3 The subway attack
Todd Phillips: The deliberate choice was to make everything feel really real, to put real-life stakes on violence. We are used to seeing violence handled in a cartoonish way with very little outcome or repercussions. We thought if we were going to run everything through a realistic lens — be it Gotham or his laugh or why he paints his face white — we should paint the violence through a realistic lens. That scene is the first time you see any real violence in the movie.
Ian Freer: Like a lot of the film, the subway attack makes great use of a puke-green fluorescent light (hats off DP Lawrence Sher). While it’s at once expressionist, it also feels real and gritty, perhaps influenced by The Taking Of Pelham One Two Three [1974]. Phillips might be filtering this scene through a prism of realism, but in some senses this is for me the most unrealistic scene in the movie. It’s a scene that asks us to believe a group of rowdy Wayne Enterprise yahoos
(Carl Lundstedt,
Michael Benz, Ben Warheit) are wordperfect on Stephen Sondheim’s ‘Send
In The Clowns’. How likely is that?
Todd Phillips: Arthur goes through four things in that scene; at first he’s kind of a jerk because these guys are accosting a woman (Mick Szal) in the subway and he’s just watching — you’re like, ‘Fucking Arthur, do something.’ Then it turns on Arthur and he’s a victim and now you feel bad for him. Then Arthur is acting in self-defence as he kills a couple of guys. Then he turns predator and hunts down a guy he doesn’t need to hunt down. In one scene, and this is why Joaquin is such a brilliant actor, you go through four different versions of what he can be.