Writer-director Todd Phillips is only breaking rules with 'Joker.' Why it took years to get the green light:
Character studies like “Joker,” sequels like “It Chapter Two” and “Terminator: Dark Fate” and the return of “Downton Abbey” are just a few of the films slated to be released this fall that we explore in our Fall Movie Sneaks.
“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?’ ” recalled Phillips, who grew up in Huntington, N.Y., and attended NYU Film School before dropping out to finish his first feature, a 1993 documentary about punk rocker GG Allin. “The movies that I grew up loving, these character studies from the ’70s, you couldn’t get those movies made in this climate.
It was another drawn-out, four-month process for Phillips to persuade Phoenix to step into a role that had been indelibly played before by Jack Nicholson and, in a performance that earned a posthumous Oscar, Heath Ledger. In the end, Phoenix, who had reportedly spurned earlier offers to play comic-book characters like Bruce Banner/The Hulk and Doctor Strange, was drawn in by the idea of creating a complex flesh-and-blood character in shades of gray rather than a black-and-white cartoon villain.
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