Vera Drew on becoming The People’s Joker

“Batman’s just very gay.” Vera Drew draws her connection between the Caped Crusader and the closet by citing men in tights, rubber nipples and fractured identities. Drew’s background is in editing, piecing together shows for Adult Swim and often teaming up with comedy duo Tim & Eric. The leap to feature-length filmmaking became her calling after COVID, and inspiration struck when a friend commissioned her to edit her own cut of Todd Phillips’ Joker.

“At that point, every superhero movie was just like, look how gritty and dark and serious it is!” she explains. “And to me, that’s not what’s interesting about comics… Like, why do I need to watch something that’s some approximation of my reality when comics have a larger-than-life thing to them?” But while splicing in slapstick sound effects to Phillips’s dour film, Drew was putting herself in Arthur Fleck’s shoes. “It resonated to me as a mentally ill trans woman who had run up against various institutions in that same way… but the idea of talking about all that stuff with a Joel Schumacher [the auteur of 90s Batman entries Batman Forever and Batman & Robin] aesthetic was what finally clicked.”

Wanting to do more than remix memes into someone else’s film, Drew posted an open call for collaborators, and got a few hundred more responses than she expected. “Like, every single style of animation,” she recalls. “So, OK, this is gonna be a mixed media thing; this is gonna be like Natural Born Killers or Pink Floyd’s The Wall. In one scene a character might be a Barbie doll and in the next it’ll be a two-dimensional thing and then it’ll be live action.”

The final product is The People’s Joker, which sees Drew adopt the alter-ego 'Joker the Harlequin' in a patchwork parody of DC story beats. Expect unhinged animation, gonzo greenscreen effects, and a rogues’ gallery of cult comedy cameos (Tim Heidecker voices a TV broadcaster demanding Batman save Gotham from the “transsexual reptilian agenda”).

But the film isn’t just one big gag: this multimedia multiverse features Drew’s most formative memories; her stint in stand-up is shown as starting Gotham’s first anti-comedy club; a toxic T4T relationship plays out with a Jared Leto-style 'Mr J'; and the director’s childhood gender dysphoria is gassed away into giggles, courtesy of a pediatric Scarecrow.

“It felt like this opportunity to do a sort of play therapy,” Drew reflects on being on the other side of the camera. “I never even sat down and memorised lines, I just showed up on set and it poured out of me.” Superheroes, or their secret identities, often have an everyman quality, so audiences can project themselves onto the day-saving do-gooders. But as injustice becomes more opaque in the world, embodying the antihero, one who antagonises society, can be just as empowering.

Joker the Harlequin learns to laugh away the pain under acclaimed comedian Ra's al Ghul, played by outsider artist David Liebe Hart. Drew directed Hart’s Adult Swim web series, and knew from day one she wanted him to play the mentor in the training montage. “He’s the one that has all the answers, and I just thought that was such an interesting role to give to somebody like [David]”, says Drew. The casting is especially apt as Hart’s awkward anti-comedy often plays to mixed audiences. “When they talk about David, they sort of remove his agency or describe him as if he’s being exploited, or the joke’s on him… That’s never been my sense of him; he is super aware of how funny he is, and how outsider-y and outlandish he is.”

The People’s Joker premiered at the 2022 Toronto International Film Festival, but nobody in the 600-strong audience knew how close the picture came to being canned. “The night before was when we had first heard from Warner Brothers that they were trying to bury the movie,” Drew recalls, “so up until a couple of hours before, I wasn’t even sure we were gonna have a screening.” The possibility of losing this limited edition community project was traumatising, but after two years of negotiations, the film has found distribution – copyright holders have a sense of humour after all.

Drew's film couldn’t come to UK cinemas at a better time. With our queer communities on the defensive, a narrative of trans triumph is sure to put a smile on those faces. At the Toronto premiere, a touched mother even told the director that she now felt she knew how to talk to her daughter. “No part of me ever thought the parents of a trans person would watch that movie, and get something out of it,” says Drew. A lot of actors have donned the Joker's white makeup over the years – but not everyone who dresses up as the iconic supervillain gets such a heroic reception.

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The People's Joker is released 21 Feb via Matchbox Cine