During The Hollywood Reporter’s Director Roundtable, director and writer Todd Phillips opened up about the difficulties in getting Joker made and the severe criticism it received for its violent content.
Director of blockbuster film Joker, Todd Phillips was part of the annual Director Roundtable along with filmmakers Martin Scorsese (The Irishman), Noah Baumbach (Marriage Story), Greta Gerwig (Little Women), Fernando Meirelles (The Two Popes) and Lulu Wang (The Farewell).
The 49-year-old, who recently earned his first Golden Globe nomination for directing Joker, spoke about his struggles to get the film made and the backlash he received for showing violence in the movie.
“We were struggling to get Joker made,” Todd Phillips told the Director Roundtable, “which sounds funny, because it exists in the superhero world, but it’s really not one of those movies.” According to the director, Joker, which stars Joaquin Phoenix, “was greatly inspired by the works of Martin Scorsese and Sidney Lumet, and other filmmakers that I grew up worshiping in the 70s and early 80s.”
Talking about the criticism the film faced over its violent content, Phillips told the roundtable, “I just didn’t subscribe to that, quite frankly, bulls*** thing that was happening in the media where they just pick a movie every so often and declare it means something that it doesn’t.”
Prior to its release, people slammed Phillips and Phoenix for justifying and encouraging violence. Both artists denied all the allegations and insisted that all of them are false. The filmmaker explained how some people would write a two-page story on how bad the movie is without even seeing it.
To clarify things further, during the roundtable Phillips went on to say that they “made a movie about childhood trauma and loss of compassion and lack of love in a person’s life and what that might do, but everybody always wants to talk about the spark and not the powder. The film’s really about the powder, what makes that happen.”
Todd Phillips has one career Oscar nomination for writing the screenplay for Borat. While Phillips has bagged a Golden Globe nomination in the best director category, the film is also nominated for best motion picture drama, best actor in a motion picture drama (Joaquin Phoenix) and best original score.
Though Joker faced severe criticism, according to Variety, it is “the craziest comic book smash in movie history” as it raked in $1.06 billion at the global box office.
– With information from The Hollywood Reporter.
