sitting right on the edge...

Excerpts from the New York Times - 4.11.07
Conducting a tour of the house, which he is renting for a few months, he made wry remarks about the art. One painting depicts a crowd of creatures who appear to be in hell, but who seem determined to extract as much sexual pleasure as they can from their eternity of free time; Mr. L has turned another one around and hung it upside down, to no apparent ill advantage...

An open bag with clothes spilling out lay on the floor of the master bedroom. "I'm kind of addicted to moving," Mr. L said, perhaps on account of having had to shuttle back and forth after his parents' divorce, when he was 11. He carries his interests around with him, and his kitchen table was awash in objects: a chess set, assorted books, various empty glasses, items of clothing. Here too was his Joker diary, which he began compiling four months before filming began. It is filled with images and thoughts helpful to the Joker back story, like a list of things the Joker would find funny. (AIDS is one of them.) Mr. L seemed almost embarrassed that the book had been spotted, as if he had been caught trying to get extra credit in school...

Also on the table is a winsome photograph of Mr. L's daughter, Matilda, now a toddler. (Mr. L met Matilda's mother, the actress Michelle Williams, while filming "Brokeback Mountain" and fell into a very public whirlwind romance and then into loved-up domestication in Brooklyn; they both appear together in "I'm Not There" but have recently separated. He is leery of talking about their relationship, but heaps spontaneous praise on Ms. Williams's performance.)...

Mr. L was born in Perth, Australia, a place so far away, he said, that "sometimes when you're there, it feels like the earth really is flat, and you're sitting right on the edge."...

One of the things that struck him most about the Dylan who emerges in "I'm Not There," he said, was Dylan's continual effort to resist easy categorization and his willingness to "recreate himself and not conform to people's ambitions to put him in a box."

That is how Mr. L feels too, and he likes to keep an element of surprise, for the world at large and for himself.

"Some people find their shtick," he said. "I've never figured out who ‘Heath L' is on film: ‘This is what you expect when you hire me, and it will be recognizable.'"

He continued: "People always feel compelled to sum you up, to presume that they have you and can describe you. That's fine. But there are many stories inside of me and a lot I want to achieve outside of one flat note."