Movies

Lawrence Sher on Rendering a Recognizable Gotham in ‘Joker’

We chat with the cinematographer about replicating cinematic memory to achieve emotional reality.
Joker Call Me
Warner Bros.
By  · Published on October 15th, 2019

I want to talk about the last scene in the movie. Arthur in the white room.

Well, that scene is very much a point of interpretation for the audience. I don’t necessarily want to answer that for them.

Sure.

I think it’s a nice thing for anybody who goes to see it and to have this discussion of what they believe that that is. But effectively, in the most basic sense, there are some scenes that mirror each other in the movie. Ok, I will give you this. Not a lot of people pick up on it, but the coverage and the camera angles of the final scene, where he’s talking to the African-American woman behind the desk, that is photographed to be a mirror and exactly the same as the social worker scene at the beginning.

So it has the intent to be a mirror there. The coverage is exactly the same. The lens is the same. The framing is intended to be very close to, but it’s not exactly the same. The room is meant to be very similar, but obviously, it’s now removed from all of its clutter, all of its density. It now has to be the most minimal stark environment. You are stripped away from reality and everything else in the world and you’re just left with a human being, and a stark table and a bunch of white walls. Also, for a movie that is filled with tons of color, the idea is at the end of the movie, let’s make it as devoid of color as possible. Black and white. I have an interpretation.

Joker What

Let hear it!

The white room is also supposed to mirror slightly the room that Penny is in when he has that flashback, or what his imagination of that room might look like when he’s reading her information in the hallway in that file.  He wasn’t there. That is his imagination.

But he’s also been institutionalized.

Exactly. That’s another interpretation. In the opening scene, when he says, “I think I liked it better when I was locked up,” we have that little cutaway of him banging.

And it’s a very similar color scheme.

That’s exactly right.

Joker You Don't Get It

My favorite moment of that white room at the end is when he tells her that she wouldn’t get the joke and then we get a flashback to Bruce Wayne in the alley with the rats behind him.

Yeah, the super rats.

Yes, the super rats! [Laughter] This movie would be absolutely different if you didn’t include the Waynes in the film. For me, it’s essential that the film climaxes with their murder, but it’s an infamous sequence that has been repeated countless times in the comics and movies. What is it like to shoot that scene? How do you even approach it?

It’s a great question. I like the scene a lot, and I like what we did with it. However, because it’s so iconic and in so many other movies, it’s the one scene where I actually did watch the previous versions. I watched the Zack Snyder one, the Tim Burton one, and one that I hadn’t actually seen before. I think it was from the Gotham TV show. But it was literally like a YouTube video compilation of all the alley scenes with Martha and the pearls and all that. Partly because it has ties to Batman history and it’s so iconic. I wanted to remind myself how other people had done it so that we weren’t repeating it or if we were repeating it, we were doing it intentionally. Would it have been any different if I hadn’t watched those other versions? I don’t know. You can’t take back time.

Our thing was to make it fast and brutal. Our main intention was, “Okay, well this has been done before, but this is our ability to tie it directly into the Batman universe and to the canon. Our main conversations were about having that iconic pulling away shot of Bruce standing next to his dead parents. We wanted to make the violence pretty quick and pretty brutal. Similar to some of the other violence in the movie, which we did not draw out too much. Even though we shot some of it in slow motion just to make them grotesque, but to keep it short and make it brutal and fast. We’re not spending a lot of time meditating over what’s going to happen, because to some extent everyone knows what’s going to happen, right?

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Brad Gullickson is a Weekly Columnist for Film School Rejects and Senior Curator for One Perfect Shot. When not rambling about movies here, he's rambling about comics as the co-host of Comic Book Couples Counseling. Hunt him down on Twitter: @MouthDork. (He/Him)