(2009′s “The Hangover” alone grossed $467 million worldwide ), Phillips had a large reservoir of goodwill to draw upon with the studio’s executives. Having generated some $2 billion at the box office for Warner Bros. ‘How about if he’s a clown at one of these places where you rent out entertainment?’ It was one of the most fun scripts to write because you were only breaking rules.” So you start backwards-engineering these things and it becomes really interesting. “I don’t believe that in the real world if you fell into a vat of acid you would turn white and have a smile and your hair would be green. 'We wanted to look at everything through as real and authentic a lens as possible," Phillips said. Drawing elements from the 1988 graphic novel “Batman: The Killing Joke,” which depicted the Joker as a failed stand-up comedian, and a handful of other sources, Phillips and Silver dispensed with the most common take on the character’s roots - in which the Joker was disfigured after falling into a vat of chemicals - and concocted their own original storyline. I’m staring up at this billboard and I said to myself, ‘What if you did a movie in that vein but made it about one of those characters?’”Īs a conductor of cinematic mayhem, Phillips was drawn to the Joker’s anarchic nature and felt liberated by the fact that the character had never had a single definitive origin story. “The movies that I grew up loving, these character studies from the'70s, you couldn’t get those movies made in this climate. “I knew that ‘War Dogs’ wasn’t going to set the world on fire and I was thinking, ‘What do people really want to see?’” recalled Phillips, who grew up in Huntington, N.Y., and attended NYU Film School before dropping out to finish his first feature, a 1993 documentary about punk rocker GG Allin.
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