Interview with Vera Drew
In honour of The People's Joker joining the Booking Scheme, Cinema For All sat down with the film's writer/director/editor/star, Vera Drew, to discuss VHS, Joel Schumacher, and screening films on the side of a barn.
The film has had quite a journey through its initial inception and its release, could you tell us how the film came about and that journey?
It started as a remix movie. I started reediting Todd Phillips’s Joker, which was born out of this artistic commission that I got from my friend. It was a response to Todd Phillips talking about “woke culture” all the time. So, I started putting together this piece of remix art, that was using footage from his movie, and as I was doing that it just started to click for me how much these characters meant to me growing up and how it informed my identity. I had this memory resurface of going to see Batman Forever with my parents as a kid, and there was something about seeing that movie at such an early age that helped me realise I was Queer. I think that movie is an expensive gay art film in a lot of ways. Having that memory resurface, this idea immediately clicked for me; I’m going to make a trans, coming-of-age Joker movie that is personal and about my relationship to these characters. And from there, well I don’t have a zillion dollars, so how do I make a superhero movie? So I decided to make it a mixed media, DIY film.
You mentioned Joel Schumacher there – the film is dedicated to Joel Schumacher and your mum, and I think that speaks to how personal the film is to its makers and how it also speaks to our collective relationship to popular culture. Could you speak to balancing those two elements?
It was almost about erasing that distinction, which I don’t think is too challenging. My generation of filmmakers come from this background of growing up and being given a toy and told that this is what our identity is. We’re constantly told that superheroes are our modern myths, and to me that’s true, but genre itself is space where there’s room for modern myth. Just on a personal level, there was a lot that I needed to process about my life at the point we started making it. The idea of finding the analogous characters to people in my life just made sense –schlubby cis guys I was around who were good allies when I was coming out, we’ll make them The Penguin, we’ll cast my friend Nathan Foster who just kind of was that guy. I grew up in a small town in the Midwest and that’s why Joker comes from Smallville. It was connecting the dots and seeing where stuff fits. It makes it easier to talk about a really toxic relationship with an ex-boyfriend if it’s Jared Leto’s Joker. It adds a layer of protection and makes it easier to talk about in a way that’s funny and actually healing.
The film is going to be made available for community cinemas to screen from VHS, which we’re really excited about, it feels really in keeping with the tone of the film and the mixed media elements you mentioned. Osgood Perkins’ Longlegs recently had a VHS release, I Saw the TV Glow plays with that aesthetic, and I wondered what you think is special about that medium and if you had any thoughts on why it’s having a resurgence?
It's so funny because for me it never went away! I have no sense of it ever coming and going because I’ve been buying VHS tapes since I was a child. I used to work on Adult Swim shows as an editor and as a VFX artist, and I worked on season 3 of Check It Out! with Dr. Steve Brule and one of my jobs on that show was literally finding that VHS look for it. I’ve always really liked playing with analogue as a format aesthetically. It’s just fun; I love the unpredictability of it, the fact that it is synthetic but there’s a margin of error. When you’re doing glitch art you never really know what you’re gonna get. It feels like painting. I think when it comes to People’s Joker, the VHS aesthetics we use felt like a visual metaphor for fractured reality and disassociation. We used a lot of it during the Smilex conversion therapy sequence because of that. It makes sense to me why Trans people seem to be drawn to VHS for those reasons too.
It feels to the millennial generation like it’s our 8mm film.
That definitely makes sense. I just rewatched Boogie Nights - which I put on because it used to be a comfort movie for me, and watching it in this completely different way it just wrecked me watching it, I was balling the whole time. It just clicked for me that “oh it’s about families”… But it gets to this whole arc in the middle about how video is going to be this thing that cheapens pornography. I couldn’t help but laugh at it, because thank god for video. Video is the reason I can make film – video democratised entertainment. It didn’t cheapen it at all. There was something so funny about that and thinking about where we’ve come from, in terms of how we talk about film, and what a film even is now. The People’s Joker is a film and not one second of celluloid was used to make it, and we have a 35mm print of the film that we screened. It’s cool, the transformative nature of what cinema is now. I’m not one of those artists who feels like I missed out on something. I have my heroes from the 60s, 70s, 80s, but I was meant to be making films in this era – there was no other way. I’d have been burnt at the stake.
I saw Inland Empire on a 35mm transfer from video… All these mediums and different eras of filmmaking are now in conversation with each other, which is exciting and something I think your film explores.
There were three really big eras of film I was thinking about for The People’s Joker. The first being 90s Scorsese and a story told over a characters lifetime, with crane shots and pop music and that cocaine energy. 80s fantasy films being another. Return to Oz was a huge influence on The People’s Joker, all of the Smallville sequences were influenced by the way Walter Murch portrays Dorothy’s form of almost conversion therapy when she goes to Oz and nobody believes her. Also, 70s television; I really loved Sid and Marty Krofft, and The Banana Splits, and Land of the Lost – the way those shows used miniatures, matte paintings, and puppets. I really want to explore that stuff in all the things I make. I’m obsessed with back projection and forced perspective and there’s just not enough of it in film. It’s so much more interesting to look at than traditional compositing.
The themes of the film really speak to being seen and seeing yourself and finding your community. I think the cinema experience can provide both of those things. Is it important to you to have people have that shared experience with your work?
I think both ways are perfectly fine. I was making a movie that would be best watched at a warehouse party or something. I think that’s why as a midnight movie it really works. About once a day someone on Bluesky will say something to me like “I had the whole polycule over last night to watch the movie” and that’s beautiful. Just a bunch of Queer lovers getting together to watch it. People have adult slumber parties and watch it together, so as a communal experience it really works. I also love it as a movie you can watch alone. I think when you watch it alone, it’s when you need a good cry and to think about your mom and that one ex that ruined your life but also helped you figure out your life. I think it functions as both. I prefer people watch it in a theatre or on a big screen, but I like that people can watch it on their phones and I like that people can watch it on an old CRT monitor. I think it can be enjoyed in a lot of different formats.
It does feel like something you’d stumble upon on TV late at night, which I feel like we’ve lost a bit as a culture.
Yeah, that’s my favourite. I think people are surprised because the comedy in it is pretty PG13. We curse a couple of times, but it’s never goes too vulgar. That was because I wanted it to feel like something you put on while your parents are sleeping. I remember growing up and that hour after school before my mom would get home, switching back and forth between reruns of Kids in the Hall and The Jerry Springer Show, and that being the tone and range of vulgarity and subject and crudeness that I wanted to circle. I think it’s another thing that VHS aesthetics lend itself too. I love the VHS print of the film and the 35mm print of the film, both of them make the movie really feel texturally like it’s from out of time and space. That was something I really wanted the film to feel like. It’s not really set in the present or the past – it’s something else entirely. I was working on On Cinema a few years ago, and Greg Turkington has a Joker film he makes in that cinematic universe that he and Tim Heidecker have, and he had this porno he would always talk about as the aesthetic influence of that, and it was crazy when he started describing it because I was like “oh my god I’ve definitely seen this”. It was this weird Alice in Wonderland thing, that I think was on Skinemax in the 90s. I miss that about television and the internet. You don’t get that as much on the internet anymore. Everything’s way too curated now. I like the danger of flipping through channels.
Yeah, that feeling of not knowing what you’re going to get. I got that with the story but also the form. You don’t know what style the film is going to adopt minute to minute.
That was something that was only really able to happen after that shift from remix movie to mixed media movie. I assembled this team of artists, and everyone was coming at it with their own given aesthetic. So many different types of animators and artists coming together to make this. It really became this cool opportunity to find a way of making this film collage and surprising people. Keeping it interesting too, because if you read the script, it’s written as a straightforward comic book movie. Now sending out scripts to people it could be “this will cost 100 million dollars to make, what are you doing?” but I just put on The People’s Joker and they go “oh okay, I get it – you’re playing with toys”.
Finally, I wondered if you had a message for community cinemas or film societies who might be screening the film and sharing it with their audiences?
You are the people keeping cinema alive. To me, the existence of community cinema is the reason I’m not cynical about the future of film. Whenever I go on annoying general meetings with people at studios, the conversation is always very bleak about where the future of cinema is headed and how we’re going to be replaced with robots and theatres don’t exist anymore… None of that is true! I’ve been all over the world and The People’s Joker has been projected on the side of barns. Movies are so alive and it’s because of communities and it’s the reason I’m still having conversations like this is because these little pockets of people coming together with a shared appreciation of art that you can’t get on fucking Netflix or Hulu. Why would you want to watch something on those streaming platforms, they’re so goddamn expensive. The future is DIY and the future is community cinema. So thank you for existing and keeping me employed.
The People's Joker is available for community cinemas to screen from 14th March. Find out more.