Gary Oldman Interview, The Dark Knight

We sit down to talk crime fighting and the caped wonder Batman with Commissioner Gordon! MoviesOnline sat down with Gary Oldman at the Los Angeles press day for his new movie, “The Dark Knight.” Reprising his role from “Batman Begins,” Oldman plays Lieutenant Jim Gordon, the head of the Gotham City Police Major Crime Unit (MCU).

“Gary is such a remarkable actor,” producer Charles Roven says. “Gordon could have been a comparatively straightforward role, especially surrounded by the more eccentric and even bizarre characters, but Gary brought so many colors to his performance.”

Director Christopher Nolan comments, “In the first film, Gordon was a very reserved character. It required an actor who could play an important role, but in a very subtle and restrained way. I was thrilled to be able to bring Gary back as Gordon, but in a story that challenges the character more and lets Gary show more of what he’s so great at.”

In “The Dark Knight,” Lieutenant Gordon is facing mounting pressure from all sides in the wake of the recent escalation of crime, but as a career cop, he knows his first, best option is to follow his gut instincts, which tell him to trust Batman. He understands that Batman now poses some danger to Gotham, but he believes Batman may ultimately be its salvation, especially with the arrival of The Joker.

“The police have never encountered anything like The Joker,” says Oldman. “He’s not interested in money or even power, in the usual sense of the word. The Joker is all about chaos; he does what he does for the fun of it. How do you police someone like that?”

Gary Oldman is a terrific actor and we really appreciated his time. Here’s what he had to tell us about his role in “The Dark Knight,” what it was like working with Heath Ledger, and his upcoming projects.

MoviesOnline: Knowing all the juicy stuff from the comics that was in store for Gordon, how hard was it to get through the first movie to get to the really good stuff in “Dark Knight?”

GARY OLDMAN: I have a confession to make. I am not a fan of comic books. I was never a comic book kid. The format irritates me. Do I read here? Is that comment his or hers? Then it goes to the next frame and I’m thinking, “Is he talking to him or her?” It irritates me. I can’t get on with it at all. So I really don’t know much. I know Barbara becomes Bat Girl, but we’ll never see that, not in the hands of Chris Nolan, at least.

MoviesOnline: Was it a treat, then, to see where this character goes in the story?

GARY OLDMAN: Yeah. When I got the script and spoke to Chris, and fleshed out the character, you know, if you can come back for seconds, it’s nice to come back and do more.

MoviesOnline: Your role in this has got a great arc, did they promise you that for the first one?

GARY OLDMAN: No. It was just Chris (Nolan) called and said “I’d like you to come back and do the second one and I think the script is really good and you’ve got more to do and I’ve really beefed him out.” I was just at the mercy of that, really, coming in. He’s written me a really nice part. [laughs] Maybe it’s all on the strength of the first one and he felt that I could pull it off. He said “Hang on a minute. I’ve got Gary Oldman playing Lt. Gordon. Why not? Give him something more to do.”

MoviesOnline: You play a very straightforward role with a lot of dimension and color. How do you go about that when you’re surrounded by so many eccentric characters?

GARY OLDMAN: You have to kind of get out of your way when you’re doing something like that. You have to surrender to the fact that really you’re like the vase and Heath and Christian are the flowers and that’s the challenge. I kind of like that though. I’ve played a lot of weird roles and I look at Heath being thrown around. Those noises, apart from the punches to the face, are the actual Heath hitting the wall and being thrown around in that room by Christian. Those are the real sounds. I watched that and thought “Oh, rather you than me.”

MoviesOnline: Did it feel weird, playing the good guy amongst so many villains?

GARY OLDMAN: You have to resolve yourself, when you play a good guy – and I’ve wanted to play a good guy for a while. I’ve tried to turn the ship around, and it’s a big ship to turn around. You can’t do it overnight. I just got into this thing of bad guys. You know, you come onto the scene, like “Sid & Nancy,” and no one really knows who you are. Up to that point, I had had a career in theatre. I’ve been in comedies and I’ve been in musicals, I’ve been in all sorts of things. And then you do that sort of performance, and slowly, your career narrows and narrows and narrows.

I’ve played bad guys because I’ve worked with people who have had less imagination than Christopher Nolan. Chris Nolan saw Heath Ledger in “Brokeback Mountain.” It takes someone with great insight to look at that performance, recognize what he is doing, and cast him for The Joker, even though he has never, ever done a performance like that. Less good directors see you in something and say “I want that.” Then you turn up and they say, “No, I just want you to do that thing I saw you do.”

MoviesOnline: Is it hard to pull yourself back like that?

GARY OLDMAN: You can't make it too- you've got to service what's there on the page. You know, Heath can take those lines and he's got the freedom in the role to just take it places, and I think it also reflects in the way that it's shot. There's an immediacy and a danger in the scenes with Heath. Chris just says “You know what? Put it on a Steadicam, put it on a handheld, and let's see what this kid does. Let's just sort of see what he's going to do as The Joker,” and there's this sort of freedom there. You don't have that with Gordon. You're more - you're reigned in, which I like, which I think is equally challenging, and fun. But you can understand why actors always like the villains and the bad guys rather than the good guys.

MoviesOnline: So you're going to be Penguin next time?

GARY OLDMAN: If they could put a good prosthetic on me. I wouldn't mind a go at the Riddler. I used to like the Riddler in the TV series.

MoviesOnline: Why the Riddler?

GARY OLDMAN: I think it's the suit with the question marks. I think I like the gear.

MoviesOnline: Can you talk a little about working with Heath the man and Heath the actor and his performance? That’s a great scene you have with him.

GARY OLDMAN: Well, there are actors that sometime go through the sound barrier. You can think of people like Jack Nicholson in “One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest,” Al Pacino in “Dog Day Afternoon.” There are certain landmark performances where you think that they just fly. And Heath has done that here. Yeah. I think there are certain actors that go along - really good actors, as Heath was - that go along and they have good careers. It's like they're sort of traveling at subsonic speed, and occasionally they go through the sound barrier. It was like he found something.

I knew it was special the first day I worked with him. I would arguably say that the Joker was possibly psychologically one of the most frightening screen villains ever. I think it’s up there with Dennis Hopper as Frank Booth in “Blue Velvet.” That’s pretty scary. We’ve got the original “Cape Fear” with Robert Mitchum. That’s a villain. Hannibal Lecter. I think he moved the bar.

MoviesOnline: What about your villains?

GARY OLDMAN: My villains are alright, they’re okay, but I don’t think I’ve ever been that good.

MoviesOnline: Obviously we see it on the screen, but when it was being filmed, could you feel that on the set?

GARY OLDMAN: Yeah. You knew in that first scene I had with him. I called a friend of mine. When we were shooting in London, I spoke to a friend of mine here. He said, “What’s it like?” I said, “It’s good. It’s going well.” “What’s Heath like?” I said, “He’s fucking sensational. You can tell already. It’s like he’s tuned into a frequency. He’s found a radio station that none of us can hear.” How good he turned out to be is beyond my expectation, really. You know what I mean? Sometimes it just happens with an actor. I’ve had a few occasionally where I’ve worked and I’ve felt in certain roles that it’s like breathing. It’s as easy as breathing. But that’s very rare where you get to a set. A lot of the time you feel you’re working a bit.

MoviesOnline: A lot of times with intense roles you immerse yourself so deeply that it’s kind of hard to get out of it. How do you…?

GARY OLDMAN: I don’t though. I don’t. It’s all tricks. No, it really is. I give the illusion that I’m doing that. I just have a facility for it. I guess that’s why I do it for a living. It’s lucky I do it for a living but I say this because you work around this intensity. I did “Christmas Carol” with Jim Carrey and at one point he had an emotional scene and he was pacing up and down and you daren’t go near him because he was kind of winding himself up. I’ve done it where I’ve got a tough scene and you have to say “Give me a moment.”

You wind yourself up and there’s this level of energy and intensity around the thing and Heath had that. There’s a total commitment to the part. That’s what you’re watching as well. You’re not only watching the skill of how he does it but you’re responding to a commitment to the work. But people want to see something with him dying. I think they always look for a darker story and they want to see something a little bit darker and sinister.

People talk about the intensity of someone like Christian Bale. And I've heard someone say “Christian's a method actor.” Well, Christian's still alive. I believe it was an accident and that was it. [pause] I mean, Heath, in between takes, would come out of character, sit down on the curb with me, have a smoke and talk about Matilda and laugh and joke. And I think it's just the sort of thing that everybody wants to go “Oh, it's the role. It drove him…” You'd have to be neurologically fucking mental, you'd have to have a disorder to play a part and let it affect you so much that you can't sleep and that you - you know what I mean? Don't you think?

People want a darker story than there really is, because my experience of him, and I don't know if he had substance abuse in the past, and people talk about partying and the stuff he used to do, but I was never witness to that. I worked with a sweet kid who had such a heart, who was a lovely guy. I worked with this guy who was completely committed to the role and the work, wanted more than anything to be taken seriously as an actor. He was on time, he knew the lines, and he was a nice kid. He’s probably looking down now and saying, “Are you kidding me? I’m going to get nominated for an Oscar? Now!?”

MoviesOnline: Do you think he’ll be nominated for an Oscar?

GARY OLDMAN: Yeah, I think so. I think the Academy tends to overlook movies like this. They somehow seem to not take it so seriously because it just doesn't fall into their thing. They don't tend to look at work in movies like this. But in this case I think the acting is so good, I think his performance is so good, I think it's going to be very hard to avoid it. So he could be the first - who was the last guy? From “Network?”

MoviesOnline: Peter Finch

GARY OLDMAN: That was the famous line where Sylvester Stallone said to his friend “I lost to a stiff.” Which is not difficult, is it?

MoviesOnline: How personally did the story affect you, as a father?

GARY OLDMAN: It’s not very hard to play. Not like you are playing against type or anything. That whole thing at the end, with the boy, something like that, you project your own family into the situations. Those kind of evenings, it amazes me to look at it, a year and a half later. It took me back to that night. Of course, the kid has to leave early – union rules. So then they have two hours to turn around a light, and the temperature drops 10 degrees and you get back and you are playing an emotional scene, and you are on a damp blanket, doing it to an extra. It’s just funny how movies are made.

MoviesOnline: How do you help your own children?

GARY OLDMAN: It depends what it is. I find myself becoming more square, as I get older. It’s weird but I find myself saying things my parents said.

MoviesOnline: Like what?

GARY OLDMAN: I always say that a lazy man works twice as hard. So you have to take your time and do it right the first time. Let it take the time it takes, put in the time and effort, otherwise you’ll end up doing it again. I always say, “Hate me now, love me later.” You’re civilizing them. You have this feral thing that is all about them, and if you don’t civilize them, then they’ll come to you when they’re all messed up at 22 and say, “Where the fuck were you?” You just become more and more old-fashion. I sound like I’m not hip. “Clean up. Do that. Don’t argue. Take your plate in.” Or you pass the bathroom, and with my little 8-year-old it’s “Lift the seat! How many more times do I have to tell you? Lift the seat!”

MoviesOnline: This film is so great because most of it is shot on location.

GARY OLDMAN: In real time with stunts and the thing. Yeah.

MoviesOnline: Can you talk about the difference between doing “Christmas Carol” and this?

GARY OLDMAN: “Christmas Carol” is kind of like shooting a regular movie, I think. A lot of people say working in that motion capture with Bob Zemeckis, “It’s like theater, isn’t it? It’s like doing theater.” And often the people who’ve never done theater say that. I don’t think it’s like theater but I feel it’s like doing a regular movie but without the breaks and the costume. You just keep going and there’s no lighting so you don’t have to wait and go back for two hours while they turn the set around and light the thing. You just actually keep filming.

MoviesOnline: I’m trying to imagine you as Tiny Tim in that movie. That’s really fascinating that that’s the role you’re playing.

GARY OLDMAN: I’m very little and they shoot me. I play Marley, Bob Cratchit and Tiny Tim.

MoviesOnline: How did you get the voice for Tiny Tim? Did you base it on anybody?

GARY OLDMAN: Well I sort of thought of me as a kid because I come from London so I did that voice and then a London accent for Cratchit and then I had this whole thing going for the ghost of Marley. They put me with a trench. There are platforms that wheel in and wheel out. They push in and push out so you’ve got all this crew that is moving the floor around. When I’m walking under the crutches, the actors are much higher than me so all the eye lines are… and then later they’ll animate the legs on me and stuff like that. I saw the designs for it and the realizations of London and the characters.

MoviesOnline: Is Jim doing it in an English accent?

GARY OLDMAN: Yeah. And all the ghosts he plays as well.

MoviesOnline: As well as Scrooge?

GARY OLDMAN: Yeah. But the design of it and the look of it are quite stunning. It should be quite magical and a different way of doing it. You couldn’t do it, it would be so expensive to do it like this and you can do things with the ghosts that you couldn’t really do in a more conventional way. Much like this, this franchise, he’s reinvented the Christmas Carol. It’s probably closer to how Dickens saw it.

MoviesOnline: Daniel Radcliffe said that he loved the scene he did with you in “Harry Potter,” that he felt like you were Butch and Sundance in the last scene you did together.

GARY OLDMAN: I love Dan. He’s wonderful.

MoviesOnline: Any chance you might be flashed back to in any of the “Harry Potter” movies?

GARY OLDMAN: No. It was funny, I spoke to Dan Radcliffe the other day. He said that they are releasing the last one in two parts. He said, “It’s because it’s so dense and so complicated.” I go, “No, that’s not the reason, Dan.” [rubs fingers together, miming “more money”]. Ching ching!

MoviesOnline: What did he say when you told him that? Was he crushed?

GARY OLDMAN: Well maybe a little crushed. He just sort of went, “Oh yeah. I see what you mean.”

MoviesOnline: Speaking of franchises, I can’t imagine there not being a sequel to this. Is that something you would enjoy doing?

GARY OLDMAN: Yes, I would like to see where they go [from] where they’ve left off. Gordon has a semi-public relationship with Batman. It’s a little covert but he does appear on crime scenes and I say to my officers, “Give us 5 minutes.” You know they do see him around. They know that I have some kind of relationship with him. But in the next one, that will be interesting because any relationship with him will have to be completely covert because publicly I will have to hunt him as a murderer. So I think if we did a third, that dynamic would be quite fun to play.

MoviesOnline: Are you signed for a Batman sequel?

GARY OLDMAN: Um… yeah, I think… yeah they may do a third. Did you just speak to Chris Nolan? Let me guess, did he just go, “I’m just tired at the moment.” Yeah, he doesn’t know what he’s doing. He’s going on holiday. He’s exhausted.

MoviesOnline: Goyer is one of the story writers on “The Dark Knight” and you work with Goyer again on “The Unborn” movie where you play a rabbi. Can you talk a little about working with David Goyer and what is the premise of that film?

GARY OLDMAN: There’s a girl and she discovers that there was a twin and there was a dybbuk, like a spirit. The history behind it is a brother of her mother that died and they were in the Holocaust and then there’s a grandmother who’s a survivor of that, and this twin that died is now wanting to be born and it’s a horror movie and it’s like a scary movie.

MoviesOnline: That’s the first time I’ve heard of a rabbi in a horror movie.

GARY OLDMAN: Because of this whole Jewish connection, rather than go to the usual priest, this Catholic sort of thing, he’s taken this other angle on it. David’s rabbi is very, very progressive. He doesn’t have the big beard and the whole … It’s not that look of the guy in black. I do a whole exorcism in Hebrew so that was very…

MoviesOnline: How was that scripted for you? Was it a whole translation?

GARY OLDMAN: Yeah, and then I worked with a real guy. I worked with a rabbi and I learned it. I tried to learn all that [makes harsh ‘h’ sounds] like there’s two reams of it, a whole exorcism of it which is fun. I was only working on it for a couple weeks, but it’s a different thing. I liked David from the movie, from the Batman series, so he called and said would I go do it and I said “Yeah, sure.” Yeah, you know, sometimes you can contemplate your own navel a bit. Sometimes you just say, “How long? Chicago? I like Chicago. Yeah. Look, it’s 9 days work. Okay, I’ll come do it.” “Yeah?” “Yeah.”

MoviesOnline: What is your greatest fear?

GARY OLDMAN: I’m afraid of getting a debilitating illness. I’m getting on now. The queue gets shorter. You start reading… “John Gielgud’s died.  The queue is shorter.” And you go, “Yup.”

MoviesOnline: You’re not that old – you are 50 but you’ve got young kids.

GARY OLDMAN: Yeah. I’ve got young kids! I feel pretty good in myself!

MoviesOnline: When you were growing up in London, was there a special toy or game that you used to like to play with your friends? What did you do for fun when you were a kid?

GARY OLDMAN: Soccer. Football.

MoviesOnline: I guess you just watched Spain win the Euro cup today?

GARY OLDMAN: Did they? I haven’t watched it.

MoviesOnline: That’s what someone told me earlier, that Spain won.

GARY OLDMAN: God! Spain won?

MoviesOnline: I’m afraid so.

GARY OLDMAN: [looking upset] I just lost $500 grand! [pause] No, I’m kidding. [laughs]

“The Dark Knight” opens in theaters on June 18th.