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

| March 23, 2006 | The first draft of The Dark Knight script is written. |
| April 10, 2006 | The Dark Knight script is revised for the first time. |
| July 31, 2006 | Heath Ledger is officially cast as The Joker. |
| September 8, 2006 | He attends the Toronto Film Festival and breaks his silence about being cast. |
| December 15, 2006 | The Dark Knight script is revised for the second time, and from this point on, revisions will be more frequent, about once a month. In my opinion, this is the version of the script that Heath Ledger will have in hand and begin studying. |
| Late December 2006 | This marks the start of the "8 months ago" period mentioned on the second-to-last page of the diary. So it is during this period that Heath considers the beginning of his study of the Joker character. In my opinion, this is when he receives his first definitive script, and maybe it's here that he starts forming the diary. However, according to his statements, the most substantial part will be created later. |
| February 24, 2007 | He attends the Independent Spirit Awards in Los Angeles. |
| early March, 2007 | He moves to a hotel room in London, where rehearsals for The Dark Knight take place, and isolates himself there for a month to six weeks. During this period, Heath mentioned forming the diary and experimenting with voices. It's worth noting that the comic book from which most clippings were taken, Batman #663, had been released just the month before, in February 2007. |
| April 13, 2007 | Principal photography for The Dark Knight begins in Chicago. |
| May 2007 | Filming for The Dark Knight continues in London. |
| June 9, 2007 | Production returns to Chicago. |
| late August, 2007 | Heath wraps filming, marking the end of the "8 months" period that began in late December 2006. |
| September 4, 2007 | Heath attends the premiere of I'm Not There at the Venice Film Festival. |
| November 11, 2007 | He gives a few promotional interviews for the film I'm Not There, where he is asked some questions about his role as The Joker. |
| November 13, 2007 | He attends the premiere of I'm Not There in New York. |
| December 9, 2007 | Production for The Imaginarium of Doctor Parnassus by Terry Gilliam, starring Heath Ledger, begins in London. |
| Christmas, 2007 | Heath visits his family in Perth, Australia. |
| Early January, 2008 | Production for The Imaginarium of Doctor Parnassus continues in London. |
| January 19, 2008 | Heath flies back to New York and is tragically found dead on January 22. |
| _______________________ |
Empire posted an oral history of The Dark Knight, and it’s there that prosthetics supervisor Conor O'Sullivan talked about the way he designed Joker's facial appearance with all of the scars. Ledger called the makeup effects for the character "new technology,” and explained that "the scars are made out of silicone not prosthetic." Ledger went on to say that his "whole bottom lip [was] fake."In the documentary I Am Heath Ledger, we learn that the silicone pieces of his lip would come loose sometimes, and because of this, the actor started licking his lips to make sure they stayed in place.Ledger just ended up leaning into that and incorporated the licking as a part of his character's creepy mannerisms.
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.
Many users online have pointed out an unexpected connection between Jack Lemmon’s “Daphne” in Some Like It Hot and Heath Ledger’s Joker in The Dark Knight. The smile, the laughter, the mannerisms, and the resemblance becomes especially strong in the hospital scene, making it hard to ignore once noticed.
The “Dark Knight” director gives a deep dissection of his single favorite scene in the movie, the gripping interrogation sequence, which (with no special effects and only bare-bones lighting) would become “the fulcrum on which the whole movie turns.”I asked the London native to pick one scene in the film that he would circle as the essential moment in the movie, either in its service to the overall story or the film’s texture. He answered quickly.Nolan: To be honest, it’s pretty easy for me. The scene that is so important and so central to me is the interrogation scene between Batman and the Joker in the film. When we were writing the script, that was always one of the central set pieces that we wanted to crack.GB: At what point in the production schedule did you shoot it?Nolan: On the set, we shot it fairly early on. It was actually one of the first things that Heath had to do as the Joker. He told me he was actually pretty excited to tear off a big chunk early on, really get one of the Joker’s key scenes up in the first three weeks of a seven-month shoot. He and I both liked the idea of just diving in, as did Christian Bale. We had rehearsed the scene a tiny bit. We had just ripped through it a couple of times in pre-production just to get some slight feel of how it was going to work. Neither of them wanted to go too far with it in rehearsal. They had to rehearse some of the fight choreography, but even with that, we tried to keep it loose and improvisational. They wanted to save it all. We were all pretty excited to get on with a big chunk of dialogue and this big intense scene between these two iconic characters. It was quite bizarre to see Batman across the table across from the Joker [laughs]. I’m glad you asked this. You know, I could actually talk about this scene for hours.
We had a lot of time to shoot it too, because it was so early on. Quite often, as you get behind on other things and you run toward the end of the shoot, things can get very squeezed. But you tend to schedule the first few weeks very generously to give the crew and the actors and myself time to find our feet and find our pace. So we had a couple of days to do it.GB: Can you give me a snapshot memory from those days shooting the scene?Nolan: It was a great set built into a location. It had all of the advantages of feeling that we were in a real place. Nathan Crowley, the production designer, built these great mirrors and this long, tiled room that I really loved the look of; it had the feeling almost of an abattoir or something. That all fed into the brutality of the scene. We wanted to be very edgy, very brutal. We wanted it to be the point at which Batman is truly tested by the Joker and you see that the Joker is truly capable of getting under everybody’s skin. I’m realizing this now about that scene — I haven’t thought this through before — the synthesis of all the different elements that I’m most interested in within filmmaking all come in that scene.
The scene starts between Gary Oldman [as James Gordon] and Heath with the lights out, and [director of photography] Wally Pfister literally just lit the scene with the desk lamp, the table lamp, and nothing else. And then when the lights come on, Batman is revealed, and the rest of the scene plays out with a massive overexposure. He overexposed like five stops, I want to say, and then printed it down to bring some of the color back in. But it’s this incredibly intense overhead light which let us move in any direction. We had a handheld camera and shot however we wanted, be very spontaneous.For me creatively, that had been about inverting the expectation. We’ve all seen so many of these dark movie interrogation scenes where somebody is being given the third degree. We just wanted to completely flip that on its head. And have the bright, harsh, bleak light sort show you the Joker’s make-up and its decay. The Batsuit was redesigned for this film. And unlike the suit that we had in “Batman Begins,” it’s capable of really being shown in incredible detail and still hold up to that kind of scrutiny under that bright light. The suit looked much more real and more like a functional thing this time. The whole scene was about showing something real and brutal and getting this real harshness.GB: There’s remarkable physicality of the actors in that scene. They are such different presences in the room: Christian is all dark mass and bottled fury and Heath has this spindly weirdness. …Nolan: Yes, and I think you start to see it even at the beginning of the scene where everything is in closer. There are tight close-ups with just a little drift to the camera. We start in a very controlled way, but even within that frame, the way Heath is bobbing in and out —and he’s actually bobbing in and out of the focal plane because, you know, it’s very hard to follow someone whose leaning toward camera the whole time. It actually really adds something. We’re continually trying to catch him with the focus. You really see his movement back and forth. That way, even in a tight frame, you have this sense of strangeness. On the other hand, you have Batman sitting there just very, very controlled, restrained as you say. Then there’s a point where it spills over into real physicality and he drags the Joker across the table. We go handheld at that point and shot the rest of the scene with handheld to be very spontaneous in its movement. They had rehearsed the stunts and the fight stuff very specifically, but we really let the actors work within that. I had never seen anybody sell a punch the way Heath was able to with Christian. I got the violence I wanted. What I felt was really important creatively for the scene was that we show Batman going too far. We show him effectively torturing someone for information because it’s become personal.Christian and I had talked a lot on “Batman Begins” about finding a moment in that film where you actually worry that Batman will go too far. A moment where his rage might spill over and he would break his rules. We never found that moment. It just wasn’t there in that story. There was a lot of strength and aggression in the way he played the part, but I don’t think the story provided that element of losing control. What the Joker provides in the second film is the fact that his entire motivation is to push people’s buttons and find their rules set and it turn it on itself. And Batman of course places such importance on his rules, his morals. It’s what distinguishes him, in his mind, from a common vigilante. The Joker is able to twist him around and make him question his own approach and his own actions.GB: In the first film, the Batman’s most memorable moments of intense aggression feel more like theater — he’s doing it in a calculated show to scare people. The first movie seems to be about Batman’s fear; the second one is about his rage.Nolan: Exactly. That’s why we never found that moment of danger, the one we had talked about, where there’s this danger that Batman will just lose it and go too far. That rage is very much a central part of the story in ‘The Dark Knight,’ and that interrogation scene is the fulcrum on which the whole movie turns. I think Batman finds out — and Bruce Wayne finds out — a lot about himself in that scene. I was just delighted to get to see Christian show that rage. And it’s wonderfully balanced with Gary’s control as well. Even though everyone remembers the scene as being the Joker and Batman, Gordon played a very important part to setting it up and allowing this interrogation to happen. And then as he is watching from the sideline, he sees the exact point where this is going too far. He knows Batman well enough to observe this, to recognize it. He tries to get in, but Batman has locked the door. And what we get to lead to, by the end of the scene, when he’s just pounding on the Joker, I think Heath managed to find the exact essence of the threat of the Joker and who he is: He’s being pounded in the face and he’s laughing and loving it. There’s nothing you can do. As he tells Batman, “You have nothing to do with all of your strength.” There’s this sort of impotence of the strong and the armored and the very muscular Batman; he’s very powerful, but there’s no useful way for this power to be exercised in this scene. He has to confront that.Originally, at the end of that scene, once the Joker reveals his information, Christian dropped him and then, almost as an afterthought, he kicked him in the head as he walked out of the room. We wound up removing that bit. It seemed a little too petulant for Batman in a way. And really, more than that, what it was is that I liked how Christian played it: When he drops the Joker, he has realized the futility of what he’s done. You see it in his eyes. How do you fight someone who thrives on conflict? It’s a very loose end to be left with.
“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".
[...] 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."
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.
“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.
January 26, 2008 - NewsweekCharisma as Natural as GravityOne 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.
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."Bale said Ledger had watched video clips of the late Sex Pistols guitar player while researching the role.
"Heath's created an anarchic Joker unlike any ever seen before."
"He modelled the part on Sid Vicious which made this punk-like character. I think it is a classic portrayal of a great villain."
"Heath immersed himself in the role. I would love to see him get an award."
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.”
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.
I’m pretty sure these are official images created by the film’s creative team. They were in the draft stage and were later rejected and not used, but ended up being leaked online. Most of the photos come from Heath’s official photoshoot, and the majority of them still haven’t been released to the public.
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