Cinema

Joaquin Phoenix Built His Joker From Real Killers

Venice gave Joker its Golden Lion; America accused it of inciting violence. Joaquin Phoenix and Todd Phillips tell Husam Sam Asi how they built a comic-book villain from real killers, and whether the film reflects society's evil or feeds it.

Husam Sam Asi 7 October 2019

Husam Sam Asi with Joaquin Phoenix during an earlier interview, for Irrational Man, July 2015.

The Venice Film Festival surprised everyone last month when it put a comic-book movie in its main competition. Films like Joker usually play outside the race, as commercial fare. After its premiere it drew an eight-minute ovation, and it left Venice with the Golden Lion. In America, the same film lit a firestorm. Critics accused it of inciting violence.

The Joker was born as a playing card. He first appeared in DC Comics in 1940 as the enemy of Batman, and he soon became the most famous villain of them all, thanks to his grotesque face, his sadistic laugh, his psychopathic behaviour and his savage crimes. The television series and films that followed never explored where he came from, so that nobody would feel for him. Joker goes the other way.

Having no fixed backstory for the Joker was liberating, its director Todd Phillips told me. There were no rules, so they made the film they wanted. Some things they redesigned to explain why he became what he is, and others they simply invented.

A tragedy, not a comic book

The film follows Arthur Fleck, a simple, mentally troubled man who lives with his mother and works as a clown while dreaming of becoming a stand-up comedian. He believes his purpose in life is to make people laugh. People answer him with contempt, mockery and violence, and he turns into a terrifying villain who takes savage revenge on those who humiliated him and plunges Gotham into chaos.

This is the darkest Joker yet. His laugh comes out of him involuntarily, empty of any joy. His body is emaciated, his mind is troubled and his heart craves love from anyone at all, but no one will have him.

The film looks nothing like other comic-book movies, with their cartoon characters and special effects. It is a dark drama rooted in reality, set in a New York-like city at the start of the 1980s, when it was drowning in violence, murder, drugs and armed robbery. That is what drew Phillips. He had no interest in making a comic-book fantasy, and this is his first drama. His previous films were comedies, most famously the Hangover trilogy.

It is a tragedy, Phillips said, laughing. They noticed that every comic-book film was made the same way, so they decided to go elsewhere: what if they made a character study the way they were made in the 1970s and 1980s, and what if it was about a villain, and more tragic than funny?

The tragedy grows out of Arthur’s passion for comedy and his longing to make others laugh. Early in the film he forces a smile onto his face with his fingers. He is trying to work out who he is, Phillips said: is his life a comedy or a tragedy?

Villains don’t see themselves as villains

Phillips’s hardest task was persuading Joaquin Phoenix to play the part. Phoenix had already turned down Marvel, believing comic-book characters were not developed enough. The script changed his mind.

It was unlike anything he had read before, Phoenix told me after the premiere in Venice. There were still elements of Batman in it and references to that world, yet it felt completely new: bold, irreverent, complex and funny.

Earlier films presented the Joker as a villain from first frame to last. Here he grows from the simple Arthur into the monster, and Phoenix never thought of him as a villain. Villains certainly don’t see themselves that way, he said, so you can’t approach a character like that believing you are playing one. Arthur still makes choices, though, and he is responsible for them.

Cesar Romero first played the Joker in the Batman television series of the 1960s. Jack Nicholson followed in Tim Burton’s Batman in 1989, Heath Ledger won a posthumous Oscar for The Dark Knight, and Jared Leto took the role in Suicide Squad in 2016.

Joaquin Phoenix and Todd Phillips talk to Husam Sam Asi about Joker on BBC Cinematic.

Real killers, not De Niro

Arthur’s real ancestors come from 1970s cinema: Travis Bickle in Taxi Driver and Rupert Pupkin in The King of Comedy, both played by Robert De Niro, who appears in Joker as the talk-show host who mocks Arthur. Phillips says Pupkin inspired the character. Phoenix refused to watch either film. He wanted his Arthur to be his own.

His references were real people, he revealed: people who had committed such crimes, whom he discovered while researching and preparing for the role.

Joaquin Phoenix tells Husam Sam Asi that he based the Joker on a real person.

Phoenix is famous for vanishing into his characters, and he has been nominated for Oscars for Gladiator, Walk the Line and The Master. Besides the research, he lost 52 pounds, nearly 24 kilos, so that his body would show the starvation of Arthur’s mind and heart.

Changing his appearance helps him inhabit a character, he explained. The way a person moves through a space can reveal a great deal about their emotional state and the kind of person they are. And some things begin to reveal themselves during the shoot that he never expected. They happen on their own.

At the same time, he works his way into the character’s mind through his behaviour. On this film the starting point was the laugh, and the next was losing the weight, which began to affect his mental and emotional state. The two, he said, were bound together.

Warning or invitation?

Phoenix’s work produced a Joker unlike the cartoon villains before him, so real that some accused the film of sympathising with a lonely, disturbed man who is angry at society, and of justifying and glorifying his crimes at a time when America is suffering an epidemic of gun violence.

Phillips rejected that outright. You are supposed to feel a little sympathy for Arthur, he told me, but the magic trick of the film is to make a movie about a villain in which he is the hero: you like him and root for him until you can’t any more. That was the aim. The film is not a manifesto and not political, he said. It is human. Films often reflect their societies, and while the story is set at the turn of the 1980s, they wrote it in 2017, so some things inevitably seep in.

Phillips did not reassure the American authorities. Security was tightened around cinemas when the film opened last weekend, and it took $96m in North America, a record for October.

Whether Joker merely reflects society’s evil or feeds it, it has created a thrilling equation, tearing down the wall between popular culture and serious drama, and between art films and blockbusters. It is expected to rule the world’s box office and to stand out at this season’s Oscars.