So Quentin Tarantino is apparently a huge fan of Joker. During a three-hour podcast for Empire with fellow director Edgar Wright, Tarantino couldn’t stop gushing about the Todd Phillips film, which he called “profound.” While he did have some criticisms about Joker being a little “one-note” and starting a trend of taking “great movies from the ‘70s and redo[ing] them as pop-cultural artifacts,” the Pulp Fiction director absolutely loved the final scene where Joaquin Phoenix’s Joker shoots Robert De Niro on live TV and he bemoans anyone who didn’t see in a packed theater. “You got a hand job as opposed to great sex… [or a] threesome,” Tarantino said before launching into a diatribe on the film’s climax. Via The Playlist:
“He’s not a movie villain. He doesn’t deserve to die. Yet, while the audience is watching the Joker, they want him to kill Robert De Niro; they want him to take that gun, and stick it in his eye and blow his f*cking head off. And if the Joker didn’t kill him? You would be pissed off. That is subversion on a massive level! They got the audience to think like a f*cking lunatic and to want something [they would never normally want]. And they will lie about it! [“Audiences] will say, ‘no, I didn’t [want that to happen]!,’ and they are fucking liars. They did.”
While Tarantino obviously loves Joker even while acknowledging its flaws, another legendary director felt the complete opposite way. During a candid interview to promote Mank on Netflix, David Fincher had harsh words for Joker‘s portrayal of mental illness. “I don’t think anyone would have looked at that material and thought, yeah, let’s take [Taxi Driver’s] Travis Bickle and [The King of Comedy’s] Rupert Pupkin and conflate them, then trap him in a betrayal of the mentally ill, and trot it out for a billion dollars,” he told The Telegraph while sharing his disbelief at the film’s box office success.
(Via The Playlist)