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The Honolulu Advertiser

Posted on: Friday, May 11, 2001

Movie Scene
Jousts share spotlight with knight

By Bill Muller
Arizona Republic

Heath Ledger

'A Knight's Tale' review

By all accounts, they play a pretty rough brand of football in Heath Ledger's homeland, Australia.

But even Ledger admits they've got nothing on the joust.

"There's nothing fake about it at all," says Ledger, who watched Hollywood stunt men re-enact the medieval sport in his new film, "A Knight's Tale."

"They're charging at each other 30 miles an hour and just pulverizing each other. It's incredible."

In the film, which opens today, Ledger stars as a young squire who fakes noble birth to ride in the joust, which pits knights on horseback armed with lances.

Jousting sequences have always been a staple of movies set in the age of chivalry (even Bugs Bunny took up the lance at one point), but "A Knight's Tale" takes it a step further, focusing almost exclusively on the dramatic and dangerous sport.

Ledger, 21, would have loved to give it a try, but the film's producers weren't going to let anything happen to their budding superstar, who made a big splash in "10 Things I Hate About You" (1999), and last summer starred opposite Mel Gibson in "The Patriot."

In the jousting scenes from "A Knight's Tale," "I did everything up until getting hit," Ledger says.

"At any points of impact, I just sort of stepped aside and let the pros handle that. Insurance-wise, I'm not allowed to ride a bicycle, much less, you know, joust."

Although the jousting is supposed to look real, the history is far from accurate, and that's on purpose. Director-writer Brian Helgeland, who won an Academy Award for his "L.A. Confidential" script, intentionally filled "A Knight's Tale" with anachronisms, such as a medieval crowd clapping along to Queen's "We Will Rock You."

"We're making a fairy tale, and it's not promising to be anything but that," Ledger says. "And that's really what the rock 'n' roll music does — it presents a bulldozer to just push over any walls that are restricting us to historical truths."

Ledger says the modern tunes put filmgoers in the right frame of mind from the start, transporting them to a whimsical place and time.

"If you were to score the movie historically correct, you couldn't even get full orchestra," the actor says, "because the instruments weren't even invented until 400 years later.

"So we're just 600 years off."

Some thought Ledger was a bit off after the success of "10 Things I Hate About You," turning down roles in similar films to wait for something different. So, was Ledger nervous about passing on high-paying jobs despite being a Hollywood rookie?

"If anything, it was fun," he says, "because people don't like to hear 'No.' "

To Ledger, it's not so much fun to discuss his newfound status as a teen heartthrob or to try to explain the invasion of Australian actors such as himself, Hugh Jackman ("X-Men") and Oscar winner Russell Crowe.

"We have a factory where we produce actors in Australia," Ledger jokes. "We're actually replicas, and once we're produced, they take us in, and we actually sit down and there is a strategy.

"There is a team of us, like 20 or 30 of us to come through, and we've had everything preprogrammed into our systems, and so we don't have a true answer to that. It's just going to slowly reveal itself over time."