It’s been almost a week since the death of Heath Ledger at the age of 28 and it doesn’t suck any less today than it did last Tuesday. There have been some wonderful tributes to Heath since that time (including Daniel Day-Lewis at the SAG Awards last night) but none perhaps as well-done as Christopher Nolan’s article in the current issue of Newsweek:
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.
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.
Click here to read the entire tribute.
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