Not to put myself down, but I think I’m just kind of dumb,” says Vera Drew, the droll, intelligent director-star of The People’s Joker. I let her explain. Back when she was making her film – a frantically funny, deeply personal parody of DC Comics’ Batman universe, which re-imagines the Clown Prince of Crime as a burgeoning alternative comedian who realises she’s transgender – it never occurred to her what the reaction would be.
“When I was making this thing, I was never prepared for the level of visibility it would get,” says Drew. “I thought I would maybe screen it like once, in a warehouse or party or something, and all my friends would go, ‘Thanks for reminding us how traumatised you are and how many fetishes you have. Thanks, Vera.’”
But The People’s Joker – as the internet would say – broke containment. After premiering at the Toronto Film Festival in 2022, the film became mired in legal issues, as Warner Bros (who owned the rights to Batman, and were in the process of releasing their own $200m Joker sequel) threatened to intervene. The dispute brought lengthy delays in The People’s Joker’s release – and a long run of underground “secret screenings” – but also news headlines, and free publicity. For a film as queer as this, the term “Streisand effect” has never felt more apt.
This week, finally, The People’s Joker is out in UK cinemas. “It honestly feels like a major weight off my shoulders, just for how much on a daily basis I get yelled at by people from the UK,” says Drew, speaking to me over video chat from her home in Los Angeles. The 35-year-old is wearing oversized glasses and sitting in a dimly lit room. “You know, no offence to the UK, but I have described it as ‘Terf Island’ to some of my friends recently.” The phrase, playing on the acronym “Terf” (trans-exclusionary radical feminist), alludes to the overall pervasiveness of transphobia in the UK, amplified by rhetoric from high-profile voices such as JK Rowling, campaigners say. “It feels like trans art is really needed there right now,” Drew adds.
She’s not wrong. The People’s Joker comes at an exciting time for trans cinema, less than a year after Jane Schoenbrun’s haunting, dysphoric I Saw the TV Glow hit screens. What exactly trans cinema looks like is a question still being defined. Both films share a kind of internet-savviness; both are thoroughly, unapologetically queer. In The People’s Joker, Drew’s Joker dates a problematic trans man styled a la Jared Leto in Suicide Squad. Batman is depicted as an abusive, alt-right gay man; Ra’s al Ghul an ageing, problematic stand-up; Penguin an edgy, well-meaning stoner. DC aficionados will recognise much of Gotham’s rogues’ gallery – most of them queered in one way or another, and several of whom are rendered in comically lo-fi CGI. “It became very unwieldy,” says Drew, “every single shot in it being a visual-effect shot”.
Before making her debut as a filmmaker, Drew was an editor, working on projects such as Sacha Baron Cohen’s Who is America?, the Netflix sketch series I Think You Should Leave with Tim Robinson – a more or less epochal text for modern comedy nerds – and the oddball talk show parody Comedy Bang! Bang! The Chicago-born filmmaker is well acquainted with the American alt-comedy scene – as you might gather from some of the names to feature in The People’s Joker: Tim Heidecker, Bob Odenkirk, Maria Bamford and Scott Aukerman.
The film was conceived in the wake of 2019’s Joker, the self-serious artiste blockbuster that reframed the famous comic book villain as a mentally ill incel, played by Joaquin Phoenix. Todd Phillips, Joker’s director, made a comment suggesting that he turned towards the dour project because “woke culture” had made comedies untenable. Among those to take umbrage at his remark was Arrested Development writer Bri LeRose, who tweeted: “I will only watch this coward’s Joker movie if Vera Drew re-edits it.” From this throwaway joke ballooned The People’s Joker. (LeRose co-wrote the film with Drew.)
On the subject of the recent, widely maligned sequel to Joker, last year’s bleak musical Joker: Folie à Deux, Drew is positively effusive. “I had to see it opening night, just because I needed to get over it, to see the movie and stop thinking about these f***ing characters,” she says. “And it reinvigorated me. I don’t think anything that cost $200m and, you know, stars Lady Gaga, is really punk per se, but it didn’t give you anything you wanted.
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“It’s a middle finger to incels and Joker (2019) fans,” she continues. “There’s a sequence in Joker 2 where Joaquin Phoenix loses his virginity to Lady Gaga, and he c***s in less than four seconds. How could I not love that film? It had a sexy grossness to it that I was just not anticipating. Todd Phillips, please call me.”
When it came to her own take on the Joker, lawyers were consulted from the early stages of development; it was (and remains) Drew’s argument that the film complies with “fair use and parody” laws. The night before the film’s premiere at the Toronto Film Festival, Drew received “an angry letter from Warner Bros” (though not, as was sometimes misreported, a formal cease and desist, she says). “It was just like this strongly worded letter,” she says. “Saying that we don’t approve, and don’t think you should be allowed to screen or profit off this film. And we want you to show this letter to anybody who is interested in exhibiting it. Which was devastating. They literally waited until the last minute.”
Copyright laws are not really there to protect artists. They’re there to protect corporate interests
At the time, there had been larger distributors sniffing around the project; the copyright uncertainty put an end to it. “My bank account would be a lot better if that had worked out,” she says, “but I don’t know if that would have been the best journey for the movie. It would have probably been dumped on a streaming platform immediately. I think [the whole story] provides an interesting window into the actual problems with copyright laws – which are not really there to protect artists. They’re there to protect corporate interests.”
A key part of the movie’s defence was that it was autobiographical. The Batman imagery became a vehicle to tell Drew’s own story: her fraught relationship with her mother, her coming out as transgender, her relationship with an emotionally abusive partner. And, of course, comedy – perhaps the most unexpected part of the film is how much time it devotes to satirising the American comedy scene, specifically Saturday Night Live and its creator Lorne Michaels, who is depicted in the film as a crude CGI bad guy. “One of the first ideas I had for the movie was that Lorne Michaels would be the primary villain,” she laughs. “If we’re making this version of the Joker a sketch comedian, like obviously, the villain should be Lorne Michaels.”
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“In a lot of ways,” she continues, “SNL is really kind of an arm of the US military-industrial complex. It’s this thing that gets people elected, or unelected. They are constantly platforming [controversial stand-up comedian] Dave Chappelle, for some reason – one of the most transphobic artists working right now… aside from the Harry Potter witch.”
There’s a tendency for The People’s Joker to be swallowed up by the story of its making, and its arduous, subversive journey to release. But the film succeeds terrifically on its own merits. “I’ve had periods of really resenting the movie,” says Drew, “and being like, was this a big mistake? But where I’m at now, I’m so thankful. It’s been this thing that’s really connected me to other queer people, and reconnected me to myself.”
A few nights before we speak, Drew screened the film at a college in Florida, where she was able to watch young trans film students respond to it. “I have goosebumps talking about it,” she says.
She smiles – not a rictal, Jokerfied grin, but sweetly, sincerely. “It fills my heart with so much joy.”
‘The People’s Joker’ is out in selected UK cinemas now
