Your Gotham is New York. Sure, it’s always been that way, and correct me if I’m wrong, but your Gotham feels like a replication of our memory of 1980s New York. It’s the New York of Scorsese or the Death Wish films. That cinematic interpretation acts as this perfect emotional mirror to how we’re feeling in 2019, or how Arthur is feeling in Gotham.
Yeah, I think that’s a good way to explain it. Movies can implant memory in us, and it is even more effective sometimes than the reality of what it is. Sometimes when you compare your memory to somebody who was also there, they go, “I don’t remember it that way.” Memory is an elusive thing. And so when Todd and I approached the period in which the movie takes place, I think it’s 1981 or in that era, I immediately went back to my own personal memory of what New York was like at that time. When you get on the bus and go in from Jersey where I grew up. I was super into hip hop and breakdancing. I’d go into the Bronx and watch breakdancing documentaries. I had this visceral memory of what that was, whether it was the graffiti or the trash or the buildings.
But also the memory of the movies that I saw in that era. What’s interesting is we would reference those movies in our mind but we didn’t necessarily go back and watch them. I went back and watched a couple of movies Todd and I were referencing thinking that they were going to really give us this template for Joker‘s look i.e contrast, color, saturation, or even some lighting references. Every time I went and watched them it was the memory of the movie I was looking for not necessarily the look of the movie itself.
Todd and I started saying to each other, “We’re not trying to make a movie that looks like Taxi Driver. We’re not trying to make a movie that looks like Network or King of Comedy, because we’re trying to make this thing that’s in our head. It just has to feel like it could have been made in that time. It’s really more of an emotional thing, like resonance to that time versus the actuality of what those movies look like. I think that the end result is something that is exactly the thing that we were looking for and was somewhat elusive in terms of trying to communicate it to each other. It was more, again, something more intuitive. It reminds people of the ’70s and ’80s movies, but if you actually compare them side by side there’s a lot of differences.
Right, especially in color.
Yeah, exactly. It’s certainly more of my personal aesthetic, and Todd’s aesthetic that we’ve been building on for 10 years and six movies. But again, to me, it reminds people of that time. A lot of it is also the production design. Building Gotham was one of the most fun parts of the job. The way you construct a universe transports the audience. It’s a huge part of filmmaking, right? Like, who is it? McKee, right?
Yeah, yeah. Robert McKee.
Who they kind of referenced in Adaptation. He had that thing where he’d say, “Know thy world like God knows his.” I might be misquoting it, but it’s effectively that. Your job as a storyteller, as the screenwriter, is to build a world constructed with such detail and specificity that it feels three dimensional and real. For us, Gotham, which in our case was an extension of New York City and New Jersey, was us doing that. What does it mean?
What is Gotham? It doesn’t really have a lot of trees. Yeah. There are some trees. But the truth is most of the trees are when he goes out to Wayne Manor. That aerial shot where the train is on the river and all those trees are on the left-hand side. All the trees that surround Wayne Manor is a universe Arthur wouldn’t see very often. So when we would do our aerials, we would selectively take visual effects and remove buildings and remove trees and just make it a sea of low line tenements leading to a skyline of older buildings. And removing all the new buildings that are in Manhattan now. Somebody was asking me, “Where is that shot you took that aerial with the subways running down the center.” It’s in the trailer. And I’m like, “We literally flew the helicopter up North into the Bronx and that’s just the Broadway 1, 2, 3.” It’s just you don’t recognize it because we removed things and made it just different enough. It’s now transformed into a brand new city, which is what the intent obviously was with Gotham.
Your Gotham is at once the most recognizably human version of that city, but also maybe the one that feels the most emotionally aligned to the hell of the comic book Gotham. My understanding, though, is that just like how you avoided directly referencing cinematic visuals, you didn’t bother with the comic books either.
We really didn’t. I never referenced them. I’m not a comic book guy, I gotta say. I’m embarrassed.
No, please don’t be. That’s fine. Most aren’t.
When I was a kid I’d read like Archie and Richie Rich, while all my friends were reading Marvel and DC stuff. But again, here, it’s a little bit of a memory of what a comic book is. Comic books are filled with really strong singular frames of imagery. You’re trying to tell a story in a panel because you don’t have the motion. So you’re creating these really dynamic frames via composition, the shading, the contrast, all these things where you have a format that is different than a movie.
I do remember though, we were in the van and the production designer had a copy of The Killing Joke. This was very early on in the scouting van and I picked it up and started flipping through it. I flipped through 30 pages or so. I do remember thinking, “This is gorgeous.” The tonality of it. The darkness of it was just striking and I can’t remember any singular image. I just remember feeling that it was beautiful with really emotionally evocative imagery. So, at the very least, I set out to create those kinds of images. Singular images that feel like they were coming from the frame. But not in the traditional sense of setting out to make a comic book movie. It was more about trying to make as many emotional and evocative frames as I possibly could throughout the movie, that could exist on their own and still tell a story.
Related Topics: Cinematography, Joaquin Phoenix, Joker, Lawrence Sher, Todd Phillips
