The aim of this website is to delve deeply into one of the most iconic portrayals in film history: Heath Ledger's Joker in The Dark Knight. Central to this exploration is the diary he kept while developing the character, carefully analyzed and reconstructed as fully as possible using today’s available sources.The information provided here will also debunk and dispel unfounded media speculation that playing the Joker negatively impacted Heath’s well-being. For instance, some media outlets have wrongly claimed or implied that certain passages reflected Heath’s own words, when a simple analysis revealed that he was actually quoting lines from books or comic books. Shame on those so-called "journalists", they are the real joke.

The Diary and related material

'Heath Ledger: Too Young To Die' Documentary

In the full documentary, six additional pages are partially visible, you can see them in the video below.

Leaked images

eeBoo website and related images

Thanks to the user IAmJ on the therpf.com forum, it was possible to identify the diary: it is the Composition Notebook titled "Elephant & Nemo" produced by eeBoo of New York. It is no longer in production but was available from around 2005 to 2010.

Script with collage by Heath Ledger

This copy of 'The Dark Knight' script is (was?) on display at the 'Heath Ledger: A Life in Pictures' exhibition in Perth, Australia. Often shown alongside the diary, as it also features collages created by Heath.
The comic clipping on the left is from Batman #655 (July 2006), the one on the right and the comic cover is from Detective Comics #475 (February 1978), collage from that comic are used in the diary as well.

Heath Ledger’s personal script

Heath Ledger's personal script from the production of 'The Dark Knight'.
Contained within a black ring binder, the unannotated script comprises 135 pages printed single-sided on bright pink US Letter paper. The green title page features the production title, is dated "3/23/2006" and has a list of revisions and the dates they were added. Each page features a printed watermark and Ledger's name in the bottom right corner. From the personal collection of Heath Ledger's personal assistant who was gifted it by Heath Ledger on the completion of filming.

The Replica

Coming soon.

Timeline

I think it is useful to provide this timeline to better understand the production of The Dark Knight and how Heath planned his study of the character. Moreover, it shows that he had finished portraying The Joker a full five months before his tragic passing. Unfortunately, this is a fact that is often underreported.

Tom Waits Inspiration

In 1979, Tom Waits appeared in this famous interview on The Don Lane Show, a popular Australian talk show. Years later, he and Heath Ledger starred together in Terry Gilliam’s The Imaginarium of Doctor Parnassus, filmed after The Dark Knight. Both Ledger and Waits had previously worked with Gilliam.It’s easy to imagine that Ledger, being Australian, was familiar with this interview and with Waits as an artist. While he never confirmed it as inspiration for his Joker, the connection seems pretty clear.

Interviews

September 8, 2006 - Toronto Sun + Toronto Star

“It’s definitely going to stump people. I think it’ll be more along the lines of how The Joker was meant to be in the comics, darker and more sinister”."I wouldn’t have thought of me, either. But it’s obviously not going to be what Jack Nicholson did. It’s going to be more nuanced and dark and more along the lines of A Clockwork Orange kind of feel. Which is, I think, what the comic book was after: less about his laugh and more about his eyes"."I actually hate comic book movies, like fucking hate them, they just bore me shitless and they're just dumb. But I thought what Chris Nolan did with [Batman Begins] was actually really good, really well directed, and Christian Bale was really great in it".[Asked if he decides to do a big movie like this, because of agent pressure] "I'm sure they're super happy that I'm doing this [The Dark Knight], because this is the first time I've really kind of taken something like that, so they're over the moon. But I think it's just going to be a really fun experience, and I love to dress up and wear a mask".[How will his Joker look?] "I've seen a few interesting designs on the look and I think that it's going to look pretty cool"."When he explained to me the angle he wanted to take, I was like, 'Yeah, I could do that', [Nolan's] going to make it a lot more sinister, and we've got a little plan for him, but it's exciting. Any opportunity to don a mask is always exciting to me".[Batman (1989)] was dominated by Jack Nicholson's acclaimed performance as the psychotic villain, but Ledger isn't intimidated by his predecessor's turn. "I love, love, love what Nicholson did", Ledger says. "[But] his performance was catering to the style of directing the movie was made under. It was a Tim Burton film. It wasn't Chris Nolan"."He's going to be really sinister and it's going to be less about his laugh and his pranks and more about just him being a just a fucking sinister guy".

August 2007 - Empire Magazine, January 2008 + July 2008 issues

[...] Heath Ledger, the man who fills the suit onscreen, joins Empire – sadly sans his ravaged, psycho-clown make-up. Ledger's ill-at-ease body language and propensity to mumble suggest a nervousness you might expect from someone tackling such an iconic role. But everybody else Empire’s talked with that day, from Nolan himself to Michael Caine, who returns as Bruce Wayne's sardonic butler Alfred, describes Ledger as "fearless”."Oh, I definitely feared it," Ledger tells Empire quietly, with a half-apologetic smile. "Although anything that makes me afraid I guess excites me at the same time. I don't know if I was fearless, but I certainly had to put on a brave face and believe that I have something up my sleeve. Something different...""I feel like I'll be assassinated if I tell you something wrong," so when asked how much we'll see in the film of the man who becomes The Joker, he merely says that, "Most of the villains in the Chris Nolan style of Batman films are normal people or once were normal people."Ledger's more happy to discuss how he became The Joker – and we're not just talking about an hour in make-up. "It's a combination of reading all the comic books I could that were relevant to the script and then just closing my eyes and meditating on it. I sat around in a hotel room in London for about a month, locked myself away, formed a little diary and experimented with voices – it was important to try to find a somewhat iconic voice and laugh. I ended up landing more in the realm of a psychopath – someone with very little to no conscience towards his acts. He's just an absolute sociopath, a cold-blooded, mass-murdering clown, and Chris has given me free rein. Which is fun, because there are no real boundaries to what The Joker would say or do. Nothing intimidates him, and everything is a big joke. I think we all have that in us," Ledger muses, before attempting to describe the physicality of inhabiting his and Nolan's vision of The Joker: "It's kind of like eating raw meat. What that does to your mouth and your eyes, simple little visual things like that. I don't know – I guess the rest is just trusting your research.""It's the most fun I've had playing a role. I'm really surprised Chris knew I could do it, or thought that I had something in me like this. And I don't know how he came to cast me. But, yeah, it's the bomb. Definitely the most fun I've had, and the most freedom."

November 12, 2007 - MTV

MTV: There's this little film called "The Dark Knight" you're doing ...Ledger: Done.MTV: Michael Caine told me recently that you'd created "one of the scariest performances" he'd ever seen. Is that part of the goal, to scare the crap out of people next summer?Ledger: It was one of the goals, yeah. There are a few more surprises to him. I don't know what I'm allowed to say. Warner Bros. and DC [Comics], I'm sure they have hit men ready to attack this room if I say anything. They'll shoot me when I leave.MTV: Is there anything redeeming to this character?Ledger: Not at all. He has zero empathy. You’ll just have to wait and see. It’s the most fun I’ve had with a character and probably will ever have. The movie itself is far exceeding my expectations. I think it’s going to be a really fun movie to watch.MTV: Christian Bale has cited "A Clockwork Orange" and Sid Vicious as two inspirations for your performance.Ledger: Yeah. "A Clockwork Orange" was a very early starting point for Christian and I. But we kind of flew far away from that pretty quickly and into another world altogether. And Sid Vicious, yeah, I guess so. There's a bit of everything in him. There's nothing that consistent. It was an exhausting process. I actually had quite a bit of time off between scenes — weeks sometimes. But it was required because whenever I was working, it exhausted me to the bone. At the end of the day, I couldn't move. I couldn't talk. I was absolutely wrecked. If I had to do that every day, I couldn't have done what I did. The schedule really permitted me to exhaust myself.

November 2007 - Press interviews

Christopher Nolan

“Heath and [makeup artist] John Caglione and myself were trying to figure out a way to make the clown makeup, but make it more threatening, somehow more real world.” In the end, Nolan took inspiration from an iconic British painter with a rather skewed artistic outlook.“I showed Heath Francis Bacon’s paintings,” the director continued, “And sort of looked at these great canvases, the way he’d smear the faces, the painting of the faces and make these very bizarre, blurred sort of distortions as if the paint is running on the canvas, or smeared across it.”With Bacon in mind, Nolan, Ledger and Caglione set about creating the Joker’s makeup so that it would appear smeared across the face to represent the inner workings of the character himself. “They really manage to put together a great texture for that, and it degrades through the film,” Nolan said. “It has a very tactile sense; you can really see the form of the makeup as it’s caked on the face.”The real brilliance of the Joker’s makeup, though, is the fact that Ledger wanted to apply it himself at least a few times throughout filming “as the character would”.Nolan noted: “The thing we got from that is that if you watch the film, he’s got traces of makeup on his fingers the whole time as he would.” This shows that behind the scenes of The Dark Knight, there was a genuine sense of genius at work.

I know you are loath to talk about Heath, for understandable reasons, but there's no avoiding the fact that when you watch the movie, his performance is so exciting that it's the first thing you want to talk about.
Yeah, I know. I've been waiting all this time for everyone to see it, and working very hard not to screw it up.What about Heath made you cast him?
I'd met Heath a couple times over the years about different projects, but nothing ever worked out. One time he gave me a speech that a lot of young actors have given me, where they basically say that they haven't achieved, as serious actors, what they want to before they're pushed into being movie stars. And of all the actors who've given me that speech, he's the only one that I would actually want to pay $10 to see give that kind of performance. And he did it in "Brokeback Mountain." The stunning lack of vanity, the sheer loneliness of that character—it's a staggering performance. So when I heard he was interested in the Joker, there was never any doubt. You could just see it in his eyes. People were a little baffled by the choice, it's true, but I've never had such a simple decision as a director.You and Heath evidently had lots of conversations about shaping the character.
He'd call me from time to time, just to talk about what he was doing. And frankly, it was pretty hard to relate to on the other end of the phone—when he'd talk about looking at ventriloquist dummies and the way their mouths moved, the way the voice would sound as if it's disembodied.When you heard him talk about ventriloquist dummies, did you think, "Where the heck is he going with this?"
[Laughs] Well, as a director, you say, "OK, that's kind of frightening." But what you're also hearing in the actor's voice is passion and intensity.You've said that when you see the Joker, you can almost imagine what he smells like.
Yeah, you feel like there's a grime to him. I showed Heath some Francis Bacon paintings, which have a particular smudged, smeared effect that I thought was very evocative of human decay and corruption.To me, the most unsettling part of his performance is that tic where he licks his lips.
Yeah, it's almost like this lizard thing. It's very insidious, very creepy. Well, as with a lot of things that Heath would do, at first I thought it was a mistake. Because the prosthetics on his mouth would come a little unstuck. But then it became apparent that he'd really found something.There are a few lines in the movie that—unintentionally, of course—conjure thoughts of Heath's death. They are just odd, small coincidences in the dialogue. Is there anything a director can do about that?
I think that the key thing about Heath's performance, as it relates to the tragedy, is that it is so utterly unlike what he was in real life. And I think that makes it much easier to watch it and enjoy the performance as he intended it.

Christian Bale

Christian Bale tells one story that certainly bears this out. He recalls their first scene together, where Batman interrogates The Joker down at Gotham P.D. "It was wonderful," Bale says, chuckling slightly, "because you're doing it, and you're into it, and someone in the crew will have a question and it pulls you right out, and you turn around, and they have these two-way mirrors, so everywhere we looked we were looking at ourselves, and you suddenly see what you're looking like to everybody else. And we were just a couple of freaks!" He laughs loudly. "I'm standing there in the suit and he's there, you know, with his Chelsea Smile, and it was just a couple of complete nutters. We both couldn't stop laughing!"He was very good company, Heath. I really enjoy it when somebody is pushing the work as much as he did. You can see how much he loved it."“Heath’s created an anarchic Joker unlike any ever seen before. He modelled the part on Sid Vicious, which made this punk-like character. His Joker is unlike any other Joker seen before. I think it is a classic portrayal of a great villain.”

Aaron Eckhart

Maggie Gyllenhaal

Michael Jai White

Terry Gilliam

Andrew Garfield

The photoshoot

Months before the release of "The Dark Knight", David Erwin, former Executive Creative Director of DC Comics, collaborated with Christopher Nolan to set the vision for the project. He was involved in every aspect, including directing actors during photo shoots for theatrical marketing, promotions, and licensed merchandise.He says: "I would direct all the photo shoots"... "We were shooting and I felt Heath was starting to burn out", remembers Erwin. "The propmaster had told me earlier that Heath was really into knives and would do all these knife tricks. I went over to the propmaster and asked him to bring me one of his knives. Once the knife came in, Heath just kind of lit up again. He found renewed energy".
Erwin describes the experience of working with the late actor as "truly magical" and unlike anything he's seen before or since. "No matter what you do, you always learn something", he explains. "Christian Bale, for example, wants direction. When I was working with him, he wanted my direction and was looking for it. Then you have Heath. I went and reviewed everything with him and we talked it over. We’re in front of the camera and then I get out of camera and then slowly, I just see him morph his physical being, spreading his feet out like Charlie Chaplin, starting to hunch over. He starts talking to himself and the next thing I know, the actor Heath that I was just talking to has completely vanished and I am there now with the Joker... Then after we go through the shoot for a while, or any time I interjected or came in-camera, then I’m back to talking with Heath. Then he’d go right back into the Joker".These are 43 images from the photoshoot. 32 of them were leaked online years ago, while the other 11 have been identified, recovered, and added to attempt a full reconstruction of the session. Additionally, there are three more close-up photos.In my view, all these images hold greater significance compared to scene stills or behind-the-scenes photos. In these shots, Heath poses in character in front of the camera, sometimes looking directly into the lens. It’s as if these images offer an additional interpretation of The Joker beyond what’s shown in the movie.

Movie Posters

Movie posters generated from the photo session.

Help

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Unindentified comic clippings from the diary