, but the film has since garnered rave reviews upon release in the US, taken out the Special Jury Prize at the Venice Film Festival in September and sparked several Oscar-nomination rumours, including a Best Actress nod for Cate Blanchett, who, along with Ledger, Christian Bale, Richard Gere, Marcus Carl Franklin and Ben Whishaw, also plays the part of Bob Dylan in one of six distinct stages of his career.
Confused? You’re not alone.
“The film is a meditation inspired by Dylan’s music and his ability to re-create and re-imagine himself time and time again,” explains producer Christine Vachon.
“Obviously, it’s not a literal re-telling of Dylan’s life,” adds writer-director Haynes.
“We’re accentuating the radical changes in point of view and style and genre and identity... It’s about the hounded artist.
"It’s partly a desire to figure him out and partly a desire to protect something that will always be enigmatic. We want to know the source of his creative energies, but we don’t want to destroy it.”
The film’s title is just as mysterious.
“It refers to an out-take recorded during The Basement Tapes,” explains Ledger. “It wasn’t included on the studio album and can only be found on the CD bootleg set.”
Ledger has won praise for his portrayal of ‘Robbie,’ a moody, counter-culture actor who represents the romanticist side of Dylan, but says accolades are never his motivation.
“I have never had great expectations of my performance or of a film. I try not to think about the outcome. If you look that far ahead, it sort of taints your choices as an actor.
"I try as hard as I can to believe that no one is ever going to see it and that it’s not even a movie. Then you can allow yourself to bare more. Then, once a project is done, I tend to forget about it until it comes out.”
Ledger might be happy to forget some movies, but I’m Not There is the latest to underline his determination not to be perceived a ‘blond-haired bimbo’.
After his start on Home and Away and his early big-screen success in 10 Things I Hate About You, The Patriot and A Knight’s Tale, Ledger was keen to move on to work that had more substance.
He eagerly accepted the part of Sonny Grotowski in Monster’s Ball and still credits the movie with including his favourite scene.
“I enjoyed working with Billy Bob Thornton in the scene where he smacks me around in the bathroom. I enjoyed that because he really hit me, you know? I like it when people take it to that point.
"I remember it being an adrenalin rush… and, while he said he was sorry, he didn’t write a formal apology. We just laughed and joked about it.”
Monster’s Ball marked the start of a new career phase for Ledger.
“It got to a point in my career where I kind of threw everyone else’s opinions and choices out the window and made my own – and it had been a long time coming,” he explains.
“It definitely started off in another life. Early on, everything was somewhat spoon-fed to me and things were handed to me on a platter.
"I didn’t really like what was on the platter, but I didn’t feel I had a choice, so I was never really happy with the direction I was being pushed in.
"I mean, I was headed down a path where it was starting to get difficult to find good material and good people to work with. So I was like, ‘Screw this!’
“I just wanted to show what I could do and the many colours of myself. I made some bad choices, got a bit ruthless, but Terry Gilliam came around with The Brothers Grimm and gave me a shot.
"As soon as he did, everyone else was like, ‘Oh, OK, if Terry’s giving him a go, then maybe we should.’”
That led to Catherine Hardwicke’s Lords of Dogtown, a fictionalised take on a group of Venice, California skateboarders; Ang Lee’s gay cowboy drama, Brokeback Mountain – on the set of which he met ex-partner Michelle Williams, mother of his two-year-old daughter, Matilda; the title role in Lasse Hallström’s Casanova; and Neil Armfield’s Candy, “a gritty little heroin love story”.
Born in Perth, Ledger and his older sister, Catherine, were named after the lead characters in Emily Bronte’s Wuthering Heights.
Their father, Kim, and mother, Sally, were divorced when Ledger was 10 and both went on to remarry, giving Ledger two half-sisters, Ashleigh and Olivia.
Ledger attended Guildford Grammar School and, after graduation, drove 4110km to Sydney, where he began to pursue his acting dream and landed a part as a gay cyclist and Olympic hopeful in the TV series Sweat.
Other TV roles (Home and Away, Roar) and movie parts (Paws, Two Hands) followed as his career took off. Ledger remembers tall-poppy syndrome setting in around this time, and says it continues to this day.
“I’ve been cut down,” he says. “I went on Jay Leno’s show, and I was telling a story about a shark incident in Perth.
"This fellow was standing in three feet of water and a 15-foot shark came and bit him in half. As I was telling the story, I made a paddling motion with my hands. It turned into a joke.
"But, in Australia, it was perceived as me dishonouring the Australian guy who was chopped in half. No one actually saw the show, and realised it was Leno’s joke, not mine.
"But they took it as an opportunity to cut me down. It was unfortunate because I would have never made a joke like that, and the family would’ve never heard about it had the press not pumped it out.”
When asked about his future, Ledger hedges, “I’m not good at future planning. I don’t plan at all. I don’t know what I’m doing tomorrow.
I don’t have a day planner and I don’t have a diary. I completely live in the now – not in the past, not in the future.”
Ledger’s next role is as The Joker in Christopher Nolan’s follow-up Batman film, The Dark Knight, a performance that was described by co-star Michael Caine as “the scariest ever”.
“I actually hate comic-book movies,” says Ledger with a shrug. “But I thought what Nolan did with Batman Begins was actually really good – really well directed – and Christian Bale was really great in it.”
In addition, Ledger says he enjoys playing a truly evil character: “The Joker is a pure anarchist. I definitely have a different take on him.
"He’s going to be really sinister and it’s going to be less about his laugh and his pranks. I’m not really thinking about the commercial consequences.
"Maybe I should be. I can just tell you I love to dress up and to wear a mask. At this point, it’s just an exciting next step.”
Both a controversial one (former Joker Jack Nicholson has since commented that Ledger playing ‘his role’ made him “furious”) and a lucrative one at that.
But “no amount of money changes what I do between ‘action’ and ‘cut’,” Ledger says. “Before I got into the industry, I never imagined I’d have anywhere near the money I have now.
"I don’t need any more. It’s not that I don’t want the money, it’s just that I would have been really happy sitting on a beach or surfing every morning.
“I never had money, and I was very happy without it. When I die, my money’s not gonna come with me. My movies will live on – for people to judge what I was as a person. I just want to stay curious.”
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