Matt Reeves has recently released a deleted scene from The Batman featuring Robert Pattinson‘s Dark Knight interrogating Barry Keoghan‘s version of the Joker, and the director has now shed more light on his vision of the Clown Prince of Crime.
Explaining in a recent interview with IGN that fans are seeing “a pre-Joker Joker” to fit with the film’s focus on Batman’s early days, Reeves explains that he wanted to take a different approach from the two recent Jokers we’ve seen on the silver screen. “I wanted to create an iteration of him that felt distinctive and new, but went right back to the roots,” Reeves remarked. “So he’s very much out of the Conrad Veidt mold and that idea of the silent film of The Man Who Laughs.”
“He’s got this congenital disease. He can never stop smiling. And it made Mike and I think about — I was talking about The Elephant Man because I love David Lynch. And I was like, ‘Well, maybe there’s something here where it’s not something where he fell in a vat of chemicals or it’s not the Nolan thing where he has these scars and we don’t know where they came from,” Reeves continued. “What if this is something that he’s been touched by from birth and that he has a congenital disease that refuses to let him stop smiling? And he’s had this very dark reaction to it, and he’s had to spend a life of people looking at him in a certain way and he knows how to get into your head.”
“Life has been a cruel joke on him,” The Batman director concluded. “And this is his response, and he’s eventually going to declare himself as a clown, declare himself as the Joker. That was the idea.”
As to whether Keoghan’s Joker will appear in the sequel, Reeves said that he has no idea yet: “I don’t know that the Joker would be in the next movie, but I can tell you that here’s what you’re seeing, is an early days version of this character, and trouble, as always, is brewing in Gotham.”
Elsewhere in entertainment, Craig Robinson is taking on snake hunting in his new comedy series Killing It.
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