The painter that inspired Christopher Nolan’s Joker
When Christopher Nolan released his second Batman film, The Dark Knight, in 2008, he showed the world a new version of the infamous Joker villain that would go on to become arguably the best iteration of the character. The Joker in Nolan’s film was played by Heath Ledger, who won an Academy Award for his portrayal shortly after his tragic and untimely death.
Ledger’s dedication to the role, in which he delivered one of the most nuanced performances ever seen in a superhero movie, was what made his Joker so special. He undoubtedly created a heartless psychopath that is certainly one of the most frightening villains in cinema history, and it was mostly down to the actor’s truly unique talent.
But one thing that we might not initially think of as having a striking importance to the character of the Joker is his makeup. However, Nolan once explained that makeup actually plays a central role in, well, making up, what the character represents, and this is something both he and Ledger were keen to explore.
Nolan once said: “Heath and [makeup artist] John Caglione and myself were trying to figure out a way to make the clown makeup, but make it more threatening, somehow more real world.” In the end, Nolan took inspiration from an iconic British painter with a rather skewed artistic outlook.
“I showed Heath Francis Bacon’s paintings,” the director continued, “And sort of looked at these great canvases, the way he’d smear the faces, the painting of the faces and make these very bizarre, blurred sort of distortions as if the paint is running on the canvas, or smeared across it.”
The paintings of Francis Bacon are some of the most unsettling in art history. When he painted human figures, they often arrived in distorted and rather frightening forms, with most of the humanity drawn out from them. Bacon’s belief was that he wanted to state “the brutality of the fact”.
With Bacon in mind, Nolan, Ledger and Caglione set about creating the Joker’s makeup so that it would appear smeared across the face to represent the inner workings of the character himself. “They really manage to put together a great texture for that, and it degrades through the film,” Nolan said. “It has a very tactile sense; you can really see the form of the makeup as it’s caked on the face.”
The real brilliance of the Joker’s makeup, though, is the fact that Ledger wanted to apply it himself at least a few times throughout filming “as the character would”.
Nolan noted: “The thing we got from that is that if you watch the film, he’s got traces of makeup on his fingers the whole time as he would.” This shows that behind the scenes of The Dark Knight, there was a genuine sense of genius at work.
