Joker director Todd Phillips describes the origin story as a “slow burn”

Last Updated on August 2, 2021

Ever since the announcement that it was being made, people knew to expect something different from director Todd Phillips’ unique Joker origin story – which is simply titled, JOKER. Made with a relatively low budget for a comic book movie (a reported $55 million), the movie is meant to harken back to the character studies of the '70s like TAXI DRIVER, and with that comes a lack of the superhero action we expect from the genre. On that note, Phillips hints it will operate unlike any comic book movie before it, describing it as a “slow burn” that meticulously works its way up to the chaos.

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“You’re not starting on 11,” said Phillips while talking with the LA Times about the movie. “You’ll get to 11 but we’re really starting on 2, and it goes from 2 to 3 to 4. It’s a slow burn.”

Phillips co-wrote the movie with Scott Silver (THE FIGHTER), and continued to discuss how he – as someone who doesn’t often watch comic book movies – wanted to make a movie about a character like the Joker (played here by Joaquin Phoenix), but in the style of the movies that inspired him coming up. That means introspective character work and ditching the exploding cities.

“It really came from this idea: what if you just did a comic-book movie differently? We all grew up on these character studies and they’re few and far between nowadays. So it was like, ‘Let’s do a deep dive on one of these guys in a real way.’ No one is going to fly in it. No buildings are going to collapse. It’s just going to be on the ground, so to speak.”

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Phillps recalled in the feature that he got the idea for this approach when at the premiere of this 2016 movie, WAR DOGS, and noticing a billboard for a recent comic book movie (he didn’t say which, but the feature notes that SUICIDE SQUAD came out around that time).

“I knew that ‘War Dogs’ wasn’t going to set the world on fire and I was thinking, ‘What do people really want to see?’ The movies that I grew up loving, these character studies from the ’70s, you couldn’t get those movies made in this climate. I’m staring up at this billboard and I said to myself, ‘What if you did a movie in that vein but made it about one of those characters?’”

You don't need to watch more than those two main trailers for JOKER to see what Phillips is going for with his vision. Starting off with Phoenix's Arthur Fleck before he gets a case of Mad Clown Disease, the most recent trailer (above) in particular paints a brief but compelling portrait of a man who slowly sinks deeper and deeper into madness before coming out a changed man. While some fans seem a bit apprehensive to the approach, there's no denying this seems unlike anything we've seen in the genre before, and in about a month we'll see if this grand experiment pays off.

JOKER premieres at TIFF next month and hits theaters on October 4.