Phoenix goes from tragic to comic

Villain in Venice

OBy Marie-Louise Gumuchian

ne of Gotham’s most famous villains arrived at the Venice Film Festival on Saturday, in a standalone dark story telling the origins of the Joker.

Joaquin Phoenix follows in the footsteps of Jack Nicholson, the late Heath Ledger and most recently Jared Leto to play Batman’s nemesis in “Joker”, turning him from a vulnerable beaten down loner into the confident, makeup wearing baddie.

Set in the early 1980s, when Bruce Wayne is still a child and years away from becoming the DC Comics superhero, the movie, which premiered at the festival, begins with Gotham in turmoil with rubbish piling up on the streets.

Phoenix’s Arthur Fleck works as a clown, swinging banners on the street or performing for sick children in hospital. He wants to be a stand up comedian, mimicking others to learn how to do so, but ends up being the butt of jokes himself.

Nicknamed Happy by his mother, with whom he lives, Fleck is anything but happy. He has an uncontrollable, and at times misplaced laughter, that is often misunderstood and sees him taunted by bullies.

Alienated and fragile, he begins to morph into Joker, unwillingly inspiring others in a fractured and violent Gotham.

“The attraction to make this film and this character was that we were going to approach it in our own way so for me I didn’t refer to any past creations of the character,” Phoenix told a news conference.

“I did identify Arthur as a particular personality but then I also wanted the freedom to create something that wasn’t identifiable. This is a fictional character and I didn’t want a psychiatrist to be able to identify the kind of person he was.”

With sombre lighting and music, a dark mood persists throughout the film, heavily differentiating it from typical DC or Marvel superhero movies.

Director Todd Phillips, known for “The Hangover” films and “War Dog”, said he took inspiration from character study movies from the 1970s.

“We just thought it could be an exciting approach to this genre, I am not sure what it means to DC or Marvel how they will change the way they do it,” he said.

“It was a hard movie for us to get made and to convince DC and the studio at first but we kind of just kept pushing as we felt it could be really special.”

Asked if a lack of empathy was a key subject in the film, for which writing began in 2017, Phillips said: “It’s a big part of what the movie’s about.

“It’s about the lack of empathy that we are seeing in the world at the time we wrote it that probably still exists.”

“Joker”, one of the most-eagerly awaited by critics at the festival, is one of 21 films competing for the Golden Lion prize.

Superhero

“It’s really exciting because it’s one of the first from DC that’s not your typical superhero super villain movie, it’s really much more of a character study,” Ariston Anderson, international correspondent at the Hollywood Reporter, said.

“It’s very smart ... to launch it at a festival ... I think there is already Oscar buzz around it.”

Phoenix, whose star turn in “Joker” is already generating awards buzz, said he “wanted the freedom to create something that wasn’t identifiable” and did not let himself be influenced by any previous versions of the character or pin him down as a familiar type.

“What was so attractive about this character for me is he’s so hard to define. You don’t really want to define him,” Phoenix said Saturday at the film’s press conference at the Venice Film Festival. “Every day felt like we were discovering new aspects of his character...up until the very last day.”

Phoenix plays Arthur Fleck, a struggling comedian whose professional and personal failures finally push him to become the nihilistic, frightening Joker. To prepare for the role, Phoenix said he read a book on political assassins to get a sense of such killers and their motivations. But ultimately, that was for information

LOS ANGELES:

Italian and US film industry executives announced Saturday at the Venice Film Festival that this summer’s box office figures in Italy are up by 40% over the past two years as local distributors depart from past practice and release more movies between May and August.

This year’s roughly 44% box only.

“I did identify Arthur as a particular personality, a particular type,” Phoenix said. But “I also wanted the freedom to create something that wasn’t identifiable. This is a fictional character. I didn’t want a psychiatrist to be able to identify the kind of person he was .... Let’s step away from that, and we want to have the room to create what we want.”

Phoenix said previous essays of the role – such as Heath Ledger’s Oscar-winning turn a decade ago – did not influence him. “I didn’t refer to any past iteration of the character,” he said. “It just felt like something that was our creation in some ways.”

Besides Phoenix, “Joker’s” cast includes Robert De Niro, Zazie Beetz and Marc Maron. The film is directed by Todd Phillips and co-written by Phillips and Scott Silver.

With its dark and forbidding tone, the film differs from most comic-book movies. Phillips said he wanted to do something similar to the character studies seen in films from the 1970s, around the era in which “Joker” is set.

“Why can’t you do a genre comic-book film like that?” Phillips said. “We thought this could be an exciting approach to this genre. I’m not sure what it means for DC or Marvel .... It was a hard movie for us to get made, to convince DC and the studio at first, but we thought we would keep pushing because we thought it would be special.”

The approach meant that they could try to create something totally new. “It was really liberating,” Phillips said. “There really were no rules or boundaries for it.”

Phillips said “The Man Who Laughs”, the 1928 film adaptation of Victor Hugo’s classic novel, was a “big inspiration” for him and Silver when they started developing “Joker”. Besides “The Man Who Laughs”, Phillips said he also drew inspiration from films by Martin Scorsese, notably “Taxi Driver”, “Raging Bull” and “The King of Comedy”, and Milos Forman’s “One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest”. (RTRS)