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'Joker' Violence Is More "Visceral And Raw" Than 'Avengers', Says Joaquin Phoenix

Tom Nicholson
Photo credit: Warner Bros

From Esquire

Joaquin Phoenix has responded to the hubbub around exactly how splenetically violent the R-rated Joker will be, saying that compared to Marvel's giddy demolition of half of New York in The Avengers, his film is more "visceral and raw".

"I don’t know how many people die in Avengers, but there's a lot," he told SFX magazine. "The violence in this is immediate and on-screen, and a little more visceral and raw."

That does make it sound more like an ambush-in-an-alleyway sort of film than a skyscraper-felling smash-a-rama. Phoenix said that he was a lot more comfortable with Joker's blood-under-the-fingernails approach.

"But yeah, I didn't have any hesitation about it," he went on. "You always want it to feel real, and you want the little violence that we have to have an impact.

"What happens in a lot of movies is that you get numb to it, you're killing 40,000 people, you don't feel it. While being a fictional story in a fictional world, you always want it to feel real. Everything that happens in this movie as far as violence goes, you feel it."

Director Todd Phillips has played down exactly how much violence you should expect going into Joker though.

"I think we're very careful with it," he told Digital Spy. "A lot of people assume, or think, it's going to be a really violent movie – but if you break it down to the amount of people that he has an issue with, I think the reason it affects you differently is because we tried to paint it with as realistic a brush as possible.

"I mean, you could watch a movie like John Wick 3 and there's a much higher amount of violence – but when it comes [in Joker], it feels like a punch in the stomach. It is all just a balancing act of tone."

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