Here’s another juicy morsel from Heath Ledger about portraying both Bob Dylan and The Joker. I think this must be another bit from the press junket interviews, but I haven’t seen this bit shared yet, so it is new to me.

In a New York hotel room, he says that it’s never going to be easy to take on a role that comes with certain expectations from the audience. “When you are playing these kinds of parts, you can underprepare or you can overprepare, but it is all just to feed our superstitious needs and to comfort ourselves. I was a fan of Dylan, but he was someone who I had scheduled somewhere down the line to be obsessed with because I do get obsessed with musicians and artists. So I think [director] Todd Haynes prematurely invited me into this film.

The Joker was different in that I was definitely a fan of what Jack Nicholson had done and the world Tim [Burton] created. I think that if he [Burton] was directing The Dark Knight and asked me to play the Joker, I would say, ‘No, I couldn’t.’ The reason why I confidently stepped into his [the Joker’s] shoes is that I had seen [ Dark Knight director Chris Nolan’s] Batman Begins and I knew the world that he had created and I knew there was a different angle to be taken with the Joker.”

You can read the rest here

There’s also a negative review of the movie, I’m Not There, that’s worth a read. Both Heath and Cate Blanchett get some positive mention.

Though Cate Blanchett (Notes On A Scandal) and Heath Ledger (Candy) turn in able approximations as the Don’t Look Back and mid-’70s era Dylan sketches, respectively, the rest of the cast feels lost in Haynes’s feigned dream logic

Read Dylan Done All Wrong

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