SQUARING THE LEDGER
by Lawrie Masterson
Sunday Times Magazine
17 July 2005

(Posted, 19 Sept 2005. Used with generous permission from the author. Thank you, Lawrie.)

It has been more than a year since Heath Ledger’s name has appeared on the credits of a movie, but the young Perth star is about to hit back in a big way. He has five new projects in the can and a new outlook on Hollywood and his career.

Heath Ledger is still somewhat puzzled about the helicopter story. Floated by Sydney gossip columnists during the recent shooting in Australia of Candy, Neil Armfield’s film in which Ledger plays a heroin addict, it had the Perth actor not just requesting, but demanding, an expensive chopper to fly him to various locations in NSW.

“I think they’re bored back there,” Ledger muses. “They’ve got no one else to kind of hunt down. Like, they’re trying to get you to come back and make a statement and say, ‘No, I don’t fly helicopters’ and, ‘No, I don’t spit on people, I don’t do this and I don’t do that’.

“But you know, the second, you do that you feel like you’re playing their game and finally they’ve got you to speak. I’ve just got to take it on the chin. At the end of the day I really don’t mind if people are confused about who I am as a person or if they think I’m bad. As long as they don’t know who I am I’m happy with it because the person I am is for my friends and my family.”

Whoever he is, Ledger’s mode of transport today, anyway, is far more modest than a chopper. He arrives at the DeMille Theatre at the Culver Studios – once owned by the legendary Cecil B. DeMille and where Gone with the Wind was shot in 1939 – in a golf cart.

Nothing unusual about that. On the sprawling Los Angeles lots run by the major studios, golf carts are more common than even the massive sports utility vehicles favoured by many movie industry executives.

Tall, lean and remarkably friendly for someone reputed to be careless about where he aims his saliva, Ledger is wearing brown jeans, a green-and white-striped shirt, a grey hooded sweater and a brown knitted cap.

“I didn’t put my curlers in this morning,” he quips.

Starting next month, a raft of movies in which he features will be rolled out, beginning with Catherine Hardwicke’s Lords of Dogtown and followed in no particular order by Terry Gilliam’s The Brothers Grimm, co-starring Matt Damon; Ang Lee’s controversial Brokeback Mountain, in which Ledger and Jake Gyllenhaal play gay cowboys; Lasse Hallstrom’s still untitled Casanova film, with Sienna Miller and Jeremy Irons; and Candy, co-starring Abbie Cornish and Academy Award winner Geoffrey Rush.

“Hopefully they’re all good,” Ledger says, having finally settled into a seat inside the theatre, which is more like a small, private screening room.

“I had time off before this string of work and I was also at the end of destroying my career.”

He laughs and continues: ”So, I’d finally destroyed it and I had to rebuilt it, and that’s why I went off and did five films back-to-back because I was, like, ‘It’s time to mend this open wound’.

“There were finally projects that I chose, you know? There wasn’t just stuff I had to do or the only stuff I could do. I got to pick and choose and I got to work with really wonderful directors and wonderful people and it’s been the most exciting year of my career.”

“There were five completely different projects, completely different characters, and it was going to be the biggest test of my career. Could I come out of this and feel as a person and an actor that I’m a lot stronger and braver?”

“I wanted to look at all five projects as one, like it was a boxed set of what I could do or what I want to be able to do. I don’t know if I did it right, but I certainly gave it a shot.”

“I think I’ve had a few breaking points,” Ledger says, laughing again. “I never regret any choice…because I had nothing but good experiences out of them – every film I’ve made.”

“But instead of making obvious choices that would turn you into a big blockbuster star, I’ve tried to go the opposite way. It didn’t feel like I was in control of my career. It didn’t feel like I was making decisions. I felt like decisions were being made for me and that’s not a very comfortable position to be in, in life or your professional life.

“But you only get wiser and stronger. You age on the road and you age in little chapters. Each chapter you’re aging with different people and you gather different things from them.

“I feel a lot more confident and comfortable in myself as a person and a lot more relaxed with my position, both in this industry and in life.”

Ledger’s private life also had taken a few twists and turns. His high-profile relationship with Naomi Watts, 10 years his senior, was on-again, off-again. At one point they lived together in Los Angeles, but finally split in May last year.

Ledger met American actress Michelle Williams, 24, formerly of TV’s Dawson’s Creek, while they were making Brokeback Mountain and the two are expecting a baby any day now.

“I am just not going to talk about my private life,” he replies good-naturedly when asked about Williams and impending fatherhood. “Thanks, anyway.”

Ostensibly Ledger has turned up to talk about Lords of Dogtown, a dramatised version of Stacy Peralta’s 2002 documentary Dogtown and Z-Boys, which chronicles the rise of skateboarding from a little-known craze to a worldwide multimillion-dollar phenomenon.

Peralta, who also wrote Lords of Dogtown, and his buddies Tony Alva and Jay Adams were rugged young teenagers in Venice, California, in the 1970s when they adapted their freestyle surfing moves from the waves to skateboards, turning neighbourhood swimming pools – emptied by a drought – into their arenas and creating the genesis of today’s extreme sport.

They galvanised around the Zephyr Surf Shop, where hard-living co-proprietor Derrick “Skip” Engblom eventually shaped them into a team, the Z-Boys. While then-conservative skateboard competitions did not know what to make of them, teenage girls did and suddenly the marketing men and promoters also sat up and took notice. A new type of celebrity had arrived.

Today the world’s most famous skateboarder, Tony Hawk, is a multimillionaire with his own lines of clothing and equipment, computer games, a best-selling autobiography, six-figure endorsement deals and offers to appear on TV’s CSI: Miami and Lords of Dogtown, in which he plays a small role.

Stacy Peralta, who helped launch Hawk’s career through his Bones Brigade team – having left the Powell-Peralta skateboard-manufacturing company - works full-time in the movie industry. He hopes to direct his next movie about big wave surfer Greg Noll.

Tony Alva – “the Chuck Berry of skateboarding, the original” – still owns and operates the Alva Skateboarding Company and can’t get some products out of his California factory fast enough to meet worldwide demand.

Jay Adams, reputedly once slapped with a ticket for skateboarding on a Los Angeles freeway, is regarded as the “casualty” of the three, having succumbed to the temptations that went with his youthful success. He has served jail time on drug-related charges, but now lives in Hawaii and still surfs.

And Skip Engblom – played by Ledger in Lords of Dogtown – still shapes surfboards for a living, although he has moved upmarket from Venice, aka Dogtown, do leafy Brentwood, where he lives with his wife, Martha.

“He is such a wonderfully vibrant, colourful soul,” Ledger says. “Playing a character who is alive and breathing was really interesting because I’d never done that before, for one, but it was really easy because Skip is such a strong figure. I didn’t have to dig deep. He just presents himself.”

Director Catherine Hardwicke, says she had no choice about casting Ledger. Engblom, who had seen The Patriot, insisted on it, not knowing that Ledger had grown up surfing and skateboarding or even that he was Australian.

The two spent time together in Los Angeles – “Going to Lakers games, hanging out,” according to Engblom – while Ledger studied the older man’s mannerisms and his distinctive, nasal accent.

Having mastered those, the next hurdle was teeth. “I have pathetic, little, wimpish, midget teeth and Skip has such strong chompers,” Ledger says.

“It was quite funny because it took a couple of weeks to get his voice and when I finally got it I was ‘OK, cool, got that done’. But then I was like, ‘Oh, s***, the teeth!”.

“They brought in fake teeth and I put them in. I had this lisp I had to get rid of and it was a week away from filming, so I had to go back to square one and learn the accent all over again so I could pronounce my S’s correctly without spitting on everyone.”

Ledger says he can look at the lives of Peralta, Alva, Adams and even Engblom and how they coped with a sudden onslaught of fame and, for some of them, wealth, and draw parallels with his own experience.

“It was slapped on me, really, before I even had a chance to take it in or sit back and analyse what was happening,” he says.

“But I think I got to a point of realising how manufactured it all is, how I was being manufactured. I understand that I am not famous, I’m not hugely talented and in making this realisation, I didn’t buy into the game.”

“I’m definitely a lot more comfortable with it now and, I guess, a little more used to it, but I still don’t believe in it.”