'Joker' DP Speaks Out on the Controversy & Influences of the Anti-Hero Movie

Having released in India yesterday and scheduled for release this upcoming weekend, Joker movie has certainly been the talk of the town everywhere. More so for the several controversies surrounding it. While leading man Joaquin Phoenix and director Todd Phillips have expressed their take on the same, in a recent podcast with The Hollywood Reporter, cinematographer of the film, Lawrence Sher talked about the details of the same.

"I don’t think the movie deals with [Arthur's] violence irresponsibly or cavalierly in the slightest," Sher says.

"Films that portray troubling things, I think are thought-provoking in ways that we can have the conversation. I rather people go see the movie, sit down afterwards and talk about some of the issues in the movie."

Joker is Sher's sixth collaboration with director Todd Phillips. The other include The Hangover series, Due Date and War Dogs.

"I knew about Todd, we run in similar circles, I was a fan of his filmmaking, but Old School I still regard as one of the funniest movies of all time, I wish I was a part of that one," Sher says. 

For Joker, he said he and Phillips revisited the movies they grew up watching in the 1970s and early 1980s, such as Serpico (1973), The Taking of Pelham One Two Three (1974), Taxi Driver (1976), to create a visual aesthetic for their version of the infamous DC Comics antihero. 

"That was the initial discussion, it’s going to be a character study. This is not a traditional comic book movie, which then starts to take you into a place of other character studies, which were some of those really breakthrough movies of that era in the 70s and 80s," he says.

"So anthropologically, you start to watching and thinking about those movies, not only for their influences on the story and the tone but also photographically as to what was it about those movies that made them different from the movies that preceded them, and are different from the movies today."