The Joker isn’t to be sympathized with. He needs to be overcome. (Minute 18:35)

Why no backstory: Thanks to Skye Jethani for the heads-up on this one via the Phil Vischer Podcast.

That was quite surprising. A lot of people were expecting you to make The Killing Joke (Alan Moore’s beloved comic positing events that lead to the birth of The Joker).
Yeah, but even in The Killing Joke there’s ambiguity and I think the ambiguity…let me put it this way, our Joker – Heath’s interpretation of The Joker has always been the absolute extreme of anarchy and chaos, effectively – he’s pure evil through pure anarchy. And what makes him terrifying is to not humanise him in narrative terms. Heath found all kinds of fantastic ways to humanise him in terms of simply being real and being a real person, but in narrative terms we didn’t want to humanise him, we didn’t want to show his origins, show what made him do the things he’s doing because then he becomes less threatening.

If you look at Hannibal Lecter or someone like that, the more you explain where he came from, the less interesting he is, I think. In that first Michael Mann film, where he’s just sitting in that jail cell, pontificating about serial killers, he’s absolutely terrifying and then each of the films that have had him in as a character have progressively revealed more and more about who he was and have made him more of an ordinary person and he gets less and less interesting, I think. So for us, with The Joker, it was very much a question of not so much dealing with the origins of The Joker, so much as the rise of The Joker. We always wanted him to be an absolute; in terms of he’s a fully formed individual. People’s reactions to him are not fully formed so were seeing him change the world, rather than himself. He doesn’t have an arc, as such – a character arc or anything like that – he really just…I like to say he cuts through the movie the way the shark does in ‘Jaws’.