Cinema Science

Delaney sent this to me. It is from the New York Times and could be a window into Heath Ledger's death. I remember reading this right before I'm Not There was released and thinking nothing of it. Could his death been a complete mistake? Could he have been too invested in a role and unable to completely let it go?

He tends to do that. He is here in London filming the latest episode of the “Batman” franchise, “The Dark Knight.” (Mr. Bale, as it happens, plays Batman; Mr. Ledger plays the Joker.) It is a physically and mentally draining role — his Joker is a “psychopathic, mass-murdering, schizophrenic clown with zero empathy” he said cheerfully — and, as often happens when he throws himself into a part, he is not sleeping much.

“Last week I probably slept an average of two hours a night,” he said. “I couldn’t stop thinking. My body was exhausted, and my mind was still going.” One night he took an Ambien, which failed to work. He took a second one and fell into a stupor, only to wake up an hour later, his mind still racing.

Even as he spoke, Mr. Ledger was hard-pressed to keep still. He got up and poured more coffee. He stepped outside into the courtyard and smoked a cigarette. He shook his hair out from under its hood, put a rubber band around it, took out the rubber band, put on a hat, took off the hat, put the hood back up. He went outside and had another cigarette. Polite and charming, he nonetheless gave off the sense that the last thing he wanted to do was delve deep into himself for public consumption. “It can be a little distressing to have to overintellectualize yourself,” is how he put it, a little apologetically.

Of course more information will come out once there is an autopsy. There is also this eerie quote from I'm Not There's director Todd Haynes, comparing Ledger to James Dean.

In a telephone interview from Berlin, where he was promoting “I’m Not There,” Mr. Haynes said that Mr. Ledger’s character was inspired by “photographs of Dylan taken in the mid-’60s when he was hanging out in New York locations with dark-rimmed eyeglasses and shooting pool or reading the newspapers in the classic Godardian striped crew-necked shirt.”

James Dean too. “Dylan was completely inspired by James Dean, and Heath has a little bit of James Dean in him, even physically, a kind of precocious seriousness,” Mr. Haynes went on. “As adult actors seem more and more infantile and refusing to grow up, middle-aged guys with their baseball caps, Heath is one of those young people who have a real intuition, a maturity beyond their years.”