Director Darren Aronofsky has revealed that Joker star Joaquin Phoenix was top of his list to take on the role of Batman.
Aronofsky is a director with a talent for creating movies that get under his audience’s skin. From the paranoid Pi to the disturbing cinematography of Black Swan, Aronofsky knows how to make his audience squirm. If he were to create a Batman movie, it would be darker and grittier than ever before… kind of like Todd Phillips’ new Joker movie. In fact, the two directors both selected Joaquin Phoenix for the lead role only for Aronofsky, Phoenix would take on the role of the superhero and not the villain.
“I always wanted Joaquin Phoenix for Batman,” Aronofksy told Yahoo!. “I hear the way they’re talking about the Joker movie and that’s exactly – that was my pitch.
“I was like: We’re going to shoot in East Detroit and East New York. We’re not building Gotham. The Batmobile – I wanted to be a Lincoln Continental with two bus engines in it. It was the duct-tape, MacGyver Batman,” he continued. “It’s funny, I think we were just sort of out of time with our idea.
“I understood that [with] comics, there’s room for all different types of titles, but I think Hollywood at that time was still in the golden age of comics, and they were still just doing the classic titles in classic ways.”
Joker is out in cinemas now.
