I loved The People’s Joker, and with the film finally released on VOD I got a chance to dig into the film with its writer, director, editor, star, and dare say future auteur Vera Drew. The Emmy nominated director studied improv comedy through a Second City youth pilot program, and later worked in entertainment television as an editor, director and writer. She eventually crowdfunded her first feature length debut, that used the iconic character to tell an autobiographical Trans coming of age story that takes place in a surreal DC comics universe.
The People’s Joker is what I believe comic book films will be like in a few years in that Vera uses the language of superheroes, multiverses and pop-culture as a baseline and shorthand, to tell this deeply personal story that alone is compelling in and within itself. Sure, if you stripped away all the bright colors and superheroes you’d have a compelling Trans coming of age story that might play at your local indie theater. But it’s through the language of comics that Vera accesses decades of character subtext, which is baked into anyone who’s seen a Batman or Marvel film to tell her story and make is as accessible as anything you’d see in a multiplex today.
As a comic fan, albeit a Cis White Male, the film deeply resonated with me and it was great to explore not only how that came to be, but how it’s affected Vera since she’s unleashed her uncompromising vision into the world.
So interviewing you sort of after the fact, with the film is widely available now with a bit of perspective. What was that experience like for you as a filmmaker, and is there anything you would change if you had to do it again?
Vera Drew: Well, I think as a filmmaker, there were definitely other points in this process where I wouldn’t have said this. But I’m grateful for the experience and how notorious the movie got at times, and once it was finally out there, how film has been pretty widely well received.
That’s just like the dream as a filmmaker, especially for your first film. So I don’t even really know that I would change anything. I definitely have some regrets along the way. I sometimes regret pulling the film from festivals after TIFF, but that was kind of an uncomfortable, yet necessary thing I had to do just cause the movie wasn’t done and there were a lot more precautions that I had needed to take.
I had taken a lot of legal precautions and gotten a lot of guidance before then, but after the TIFF debacle, I needed to get a litigator and I also just needed to find a pathway to distribution that was a little bit more unique than I think we had originally set out. So, I don’t really know that I’d change anything because I think the reason it went the way it went, is why I get to have so many conversations like this.
Yeah, I was at a couple of those festivals where you would hear about it and it would be programmed and then it wouldn’t show. But I’ll be the first one to say when you started doing the secret screenings, that’s what got me front and center, the fact that I had missed it at previous fests and was able to see it after the fact. So you know, to your credit it kind of worked its own magic.
Vera Drew: I mean the movie, always was literally a magic ritual. I’m a very witchy person and it was a real process of letting go and letting the universe just kind of work its magic around me.
I had a lot of people in my circle, like whether they were my friends or people in the industry telling me like you’re not going to be able to maintain this interest after TIFF. I had people saying that and it was really scary. I just had to kind of believe the entire time that, like, the quality of the movie could kind of stand on its own, and I think that helped a lot.
I feel like the only way we’re going to be able to keep superhero stories fresh and relevant is imbibing them with different perspectives. How did the concept for your take on the character in this way even cross your mind and utilize the character’s journey as shorthand for your own, which was genius by the way?
Vera Drew: Thank you.
I love comic books and I think there’s so many stories that just haven’t been told, using these characters and I was kind of reaching this point of frustration with that. I think that was one of the real motivating factors.I really wanted to see an actual outsider voice, like Trans and Queer people. I’ve gotten some people, I think they’re just baiting me, but they have gotten on me about like, how could you make a Queer villain? Or like, you know, is there wrong about showing an abusive relationship between 2 Trans people, or like making the Joker a Trans woman.
To me it was always like, well, Queer people are villainized and this is like in the DC cannon specifically, like most of the villains are just people who are either mentally ill or like these social outcasts. So why don’t we tell a story that has some actual truths to those sorts of archetypes. It was really like this fertile ground for it and I think I’m probably done working in comic book movies, at least for now. But I hope I get to see more of that kind coming at it from like that sort of individual perspective.
I hope this does inspire others. It definitely felt very intimate and personal. When I watched it, I felt like I was reading someone’s diary and it deeply affected me. I’m saying that as a white Cis male, like, I was on the verge of tears at the end and I don’t say that lightly. And I think because it’s so personal that it kind of crosses the barrier because of that and goes from the Trans experience, and speaks to the human experience.
Vera Drew: I think that was the thing. I think I was trying to prove it to myself because I just been getting so frustrated, pitching things and having people tell me that they were too Trans or whatever. Well, also like simultaneously getting put in writers rooms or put up for like diversity initiatives just because I was Trans. When you really imbue a film with your specific story, people are gonna relate to it. I don’t really know what the science is to it. But it really is something that I sort of figured out along the way.
The Trans experience itself is just literally a kind of a coming of age experience, it’s a becoming and an undoing and it’s not a straight line. Everybody comes of age. I just think the difference for Trans people is it happens on the outside and you know, we have to kind of catch everybody up to our pronouns and all that.
The film is so personal, were you ever worried about putting yourself that far out there like that?
Vera Drew: You know, I was so naive. I just hadn’t even really considered it. I really thought I was making something just for me and my friends, which is really silly to say now. You know, like having conversations like these or like the fact that Grant Morrison actually saw the movie, you know, like stuff like that. It’s like, it’s very weird. My brain can’t still hasn’t been able to quite figure out how to hold it.
It’s made me very vulnerable and it’s been a little intense at times. I think that was largely why, like last year was kind of simultaneously like the best year of my life, and like one of the worst because it was just this very chaotic roller coaster ride. I think when you make something this personal reality really gets confusing, especially like if you’re somebody like me who has, PTSD and mental illness.
There is an intensity that comes along with it, especially like this movie means a lot to a lot of Trans people. There’ve been a lot of people that have seen it and that was their motivating factor to start their transition. That was something that I never considered that would be a thing and having those conversations are very intense. But I like being able to have them. It’s something that I’m still kind of learning how to show up for and have boundaries around.
I never wanted to be a fucking role model, you know? But I’ve kind of made my bed and I’m gonna lie in it.
Yeah. I’ve seen you at a few festivals and you were always engaged with the folks around you and I would see you having these kinds of conversations. I didn’t want to interrupt, because it was such a beautiful thing to see that connection happening.
Vera Drew: In the beginning, I didn’t really know how to have those conversations. Like I’m a shit poster. I’m a deeply empathetic person, but I was just in therapy today being like, I need to learn how to cry again after processing my feelings through the Joker in this way. I’ve really re-irony poisoned myself, but those conversations bring me back to Earth in a way like they’re almost very grounding and I get to see these little beautiful reflections of my own life in other people.
I quickly realized, like there’s no way I could ever be cynical about this or let it get to my head or be impatient with people or or standoffish, because I didn’t have a filmmaker like me like when I was coming up. I came out so late in my life, I think largely because I really understood myself through movies and there weren’t really movies that told my story. I had to really kind of piece it all together with like all these like broken shards of myth, therapy and testing out every other identity under the Sun.
There’s a lot of other trans films that are out now, and I’ll hear the phrase like “the Trans Film movement” or whatever get kind of thrown around and at first it really bothered me because we’re all making very different art, like we’re not a part of a collective. This isn’t like Dogma 95 or something where we’re all like meeting with each other and deciding what our agenda is.
That’s right. Like everyone has to use the Academy aspect ratio and everything.
Vera Drew: Yeah, exactly. Maybe we should. (Laughs)
But there’s never a thing that that was happening. But if I just, take myself out of it and my fucking ego out of it for like a second. And I really put myself in the shoes of somebody, like a Trans person who lives in the Midwest right now who wants to make movies and has no idea how they’re going to break into the industry. They get to just see all these movies that are being made and they get to see somebody like me who just made a movie in her fucking bedroom. Like with these characters too. It’s really humbling and I just feel so grateful that I’m able to do that and be an example, just because there weren’t examples before.
The film has a very distinct visual handmade sort of DIY style, how did you arrive at that and how much work went into sort of perfecting that digital collage aesthetic?
Vera Drew: It really was something I had to kind of figure out along the way. Like, I think I had enough pieces of art that I could sort of use like gospel to turn to, you know, like Natural Born Killers is always something that I bring up just because that’s a movie where there’s so many like tonal shifts and even just like aesthetically. Like it’ll cut between three different camera stocks in the span of five seconds, or like a anime sequence of a character like ripping somebody’s head off and stuff and you’re watching it and you’re able to take it in as a continuous story.
I think Pink Floyd’s The Wall, too, was like another one, just because that’s a very cerebral movie and it’s a very simple plot. It’s just somebody, having a nervous breakdown in a hotel room before getting on stage, which sounds like my experience at TIFF. But that movie has so much experimentation and different animation styles, so it’s kind of always turning to that too, as a point of reference.
One I’ve never really brought it up before, but I was really inspired by not even just for the People’s Joker, but David Lynch’s Twin Peaks The Return. It kind of just changed the way I thought about filmmaking and television and everything because that was a show you can really tell that David Lynch was spreading his budget very thin and I say that complementary. Like I think it still works and he leans into the limitations.
I think there was just this sort of precedent there that it’s like if you really don’t hide your limitations, if you really wear them on your sleeves and and turn it into a choice, it can work.
Well, to kind of sort of wrap it up and bring it back around what is next? How do you follow this up? You’ve said you’re not doing anything comic book related, which is kind of refreshing.
Vera Drew: Yeah, it’s funny because, you know, after I finished it one of the bubble bursts was sort of like “ohh, how come I’m not like getting offered any IPs”, I just fucking re-invented one here.
I actually talked about it with Nathan Faustyn, who plays the Penguin and he was like ‘you hate IP’s’. I love IP but like, I hate that idea of like, I love Star Wars, but you see what happens when a, quote UN quote, auteur gets brought into that kind of world?
So it was really important for me to like whatever I do next to be something that’s original and and I have a script that I’m working on right now called Dead Name, that’s like a cosmic horror movie and it’s very much about, I think the last like four years of my life. It’s like another coming of age story. I mean that’s in many ways it’s more personal than The People’s Joker and a little bit more ambitious in some ways. And I’ve also got a heist movie that I’m attached to. It’s like a horror heist movie. I can’t talk too much about it, but hopefully soon.
It’s honestly, one of the best scripts I’ve ever read. It was really like the first script that I’ve had written by somebody else that I was like, ‘oh I can really bring something to this, this is so close to being my voice’. And there’s things about just working with somebody else’s material will really make me a better artist.
Beyond that, we’ll see if any of those get going anytime soon. I really miss being behind the camera and acting too, but I don’t want to act in something again for a while.
