David Fincher has never been one to bite his tongue & this time he’s leveling a bit of criticism at Todd Phillips’ Oscar-winning film Joker for its portrayal of mental illness.
Fincher did an interview with “The Daily Telegraph” and it’s during this interview that he states the movie was “a betrayal of the mentally ill” & he even took a wider swipe at studios for only green-lighting films that they think will “make them a billion dollars.”Here is his full quote below:
“Nobody would have thought they had a shot at a giant hit with Joker had The Dark Knight not been as massive as it was. 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.”
While he didn’t elaborate too much on his assessment, it seems like he feels the film’s depiction of mental illness didn’t hit all the right notes & that a lot of it was used to allow the film to make a killing at the box office. If you recall, a lot of critics were critical of its depiction of mental illness, with some even calling it dangerous. The film was polarizing with many critics but that didn’t stop the movie from grossing $738.5M at the worldwide box office & earning 11 Oscar nominations.
Fincher, who recently revealed a new four-year pact with Netflix, also detailed why he went into business with the streamer:
“The reality of our current situation is that the five families don’t want to make anything that can’t make them a billion dollars. None of them want to be in the medium-priced challenging content business. And that cleaves off exactly the kind of movies I make. What the streamers are doing is providing a platform for the kind of cinema that actually reflects our culture and wrestles with big ideas: where things are, what people are anxious and unsure about. Those are the kinds of movies that would have been dead on arrival five years ago.”
