“The mythology of 2019’s Joker is that writer-director Todd Phillips really just wanted to make a dark character study in ’70s-style film realism, à la Martin Scorsese’s 1982 feature The King of Comedy.
“The kind of film, he said, that couldn’t be made in the modern studio system. The “comic book” of it all was a means to an end, and the fact that the Joker had never had a definitive origin story meant Phillips had more freedom to construct his own take.”
Read more at Polygon
