No, Todd Phillips does not want to know how you got those scars, or anything else about your canonical origins if you’re the Joker. According to his new interview in Empire, the writer-director of the upcoming Joaquin Phoenix gritty clown drama didn’t draw from the traditional background of Batman’s greatest villain but instead thought up some other, newer stuff that might possibly make a regular Gotham guy act so very wackity-shmackity.
Explained Phillips, “We didn’t follow anything from the comic books, which people are gonna be mad about. We just wrote our own version of where a guy like Joker might come from. That’s what was interesting to me. We’re not even doing Joker but the story of becoming Joker. It’s about this man.†Ah, but will Joaquin’s version of the Joker still want to watch the world burn? Based on the whole “laughing maniacally while getting beat up on the subway†part of the trailer, it sure seems like it, but you’ll have to wait until October 4 to find out for sure.