Joker director Todd Phillips is setting the record straight regarding the film’s comic book influences.
Ahead of the release of Joaquin Phoenix’s Joker next month, director Todd Phillips has cleared up the idea that the film isn’t influenced by the comics. The conversation started when a piece in Empire Magazine featured a quote from Todd Phillips that said Joaquin Phoenix’s Joker didn’t follow anything from the source material. But Todd Phillips recently addressed the issue and claims he was misquoted in the article and that there are elements from the comics scattered across Joker.
Heroic Hollywod recently attended a Joker Q&A with director Todd Phillips and star Joaquin Phoenix. During the Q&A, Phillips said that they looked at the entire history of the Joker to pick and choose elements that would work well on the big screen. While it’s not a direct adaptation of any specific Joker storyline, the film uses moments from across the Clown Prince of Crime’s villainous history. Read Todd Phillips’ quotes below.
“…It’s funny because a lot of you guys have probably repaved something I’ve said in Empire where I was misquoted, and I’m not going to complain, I like the writer, he wrote a great piece… where I said we didn’t take anything from the comic book world, it’s actually not what I said. What I said was we didn’t take anything from particular comic. We kind of picked and chose what we liked from the kind of, 80 year-year canon of Joker. We kind of pulled a few things that we liked, but I don’t know, to us… yes, could it have been called Arthur and it just be about clown, maybe. I just thought that there’s a new way to tell a comic book movie, and maybe I’m wrong, but, and let’s do it as a character statement. Part of what, I guess a big part of what it should be about, more than making a movie called Arthur, was to kind of deconstruct the comic book movie a little bit.”
So there you have it, Todd Phillips did use things from the Joker’s comic book history to put on the big screen. Are you excited to see what Joaquin Phoenix does with his Joker role? Let us know in the comments.
Here is the official synopsis for Joaquin Phoenix’s Joker:
Director Todd Phillips’ “Joker” centers around the iconic arch nemesis and is an original, standalone fictional story not seen before on the big screen. Phillips’ exploration of Arthur Fleck, who is indelibly portrayed by Joaquin Phoenix, is of a man struggling to find his way in Gotham’s fractured society. A clown-for-hire by day, he aspires to be a stand-up comic at night…but finds the joke always seems to be on him. Caught in a cyclical existence between apathy and cruelty, Arthur makes one bad decision that brings about a chain reaction of escalating events in this gritty character study.
Opening in theaters on October 4, 2019, Joker stars Joaquin Phoenix, Zazie Beetz, Frances Conroy, Marc Maron, Brett Cullen, Bryan Callen, and Robert De Niro. Stay tuned for more updates on the Joker movie!
