T’S JUNE, AND in the
Los Angeles editing
suite where Phillips
is overseeingJoker’s
post-production, the
film has been paused,
landing on a close-up
of Phoenix’s Arthur
Fleck smoking a cigarette.Empiresits on
a sofa facing many monitors, all displaying
the image. The Joker — or at least the man
who becomes him — surrounds us. He’s
engulfed Phillips for three years.
In the summer of 2016, Phillips was
promoting the Miles Teller/Jonah Hill drama
War Dogs, his take on the true story of two
young arms dealers out of their depth. Talking
about it for weeks prompted him to think about
the films he loved growing up, and most, he
realised —One Flew Over The Cuckoo’s Nest,
Serpico,Taxi Driver— were character studies.
Great ones today are few and far between, he
thought. “And getting people out to see them on
a large scale is really difficult because the movie
I also knew that he didn’t really have an origin
story, so I thought, ‘Oh Jesus, are we able to do
that, is it legal?’”
Thoughts coalesced, and at the after-party
forWar Dogs’ Los Angeles premiere in August
2016, on the Sunset Tower Hotel’s pool terrace,
overlooking Hollywood itself and thinking about
the future of the movie business, Phillips
pitched Warner Bros.’ executives on the spot.
He suggested they begin a division called DC
Black, separating itself from the current crop of
DC films. “I said, ‘LetJokerbe the first, then let’s
get fucking great filmmakers to come in.” It was
also a way to differentiate from Marvel. “Instead
of trying to live in the shadow of that beast, let’s
do something they can’t do,” he said. Budgets
should be around $30 million, he recommended,
films without all the CGI hoopla. “I said, ‘Let’s
just strip that all away. It’ll be liberating.’”HE EXECS TOLD
Phillips to go write his
Jokerscript, which he did
with Scott Silver, writer of
Curtis Hanson’s8 Mile
and David O Russell’s
The Fighter. They had
complete creative licence.
“We didn’t followanythingfrom the comic-
books, which people are gonna be mad about,”
says Phillips. “We just wrote our own version of
where a guy like Joker might come from. That’s
what was interesting to me. We’re not even doing
Joker, but the story ofbecomingJoker. It’s about
this man.” The studio loved it, and while they
didn’t commit to DC Black, they greenlitJoker.
“I thought it was crazy-ambitious,” says
Bradley Cooper, who’s producing the film. “Todd
said to me, ‘I have this idea, I wanna tell the
origin story of the Joker.’ I said, ‘Wow. Okay!’”
The pair hit it off while makingThe Hangoverin
2009, and in 2014 formed a production company,
at which they would make films they wanted to
see, each providing creative eyes and ears for
the other.War Dogswas the first, then Cooper’s
A Star Is Born, and nowJoker.
Elements from the comics are in there,
“because itisThe Joker”, says Phillips: the film
is set in Gotham, 1981, where we’ll meet
powerful businessman Thomas Wayne and his
young son Bruce. It’s set then because Phillips
didn’t want mobile phones and the internet in the
film, but also because he “didn’t want it to take
place in the world of Zack [Snyder] and
[Christopher] Nolan or any of those guys,” he
says. “We just want it to be its own thing.”
And that thing is Arthur Fleck, an
unbalanced individual who’s been “in the system
for a long time”, says Phillips, in and out of
institutions for a condition the film doesn’t
specify. Fleck was written for Phoenix, with blind
optimism; Phillips didn’t know him, and the
actor has not dallied with genre material since
working with M. Night Shyamalan onSigns
(2002) andThe Village (2004). Since 2005’sbusiness is so comic-book-oriented. And then
I thought, ‘You could do a character study if
you do it about a comic-book character.’ And
I always liked Joker, because I like mayhem.”
This is clear if you’ve seen his films,
and even more so here in Los Angeles where,
on a corkboard behind the monitors, he has
pinned various documents from his filmmaking
career: photos from theHangoverfilms; Will
Ferrell on the set of 2003’sOld School; a
handwritten letter from shit-slinging punk rocker
GG Allin, the subject ofHated, a notorious 1993
documentary Phillips made when he was still
a student at New York University. In all of his
films there are disruptors: Ferrell inOld School,
Tom Green inRoad Trip, Zach Galifianakis in
Due Date.
“Oh, there’s a thread,” he says. [The
Hangover’s] “Mr Chow is the Joker. GG Allin is
the Joker. I just love the energy that a disruptor
brings. So I thought, ‘A Joker origin story would
be cool; nobody’s done that.’ I read comic books
as a kid, I knew enough about Frank Miller and
theDark Knight series, andThe Killing Joke. ❯