Interview: Heath Ledger

Heath Ledger (Brokeback Mountain, The Brothers Grimm) speaks in his native Australian accent for the first time in 10 years in Candy, the debut feature film from accomplished Australian stage director Neil Armfield. Adapted from a semi-autobiographical novel by Luke Davis (and also co-author of the screenplay, along with Armfield), Candy is the story of Dan (Ledger) and Candy (Abbie Cornish – A Good Year, Somersault), whose deep love for one another blossoms into a destructive and out-of-control relationship with the aid of their ever-increasing heroin addictions.

At the start of the film Dan is a young, naive and unambitious poet – we don’t actually see him do any writing, though his poetry is mentioned a few times, and he does read e.e. cummings. He is certainly no Jim Carrol or Charles Bukowski, using his substance of choice to fuel the creative process and cranking out mountains of prose. Dan is more of a petty criminal that fancies himself a poet, and he’s already developed a pretty decent-sized heroin addiction. His girlfriend, Candy, is a painter who is drawn to both Dan and his easy-going, bohemian lifestyle, not excluding the drug. She starts mainlining too, their addictions grow, and slowly but steadily the drug demands more and more from them.

Ledger and Cornish make a phenomenal onscreen pair, matching each other in every scene as they travel both emotionally and physically through overwhelming sensuality to unimaginable horror. Geoffrey Rush (Pirates of the Caribbean , Munich) adds another outstanding performance to his résumé as Casper, a flamboyant surrogate parent-figure, fellow addict, and chemistry professor who can synthesize heroin on his lunch break at the university. Armfield makes the best transition from stage to screen since Sam Mendes (American Beauty) with a visual range that matches the emotional range of his actors’ performances.

A friend of mine once commented on actors, saying that the key to being a good actor is picking a good script (I would amend this to include picking a good director/producers/etc.). Picking a good script (and project) seems to be a skill Ledger has already developed in his relatively young career. While there are a few obvious targets for critics (The Order, A Knight’s Tale), Ledger has consistently taken on a variety of different roles, and his willingness to experiment and challenge himself has paid off. Candy ranks as one of his best performances to date, and I look forward to seeing him in his upcoming roles as Bob Dylan in I’m Not There, and as The Joker in Christopher Nolan’s The Dark Knight, the follow up to last 2005’s Batman Begins.

I had the chance to participate in a recent roundtable discussion with Heath Ledger in New York City.

Question: What was it about this film that caused you to want to take on this character?
Heath Ledger: Well to be honest it was just the opportunity to work at home again. Scripts in Australia are slim pickings these days, and it was the best one available. It had been eight years since I had used my own accent in a movie, and I was curious to see what that would be like.

Q: Concerning the drugs, what sort of research did you do? Did you talk to anybody specifically?
HL: Well, physically, I stayed out of the sun, and I tried to eat less. But all the technical aspects of it, we… Abbie and I, went to this center in Sidney called NUAA, which is Narcotics Users Association of Australia. And we met a gentleman who has been using and still is, I think over the last twenty years or something. He took us into a boardroom, and he opened up what looked like a rifle case and inside was a prosthetic arm, which was designed to train nurses, and within this center it was designed to train young drug addicts how to find veins. And it was a fully functional kind of thing – in terms of the veins, fully functional – and where it attached to the shoulder were two tubes where you could attach the blood bags, and it would pump blood through the arm. And you could find a vein, and when you found the vein – he showed us the angles to go in at – and you could even take blood out of the arm and push through, and then he showed us how to tie the tourniquets. So that. And then the rest, like for example, all the drying out sequence, we just had someone on set who could take us step by step through the stages, from experience. ‘Now you’re in a cold sweat. Okay, in this next scene you’re stomach feels like it just twisting up into a knot. You’re head aches, you’re parched.’ Just kind of spelt it out for us. We just responded to his knowledge of it. Yeah, so that. I guess.

Q: I found it to be a very powerful movie in terms of the bottom that these people hit. Did you find it stayed with you a while after you were done?
HL: No, not really. I kind of save the living through it part for the time between action and cut, and then I’m pretty good at just dropping it when it’s over, and certainly when the film is over, I just throw it all away, and I’ve very excited to get back home. So I generally don’t find that too difficult.

Q: There are a lot celebrities that end up in rehab at one point or another. What do you think drives them there?
HL: I don’t know, I mean it’s obviously not just celebrities in rehab, you know. It’s probably a similar statistic to just people outside of the industry. But I do think that drugs and alcohol have been glorified and mythologized in a way into the art world and what it takes to create. Like whether it’s watching Jackson Pollack paint with a bottle of booze in his hand and a cigarette hanging out of his mouth, we’ve kind of connected that to what it takes to create something, when in fact it’s anything but the truth. Obviously creation comes from your mind, and it’s hard to create when you’re all phased or drugged up. I’m sure drugs and alcohol would inspire new thoughts and…. but yeah, it’s certainly not something I use as a tool or a mechanism to create.

Q: Do you have a favorite scene in the film?
HL: To shoot, or to watch, or to….

Q: To shoot or when you watched it afterwards.
HL: Visually I really like the stuff in the rotor. I think it’s very pretty. I didn’t enjoy shooting that.

Q: How many times did you have to ride around in that?
HL: For half a day kind of thing. [laughs] Didn’t like that very much, didn’t sit well with me [laughs].

Q: This film had a lot of funding from state and local sources. What’s the difference between a smaller film like Candy and a Hollywood, corporate-funded film? Is the outcome different?
HL: Well I think you’re generally granted more freedom when the money comes from alternate sources rather than a studio. But whether it’s a better outcome is relative to the person making the film I guess. But I think generally if it’s state-funded or privately funded, usually your budget isn’t as high as it would be with a studio obviously, but I think…. I prefer to see the outcome of films that have lower budgets, because you’re forced into using your imagination, you don’t have everything at your fingertips, you have to create it…. from scratch kinda thing.

Q: Has starting a family changed your perspective on your career and the kinds of movies you want to make?
HL: I didn’t immediately get an urge to go out and be a voice in an animated film. But it definitely changes the person you are, and I think your personal evolution runs hand in hand to your professional evolution. Performance and the person you are, I think, they kind of grow simultaneously. So I think it affects performance more than choice perhaps.

Q: This film is based on a book. Did you read the book beforehand? Did you meet the author or speak with the author?
HL: Yeah I’d read the book beforehand a couple of times, it was a quick read. And the author was on set, everyday. He wrote the screenplay and he was kind of…. He’d been through a similar experience and really he was the source of information I was talking about earlier. It was coming from him.

Q: Is there any director you would like to work with?
HL: [laughing] Yeah…. Most of them are dead. But no… yeah.

Q: Like John Ford or William Wyler or Fellini?
HL: Fellini, sure. Cassavettes…. Bob Fosse…. Stanley Kubrick. But…. They’re all dead. [laughs] No, but there is, there’s a long line, a list of them I should say, they’re not lining up [laughs]. I wish there was a long line. But…. Terrence Malick, I’d really like to be in one of his visual poems.

Q: I have a two-part question. One, have you done any comedies since 10 Things I Hate About You, and if not, would you like to?
HL: Unintentionally, yes [laughs] I think I have. Okay, kind of. I really didn’t find them that funny, but yeah.

Q: Do you enjoy doing comedies?
HL: Yeah. I do. I enjoy the physical aspects of comedy. I’d like to do a silent film, that’s maybe a comedy perhaps, that would be a lot of fun.

Q: You’ve done a few love scenes in your career. Have you ever had to do a love scene in which you felt uncomfortable? With either the person in the scene or the scene itself?
HL: Well…. I’ve definitely worked with people I was uncomfortable with, but I didn’t have to do love scenes with them. Most… it’s a funny thing, there’s nothing attractive about that process at all, even if the person is attractive. It’s just very unattractive, having to go through that. Luckily enough I’ve worked with very nice people.

Q: Would that be true for this movie? I mean, it’s such a sensual film.
HL: Would what be true, that it’s an unattractive process to go through? Yeah, it is. It’s very awkward, there’s nothing sort of organic about it whatsoever. Grips and gaffers and boom operator and lights and camera and focus people looking at your butt, and…. it’s just so awkward and clumsy. And that’s the biggest kind of…. That’s your objective in that scene, is to make it look like it’s anything but that. It’s so nerve-wracking, it’s very uncomfortable.

Q: What did you learn about users in general?
HL: I’m not sure. I guess I got to… when I met this one man… just kind of the desperation of it, and the need to want to be accepted kind of thing, and feeling secluded from society, they feel alienated by their illness. And learning that there is a genuine need for acceptance within society. Because when they are in the thick of their addiction, they don’t see an ending to it, so they just want to be treated normally. So, maybe that.

Q: What’s next for you?
HL: Well the next thing is playing The Joker, next year.

Q: What motivated you to take on the role of The Joker, were you a fan, or….
HL: I guess if I was a fan of a comic book character it would probably be The Joker. The offer motivated me [laughing] to take it, the opportunity to play this guy. I – somewhere inside I kind of knew instantly what to do with it. I didn’t feel like I had to search for it, I felt like I had a plan of attack already, so that usually dictates whether I want to do something or not, if I have an understanding of it straightaway.

Q: Have you had any discussion with the director, or are you just doing it yourself?
HL: At this point it’s just solo. Chris Nolan’s still busy, or he was busy, with The Prestige, and they’re still writing the script. They’re so safe-guarded, even with me, I don’t have a script. I read it, once, at Chris Nolan’s house, but he wouldn’t let me leave with it [laughs].

Q: Do you like doing improvisation, and is there any in this film?
HL: Most of the scenes had drips and drabs of improv…. I do. I guess I’ve never been exposed to a situation where it was just, ‘Okay, so you guys meet each other in a park, you’re from here, you’re from there, roll camera.’ I’ve never kind of had that thrown at me, which I probably would be a little uncomfortable with. But if you have a complete understanding of your character and what he or she, what is their make-up, like where they come from, then it makes it a lot easier. But I do like to just throw things out there in the moment, in an attempt to be captured as opposed to recreate, which is what extensive rehearsals can sometimes take away.

Q: Did you have that while making this movie?
HL: Yeah, Neil wanted to do a lot of rehearsal on this because he came from an extensive theater background. And Abbie and I were kind of like the naughty kids in class, who kind of sat back and didn’t really want to give too much in rehearsal, purely for the reasons I gave you a second ago, it’s slightly superstitious of us, but I truly believe in being captured, and not trying to recreate something you did perfectly in an office space somewhere, a thousand miles away. But he did, he respected that, and he gave us that room.

Q: Brooklyn’s a long way from Australia, what do you like about living in Brooklyn?
HL: Everything. I adore it. I love the real sense of community, I love my neighbors, I love the coffee shop down the road, and it’s just we really left there to live, and it feels like we’re on an island when we’re just next to one.

Q: Can you walk around there, people just leave you alone?
HL: Yeah, yeah. Absolutely.

Q: You’re just a regular couple there?
HL: Yeah, that’s the thing, in New York City you’re protected by numbers in a way, there’s so many people walking in the streets that no one’s looking at who’s walking past them. And particularly in Brooklyn. People are really just trying to get from A to B, and get on with their day, and not looking to see who’s walking past them.

Q: You’re working on the Todd Haynes Bob Dylan film [I’m Not There]? Can you tell me about connecting with New York and that era and time?
HL: Well I found the connection obviously just through his music. His lyrics, his poetry. And it was an incredible experience. Todd Haynes I consider to be a genius. The footage I’ve seen of this film is beyond astounding. Cate Blanchet is given such an incredible transformation in this movie, it will blow you away. She walks, talks, sings, smells like Bob Dylan.

Q: How does Bob Dylan smell?
HL: Not very good [laughs].

Q: Have you met him?
HL: No I haven’t.

Q: Is there anything you miss about Australia?
HL: Oh yeah, I mean my family, my friends. I miss them dearly, which is everything about your home. And the meat pies. And the beach.

TH!NKFilm releases Candy exclusively on November 17th with a wider theatre release in the weeks to come.