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'The Dark Knight': Tragedy and Triumph



Heath Ledger isn't here. It's July 2007, in downtown Chicago, and the actor was originally scheduled to be shooting a scene in which he uses a pencil as a lethal weapon. But the sequence has been postponed, and Ledger has the day off. Instead, we're watching the cameras roll on a somewhat less riveting moment in The Dark Knight: Billionaire Bruce Wayne, exhausted from his late-night crime-fighting escapades, slumps into a chair and falls asleep in the middle of a business meeting. That's right, we're watching Batman take a nap.

No matter. Ledger is all over this set in another way - he's all that anyone working on the movie wants to talk about. Director Christopher Nolan calls Ledger's acting in the film ''fearless.'' Christian Bale, the Caped Crusader himself, says it's ''intense - a superb performance.'' And Morgan Freeman, who plays inventor Lucius Fox (his job in today's scene is to chat with Wayne after the Bat nap), chimes in with a simple ''extraordinary.'' Even before a single frame of the film has been seen, Ledger's twisted turn as the Joker - a part once played by no less an icon than Jack Nicholson - is already building buzz as a dazzling, demented tour de force.

Six months later, in January 2008, it will suddenly, shockingly, become much more.

With The Dark Knight, Nolan and Bale return to Gotham City for a second, even moodier and more savage installment of the superhero franchise they revamped in 2005 with Batman Begins. The movie delivers on its promise, pitting Batman against the freaky new fiend in psychotic cosmetics who robs banks and blows up hospitals for the sheer anarchic kick of it. Most of the familiar faces (and one new Two-Face) are on board, including wry butler Alfred (Michael Caine), stalwart police detective Gordon (Gary Oldman), and lawyer-slash-love interest Rachel Dawes (Maggie Gyllenhaal, taking over the role from Katie Holmes), as well as a new crusading district attorney named Harvey Dent (Aaron Eckhart). The Dark Knight has everything fans expect from the series: gizmos like a sleek new ''Bat Pod'' motorcycle, eye-popping stunts (most performed the old-fashioned way, with real stuntmen and real explosions), and, of course, the brooding Bale, arguably the best, certainly the most serious actor ever to growl under the cowl.

Still, when the film opens July 18, Ledger will be Topic A. His turn in The Dark Knight would have been widely talked about this summer even if the 28-year-old actor hadn't died of an accidental prescription-drug overdose last January. It might have even earned him another Oscar nomination (it still could, posthumously). Now the performance is shrouded in tragedy, though, and may well be Ledger's last cinematic testament (it's unclear what Terry Gilliam will, or can, do with the actor's unfinished footage from The Imaginarium of Doctor Parnassus). And that loads The Dark Knight with a poignancy its creators never anticipated. Certainly one they never desired. Along with the grief it caused friends and family, Ledger's death cast a shadow of uncertainty over the film. It had Warner Bros. reexamining its entire marketing plans for the movie, conducting taste tests on the appropriateness of Ledger's clown face on publicity stills and in trailers. Hardly the way the studio had hoped it would be launching its biggest summer thrill ride.

The guy had serious nuts,'' Nolan says. ''What I needed was someone who wouldn't be afraid of the comparison with Jack Nicholson. And then I saw Heath's incredible performance in Brokeback Mountain. Such a lack of vanity. This was an actor who wasn't afraid to bury himself in his character - to a massive extent.''

The Joker's return, of course, had been foreshadowed in the final scene of Batman Begins, when Batman turns over a playing card to reveal the telltale mark - a jester - of Gotham's most notorious criminal mastermind. But what really stacked the deck in favor of a Joker-centered sequel was the $372 million Batman Begins raked in worldwide. With Bale contractually locked in for two more Bat movies, and Nolan on board for at least one more, the only thing needed was an actor to play the bad guy. There certainly wasn't a shortage of options. Robin Williams, Sean Penn, and even Mark Hamill were rumored to be on Nolan's short list (at least Hamill had practice, having voiced the Joker in various superhero cartoons). What nobody knew at the time, though, was just how short the director's list was. ''Heath was the only one on it,'' Nolan insists. ''I knew he was it from the start.''

Nolan was right: Ledger was fearless. The actor seemed to have no misgivings at all about trespassing on Jack's old turf. On the contrary, Ledger's feral take on the Joker makes Nicholson's more gentlemanly clown in Tim Burton's 1989 Batman look about as scary as Cesar Romero. Of course, at the time - the summer of 2006 - Ledger had reason to be confident. He'd just been nominated for his first Academy Award for Brokeback, which must have eased the sting of recent flops like The Order and Lords of Dogtown. A major role in a big studio franchise was the next logical step for Ledger's career. Especially a franchise that had been relaunched by the indie auteur behind Memento and had been retooled as a smart, edgy showcase with a layered, contemplative subtext not generally found in flicks about crime-fighting guys in tights.

Nolan and Ledger hit it off from the start. ''We had the same take on the character,'' the director says. ''We didn't have a script yet, but we had ideas. The idea of anarchy as an absolute. The idea of chaos as the most frightening thing to society. The idea of a motiveless criminal, somebody who just wants to watch the world burn.'' Some of those ideas were pretty radical for a summer tentpole with a reported budget of $180 million (before marketing costs). The Joker, for instance, is given no backstory in the film; he simply bursts into Gotham with the terrifying randomness of a drive-by killer. Even as Nolan started folding those ideas into an actual script (with his brother Jonathan and Batman Begins scribe David S. Goyer), Ledger was already slipping into the character's skin. He spent months working with a voice coach fine-tuning the Joker's cackling cadence. ''He tried to articulate to me what he was doing with his voice, but it was sometimes hard to understand,'' Nolan confesses. ''He talked about ventriloquist dummies, the way their mouths moved, the way their voices wouldn't appear to come out of them. He said he wanted the voice to have a mocking quality, a sort of disconnectedness.'' Ledger also gave plenty of thought to the makeup that would be splattered across his face throughout the film. ''He started applying the makeup himself - just to see what it would look like if he put it on with his own hands,'' Nolan says. ''We talked about how streaking the paint could get across the idea of corruption, of decay.''

As the cameras started rolling in April 2007, Ledger continued to dig into the Joker's coiled psyche. Gary Oldman, who's played a few nutjobs himself, recalls uncovering one of Ledger's inspirations while shooting a sequence in Gotham's jailhouse. ''It was the scene after we capture the Joker and he's in a holding pen, sitting with his back against the bars,'' Oldman says. ''And Heath is sort of looking at me, kind of under his brow, and then he just starts clapping. I remember going over to him between takes and saying, 'You know, you remind me of Alex from A Clockwork Orange.' And Heath said, 'Yeah, yeah, yeah. Funnily enough, I was just watching that movie in my trailer.'''

As serious a journey as Ledger took into the character, though, nobody recalls seeing the actor fall down any mental rabbit holes. Contrary to the speculation after his death, his work on The Dark Knight didn't appear to ruffle Ledger's psychological health in the slightest. ''Heath got the same kick out of acting that I do,'' Bale says. ''He enjoyed the sort of crazy immersion of acting. He took it incredibly seriously but simultaneously recognized how ridiculous it all is.'' Oldman got a similar impression. ''I know there are these rumors out there that playing the Joker drove him to his grave,'' he says. ''But I never saw anything of that. He was always on time. He knew his part backwards and forwards. I just thought he was a really sweet kid.''

There was one actor on the set of The Dark Knight who did get overly wrapped up in his role - it just didn't happen to be Ledger. ''I always make up my own backstories for my characters,'' says Michael Caine. ''Nobody cares but me, but I do it anyway. And my backstory for Alfred was that he was with the Special Infantry Service - sort of like the Navy SEALs - during World War II. But he got injured. So in order to stay in the service, he took a job in the officers' mess as a barman. And that's where [Bruce Wayne's dad] found him. That's why the accent I use for Alfred is that of an army sergeant. You see, you're not dealing with an ordinary butler here...''

That scene in The Dark Knight when Ledger impales a man's head with a pencil? The one that got postponed in Chicago last July? It's terrific in the finished film. Almost as good as the one in which the Joker flips an 18-wheeler truck during a high-speed chase with the Bat Pod. Or when he slips into a nurse's dress and shimmies down a Gotham City street, coolly setting off fireballs of explosions behind him with a remote-controlled detonator.

Last January, however, there was reason for Warner Bros. to be nervous. The media frenzy over Ledger's death was going full tilt, with every news network broadcasting footage of his corpse being loaded into the back of an ambulance. Filming on The Dark Knight had wrapped in November, but what if Ledger's performance needed voice looping or - worse - reshoots? And what about the marketing? How would the studio sell the movie when audiences now knew the tragic fate of its villain? ''We didn't want to do anything that would seem exploitative,'' says Jeff Robinov, president of Warner Bros. Pictures Group. (Exploitative includes talking to the press about Heath; virtually everyone interviewed in this story clearly would have preferred to discuss any other aspect of the film.) As for possible reshoots, Nolan says that wasn't a problem. ''I've never done any reshoots on anything,'' he says. ''I've never had to loop more than a couple of lines in any of my films.''

Ultimately, the studio decided to leave Ledger's face in the publicity stills and release the trailers that showcased his performance. It even went ahead with a Joker action figure, which looks more like a character out of The Nightmare Before Christmas than it does Ledger, but never mind. It's a testament to the actor's talent that when the lights go down in the theater, and The Dark Knight starts unspooling, it's shockingly easy to forget that he's gone. It's only later, walking to the parking lot, the reality sinks in again.

Perversely - or maybe predictably - the tragedy of Ledger's death may draw ticket buyers who aren't Batman fans but who want to pay the actor their last respects (or who just want to gawk at his ghost). In any case, advance ticket sales for The Dark Knight, as well as some gushing early reviews, suggest that the opening-weekend numbers are going to be huge. Some observers already predict that the movie could surpass Spider-Man to become the highest-grossing comic-book-based movie of all time. In an irony the Joker would appreciate, Heath Ledger's last film is about to be the biggest hit of his life.