These are some very kind and inter­est­ing words recant­ing Heath Ledger’s on set aura, as told by Chris Nolan (via Newsweek)

One night, as I’m stand­ing on LaSalle Street in Chicago, try­ing to line up a shot for “The Dark Knight,” a pro­duc­tion assis­tant skate­boards into my line of sight. Silently, I curse the moment that Heath first skated onto our set in full char­ac­ter makeup. I’d fret­ted about the reac­tion of Bat­man fans to a skate­board­ing Joker, but the actual result was a pro­lif­er­a­tion of skate­boards among the younger crew mem­bers. If you’d asked those kids why they had cho­sen to bring their boards to work, they would have answered hon­estly that they didn’t know. That’s real charisma—as invis­i­ble and nat­ural as grav­ity. That’s what Heath had.

Heath was burst­ing with cre­ativ­ity. It was in his every ges­ture. He once told me that he liked to wait between jobs until he was cre­atively hun­gry. Until he needed it again. He brought that atti­tude to our set every day. There aren’t many actors who can make you feel ashamed of how often you com­plain about doing the best job in the world. Heath was one of them.

One time he and another actor were shoot­ing a com­plex scene. We had two days to shoot it, and at the end of the first day, they’d really found some­thing and Heath was wor­ried that he might not have it if we stopped. He wanted to carry on and fin­ish. It’s tough to ask the crew to work late when we all know there’s plenty of time to fin­ish the next day. But every­one seemed to under­stand that Heath had some­thing spe­cial and that we had to cap­ture it before it dis­ap­peared. Months later, I learned that as Heath left the set that night, he qui­etly thanked each crew mem­ber for work­ing late. Qui­etly. Not try­ing to make a point, just grate­ful for the chance to cre­ate that they’d given him.

Those nights on the streets of Chicago were filled with stunts. These can be bor­ing times for an actor, but Heath was fas­ci­nated, eagerly accept­ing our invi­ta­tion to ride in the cam­era car as we chased vehi­cles through movie traffic—not just for the thrill ride, but to be a part of it. Of every­thing. He’d brought his lap­top along in the car, and we had a high-speed screen­ing of two of his works-in-progress: short films he’d made that were excit­ing and haunt­ing. Their exu­ber­ance made me feel jaded and leaden. I’ve never felt as old as I did watch­ing Heath explore his tal­ents. That night I made him an offer—knowing he wouldn’t take me up on it—that he should feel free to come by the set when he had a night off so he could see what we were up to.

When you get into the edit suite after shoot­ing a movie, you feel a respon­si­bil­ity to an actor who has trusted you, and Heath gave us every­thing. As we started my cut, I would won­der about each take we chose, each trim we made. I would visu­al­ize the screen­ing where we’d have to show him the fin­ished film—sitting three or four rows behind him, watch­ing the move­ments of his head for clues to what he was think­ing about what we’d done with all that he’d given us. Now that screen­ing will never be real. I see him every day in my edit suite. I study his face, his voice. And I miss him terribly.

Back on LaSalle Street, I turn to my assis­tant direc­tor and I tell him to clear the skate­board­ing kid out of my line of sight when I realize—it’s Heath, woolly hat pulled low over his eyes, here on his night off to take me up on my offer. I can’t help but smile.

Christ­mas has been and gone, and, after get­ting our lit­tle trailer, gift wrapped in a pre­ced­ing viral mar­ket­ing cam­paign, we have all sat back and relaxed (whilst get­ting fat on choco­late). The Dark Knight news has since been sparse, not a lick of viral mad­ness since Santa came around. Though you can guar­an­tee that it will all kick off again as soon as we get a whiff of that next mar­ket­ing scheme.

In the mean­time, Mag­gie Gyl­len­haal has been speak­ing with the British pub­li­ca­tion Metro about her role in the Bat­man flick (and also sexy under­wear it seems):

Is your Bat­man char­ac­ter a damsel in dis­tress?
There are moments of that. Chris Nolan, the direc­tor, would joke about how I had to resign myself to being a lit­tle bit of a damsel in dis­tress but he pushed me in other ways to make her a pow­er­ful char­ac­ter. I play a lawyer and have real rela­tion­ships with the peo­ple I’m inter­act­ing with in the movie. She’s very smart and a real rounded per­son. Of course, if you’re the girl in Bat­man, you’re going to be a damsel in dis­tress to some extent but she’s a really great char­ac­ter. So many peo­ple I play are a mess; Rachel’s really clear about what’s impor­tant to her and unwill­ing to com­pro­mise her morals, which made a nice change.

Along with Empire, Wiz­ard have a super hero themed issue which dons a glo­ri­ous front cover pic­ture of Heath Ledger as The Joker:

Click to em’biggen.

The Empire arti­cle itself also con­tains a new Bat­man pic­ture of Bruce Wayne admir­ing the new bat-suit. For those inter­ested in read­ing the arti­cle, but are unable to pur­chase a copy of the British pub­li­ca­tion, a typed out ver­sion can be found on SHH, Empire Arti­cle. This is an extract from the Empire inter­view with Chris Nolan:

“The way Bat­man Begins ended was intended not so much as sequel bait,” Nolan insists, “but to cre­ate a level of excite­ment at the end of the movie. Ulti­mately, the sequel hap­pened because we got caught up in that process of imag­in­ing how you would see the Joker go through the prism of what we did in the first film.”

And how is the Joker seen through that prism? “Inde­scrib­able, really, Not to sound eva­sive — it actu­ally is quite dif­fi­cult to explain, but all I can really say is Heath’s not doing any par­tic­u­lar thing, he’s inhab­it­ing the char­ac­ter in very much the way I’d hoped from a psy­cho­log­i­cal per­spec­tive. He really cre­ated some­thing that I think is going to be quite terrifying.”

Orig­i­nally posted at Latino Review (with poor audio qual­ity).

Seems like there’s a heated Joker debate going on in this post. Well, to put some fuel on the fire MTV had a sit down chat with for­mer Joker, Jack Nicholson:

MTV: What do you think of another actor, Heath Ledger, play­ing the Joker in next summer’s “The Dark Knight”?

Nichol­son: Let me be the way I’m not in inter­views. I’m furi­ous. I’m furi­ous. [He laughs.] They never asked me about a sequel with the Joker. I know how to do that! Nobody ever asked me.

MTV: It was never brought up?

Nichol­son: No. It’s like, in any area, you can’t believe the rea­sons things do or don’t hap­pen. Not ask­ing me how to do the sequel is that kind of thing. Maybe it’s not a mis­take. Maybe it was the right thing, but to be can­did, I’m furious.

MTV: I’m sur­prised to hear you sound­ing com­pet­i­tive about a role like that.

Nichol­son: Well, the Joker comes from my child­hood. That’s how I got involved with it in the first place. It’s a part I always thought I should play.

Joker Spoil­ers:

For some more Joker related tales, head on over to Latino Review for some major plot spoil­ers con­cern­ing The Joker’s movie entrance.

It is also rumored that we might see a Dark Knight poster before the end of this month.

Batz over on the SHH forums has lov­ingly scanned in an excerpt from an inter­view with Eric Roberts (the actor that plays Sal Maroni) in FHM. This inter­view does con­tain spoil­ers con­cern­ing the Joker’s role, so I warn you to take heed before read­ing this article.

Click the image for a larger version.

The New York Times caught up with Heath Ledger in Lon­don, whilst being an inter­est­ing insight into the actor’s real life habits, there are also a few inter­est­ing Joker muses in the piece.

Here too was his Joker diary, which he began com­pil­ing four months before film­ing began. It is filled with images and thoughts help­ful to the Joker back story, like a list of things the Joker would find funny. (AIDS is one of them.) Mr. Ledger seemed almost embar­rassed that the book had been spot­ted, as if he had been caught try­ing to get extra credit in school.

Via Bat­MovieNews

The web­site Kino has posted some details from an inter­view with the Dark Knight direc­tor Christo­pher Nolan and pro­ducer Charles Roven, sadly how­ever, the web­site is entirely in Ger­man. Not to worry, Bat­man on Film have some inter­preters (oth­er­wise known as Google Trans­late) to work it all out for us non-bilinguals:

As we already know, Bat­man (Chris­t­ian Bale) trav­els to Hong Kong. Pro­ducer Chuck Roven con­firmed [the] Asian trip but would not reveal why Bat­man goes there. “Gang­ster hunt­ing” was mentioned.

The new Bat­man suit will be equipped with “[white] lenses” (some sort of bat sonar equipment).

The pro­logue that will be shown in IMAX in Decem­ber is the first five min­utes of the film.

Here’s a trans­lated quote from Chris Nolan: “[The Dark Knight] is not ‘The Joker Begins’. We did not want to tell how the Joker became what he is.

“In those five min­utes [of the pro­logue], we show how the Joker goes from being a small-time crook to Gotham’s great­est vil­lain. It’s like ‘The Rise of the Joker’.”

Mean­while, com­poser Mel Wes­son, work­ing with James New­ton Howard and Hans Zim­mer on the Dark Knight score, men­tioned the dark theme they were aim­ing to achieve (via Bat­MovieNews):

This is the one I’ve been wait­ing for. Another out­ing for Gotham’s Dark Knight, together with Hans Zim­mer and James New­ton Howard. I began work­ing on ideas in mid Sep­tem­ber ’07, it’s a long sched­ule but it’s good to have time to exper­i­ment and expand the ideas we had on Bat­man Begins into the dark­ness.… don’t for­get ‘Not all jokes are funny’.