Gotham City in 'Joker' was influenced by 'Taxi Driver' and New York, says director Todd Phillips
In Gotham's portrayal in all of the Batman films, the TV spin-offs come with their own distinct flair and tone. The recently released 'Joker' too had its backdrop as Gotham and the director Todd Philips shed light on recreating the city for the movie. As reported by comicbook, he revealed that the city was New York in the special features of the film's digital release.
"Even though we don't really say when and where the movie takes place, in my mind, it was always New York City, 1981, what did that look like and what did that feel like from my memory of it," Phillips added. "I was only 11 or 12-years-old, but my memory was kind of what you see in the movie. A very run down, broken down city on every level."
He also explained the influences some of the earlier cult classics had in picking the city for Gotham. "There's a ton of specific inspirations we had for this movie. 'Taxi Driver', obviously, is one of my favorite movies, but it's not directly that," Phillips also added the Milos Forman-directed 'One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest' and Sidney Lumet’s 'Serpico' to the list of influences.
"Movies from these great character studies that they don't do as much nowadays as they did in the late '70s, whether it was 'Cuckoo's Nest', or 'Taxi Driver', or 'Serpico', or 'Raging Bull', of course, 'King of Comedy'," Phillips opined. "Marty was doing a ton back then. And even things like 'The Man Who Laughs' — I mean, we were watching a lot of musicals, Scott Silver and I when we were writing it."
Phillips went a bit further and explained though that just because it is based on 1981 New York, it isn't necessarily set in that time and place. "We purposely set the movie in the past to kind of remove it from anything else anybody knows," he said. "And it's not even really set in the past. It's sort of set in an alternate universe in a way."
