Todd Phillips explained where the inspiration for his version of Gotham City came from for Joaquin Phoenix’s Joker.
Joker director Todd Phillips crafted a bleak vision of Gotham City for Joaquin Phoenix’s villain to inhabit, but on the special features of the film’s home release he revealed there’s a specific real-world inspiration for the look and feel of the city. Most recently, Joker was recognized at the Golden Globes, with Joaquin Phoenix winning Best Actor in a Motion Picture Drama and composer Hildur Guðnadóttir receiving the Best Original Score award.
In the Joker home media features, Todd Phillips reveals that Gotham City was directly inspired by memories of seeing New York City in 1981. The director described it as a “broken down city on every level.” He also went on to say that he thinks Joaquin Phoenix’s Joker isn’t set in the past, it just takes place in an alternate universe. Take a look at at what Joker director Todd Phillips said about his Gotham City below.
“Even though we don’t really say when and where the movie takes place, in my mind, it was always New York City, 1981, what did that look like and what did that feel like from my memory of it. I was only 11 or 12-years-old, but my memory was kind of what you see in the movie. A very run down, broken down city on every level. We purposely set the movie in the past to kind of remove it from anything else anybody knows And it’s not even really set in the past. It’s sort of set in an alternate universe in a way.”
What do you think about Joker director Todd Phillips’ version of Gotham City? Are you looking forward to re-watching Joaquin Phoenix in the role? Sound-off in the comments below!
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.
Directed by Todd Phillips from a script he co-wrote with Scott Silver, Joker stars Joaquin Phoenix, Robert De Niro, Zazie Beetz, Bill Camp, Frances Conroy, Brett Cullen, Glenn Fleshler, Douglas Hodge, Marc Maron, Josh Pais, and Shea Whigham.
Joker is now playing in theaters!
Source: ComicBook.com