Transcription
Do you remember the moment when for Heath and or Tom you saw them early on that gave you um confidence that the choices they were making were going to pay off?
In both cases it was it was the same and probably when I came to The Dark Knight Rises I was remembering that and and pushed towards it. It was the the hair and makeup test we did. Uh and for The Dark Knight, you know, I had Wally Pfister just get a handheld camera, 35 mil, put a light up on the stage, Heath would come in with one particular type of wardrobe, one particular type of makeup, move around, no sound recording, so not self-conscious, just moving, trying different weapons, different pairs of shoes, and we all sort of got to watch this sort of magical magical kind of transformation and watch him find, not that he was finding it in that moment, but he was just gradually unveiling the things he'd been working on for months and months and months. And then he'd throw in a line or two even though there was no dialogue, but you you just hear him letting it out, letting the laugh off out into the room to echo around and just experimenting with it, and uh yeah, the tests were were incredible looking, and when we came to do The Dark Knight Rises, I I think probably with that in the back of my mind I kind of waited till we really had the mask figured out, had endless discussions with Tom, we'd done all this kind of work in advance, but then to see him kind of walk into the harsh top light, kind of walk out there and uh uh you know, assume a character.
And I think in both cases, interestingly, the key stills of those characters, um the one of of Heath is a very big close-up of Heath with just his eyes and his mouth visible. It was very defining. It was the first image we put out. That was taken during the hair and makeup test, not during principal. Similarly with Tom, um there's a there's a a great shot of him sort of from behind looking across his back with his head sort of turned to the left that we put out right at the beginning. That was also from his hair and makeup test. So, uh yeah, it's kind of kind of been the way those things have come together, but that's the The interesting thing with this generation of actors, of which, you know, Heath obviously a uh phenomenal leader in that, and and Tom, you know, just just one of the finest of his generation, they fuse the sort of psychological realism, the internal method-based acting of the '70s onwards, well, '50s onwards, really. Um but, they also combine it with this older, more external, you know, you could call it Olivier, Charles Laughton, you know, that prior generation of, you know, uh sort of give me the hat and the walking stick and let me sort of find that and see how the walk informs the character. They're coming at it from both ends, and I think that's one of the reasons why we're seeing such fantastic work, um you know, from actors like that, who they they stand on the shoulders of prior generations who've gone this way or that way. Everything's been external or everything's been internal, and uh these actors, they're approaching it from from uh both places.