Interview: Vera Drew on the Long-Delayed Release and Surprising Healing Power of Her Feature Directorial Debut ‘The People’s Joker’

“I didn’t know what a director was, but I knew I wanted to be it.”

Many film lovers first heard of The People’s Joker after it was pulled from the 2022 Toronto International Film Festival after only one screening. Headlines and rumors stirred up conversation about the reason for this sudden cancellation, mostly centered around speculation that Warner Brothers put a stop to the film’s exhibition due to copyright issues. Director-writer-star Vera Drew is here to set the record straight about the film’s infamous origins, now that it’s finally being released to the general public.

The People’s Joker is an eye-popping adventure, using well-known comic book characters to tell a story about identity and self-acceptance. It follows Joker the Harlequin (played by Drew herself), a comedian trying to make a name for herself in Gotham City, where any comedy not sanctioned by the government has been deemed illegal. She goes on a journey not dissimilar from a certain recent Oscar-winning portrayal of the Joker, but here, her self-discovery comes when she fully comes to terms with her existence as a trans woman. The film brilliantly uses characters and storylines familiar to the audience but – as all good queer films do – it mixes up form, style, and energy and creates something new and unexpected. It’s a totally fresh piece of art, and Drew had plenty to say about its development and production, along with her connection to the character of the Joker.

Cody Dericks: I want to thank you for taking the time to talk with me today. I just got to watch The People’s Joker yesterday, and it is a wild film that breaks all sorts of rules, both on and off-screen, which we’ll get into, and it’s exactly the kind of daring and innovative movie that just gets me excited about the art form. I’m really excited to talk to you about it. How are you feeling about more people getting to finally see your movie?

Vera Drew: God, I’m beyond thankful just because I spent most of last year kind of thinking… I knew this movie was going to get out there one way or another, just because it’s a parody and is protected by fair-use. The legal baggage that we have has kind of been, I think, grossly exaggerated and has been a lot less dramatic, but definitely kept us in limbo last year. There were so many points, I think, where I was unsure of what a release would look like for it. But yeah, thankfully taking it out to festivals and stuff last year. We did a little secret screening tour in Australia and at a few festivals around the United States that just on a personal level kept a light at the end of the tunnel for me because I was like, “Okay, whenever I screen this movie, people seem to like it. Once it’s out there, it’ll all be okay. It’s just a matter of figuring out how to get it out there now.”Glad we’re finally able to do it.

CD: Absolutely. I love the idea of a secret screening film festival tour. It feels almost something like what the characters in the movie themselves would do.

VD: Totally, yeah. It’s crazy because I didn’t know, I don’t think I knew what a secret screening was until my first Fantastic Fest. I was supposed to play there that year, but we had pulled the movie from the festivals that we were set to play right after TIFF and everybody… I was there at Fantastic Fest, just partying, and everybody thought I was there to screen the movie, and they kept going like, “Oh, it’s going to be one of the secret screenings, right?” I had no idea what a secret screening was. Even just on principle, I’m like, “Why would you go to a screening of a movie if you don’t know what it is? I go and see movies that I know what I’m going to see, and then I don’t enjoy them.” And we didn’t end up having a secret screening that year, so a lot of people were disappointed, but it was where I got the idea and where I was introduced to the concept.

When we finally started incorporating that in our festival strategy, I not only got the appeal of just what kind of movies are usually at secret screenings, but in our case it was great because I would take the movie out with the title, so the festivals would print this title in their program, but it was an untitled, perfectly legal, queer, coming of age comic book parody, and that was how it would be listed. And then under it would say, “With a special appearance by Vera Drew.” Then a description that was just basically like, “Yeah, it’s like a Joker parody.” If people knew what the movie was and they saw like, “Oh, there’s a secret screening in my city or whatever”, they’d go, “Oh, cool. I think this is The People’s Joker, or it’s something very similar.” If people didn’t know, it just sounded like the weirdest movie ever. Why wouldn’t you go check out at least to see if it’s either probably really, really good or really, really bad? You might as well check it out.

CD: But at least it’s perfectly legal, as it says.

VD: Yes. Exactly.

CD: I’m glad to hear that the legal background stuff wasn’t as dramatic as it may have been, like you said, blown out to be, but it definitely is the kind of thing that gets the film’s attention, if nothing else. I want to know what your reaction was to the first instance where, I believe it was at TIFF that the film was not allowed to be seen anymore, or was halted for legal reasons or what have you?

VD: Yeah, I’m going to talk about it just because I do really feel the need to set the record straight, just because there was a lot of stuff that even got misreported after that. At TIFF we never got a cease and desist. We never got any sort of official…Warner Brothers has not spent any money on lawyers when it comes to The People’s Joker, to my knowledge. Really all we got from them was a strongly worded email, but also it was kind of nice and complimentary, but basically they were like, “Vera did a great job, but we think this infringes on our brands.” They also at the end of the letter said, “We want you to show this email to any distributor or film festival that’s interested in playing the movie,” which is not the kind of message you want to receive, even if it isn’t an official cease and desist. But at least an official cease and desist would’ve been like, “Okay, I guess I can’t screen this again without some sort of legal battle or something.”

But in this case, it was kind of vague and I was just intimidated by what they had sent. I ended up doing exactly what the letter said, and I showed it to TIFF and was like, “Hey, I think you guys probably knew something like this could have happened.” I had always assumed that Warner Brothers was just going to ignore us because, I don’t know, like Disney with that Escape From Tomorrow movie. They ignored that movie and it really kept it out of the press cycle. Warner Brothers did the exact opposite with us, but thankfully when we went to TIFF, they were like, “We want to play the movie still, so let’s figure it out.” That was great because TIFF really advocated for us. I love TIFF as just, like, an organization. I hope I get to play all my movies there just because I’ve never been advocated for as an artist by any corporation in my life really. I’ve worked for corporations and they’ve been like, ‘Hey, good job. Here’s minimum wage.’”

It was really my first instance of somebody going like, “No, not only did you make something that we want to stand behind because it’s good, we completely agree with the premise that it’s protected by fair use and parity law.” They actually negotiated with the head of Warner Brothers Canada. I’ve never talked to him, I’ve never personally directly talked to anybody at Warner Brothers since TIFF happened, which is crazy just because I used to work for them. I used to work on Adult Swim stuff, so I’d have meetings with them all the time right down to the fact that I was doing general meetings in the lead up to TIFF where I was talking about making this movie with executives and being like, “Hey, I’m making this Joker parody over here.” They’d be like, “We heard, can’t wait to see it.” I was really blindsided by that initial reaction, but thankfully we had that premiere at TIFF and it went great. It was really the best screening we had in a lot of ways.

Then the next day we went completely viral because I went back to UTA and my publicist and stuff and was just like, “Let’s talk about what happened because I don’t really know what else to do next.” I woke up that next morning and a picture of me dressed like the Joker was in every single trade and everybody was talking about the movie. I had just had this experience of having this great premiere, but I was also having the experience of seeing “rights issue, rights issue, rights issue” slammed across every headline that related to this movie. That quickly settled in like, “Oh, okay. Those few big distributors that were interested are probably no longer interested now.” And that was kind of devastating just because there was really big interest in this movie ahead of TIFF. I think that’s what put us on WB’s radar, ultimately.

Yeah, that morning of, just suddenly my entire life was different. I was really kind of sad at first just because I was like, “Well, I don’t really know what to do with the movie now.” But I got a few text messages from friends, and one of them was from Tim Heidecker from Tim and Eric, and all he said was, “Look at all this press you’re getting.” I immediately pulled my head out of my ass and was like, “Oh yeah, a lot more people know about this movie now, not only because of the magnificent screening we just had last night, but it completely put a spotlight on this. Warner Brothers gave us a bunch of free PR.”

CD: Right. Yeah.

VD: In that moment I felt really good ultimately about whatever perceived legal baggage we had. And then from there, I did end up pulling the movie from festivals. That was for two reasons. One, I had cast an actor as Lorne Michaels who ended up on SNL and did not want to be cast as Lorne Michaels anymore. And then the other reason was that the TIFF cut was such a fresh paint job; I literally got in the car to go to the airport five minutes after finishing it.

CD: Oh my God.

VD: The movie wasn’t done. Yeah, my heart started beating just as I said that, and that’s why I have to drink tea. I drink tea whenever I talk about stuff now to keep me grounded. But yeah, I think that after a period I was just like, “A lot more people are going to see this movie now just because of the press we got and because of the attention it got.” I really want to spend the next however amount of time finishing it and really getting it boiled down to what it should be, and also working on legal clearances and stuff like that. I didn’t realize that was going to be another year and a half of my life, but I am so glad with the journey it’s taken because it really landed in the absolutely right home, I think, with Altered Innocence.

CD: Awesome. Well, as fascinating as the legal implications, exaggerated or not, are, I do want to talk about the film itself, because the movie I think really stands on its own as this incredible boundary breaking look at identity and IP, if you will. I want to know what it is about these specific comic book characters that made you drawn to them and to use them as a trans coming out story?

VD: I think I’ve just always really, I mean, I’ve been a lifelong comic book reader for the most part. I’ve been reading Batman comics for as long as I could read, and also my earliest memories were wanting to make films. I think both identity and just filmmaking, whatever filmmaking is, because I really do think it’s kind of a mental illness on some level that you just have. In the way that it’s not necessarily a bad thing, it’s something you have to learn how to harness and manage because I really don’t remember when I found out what a director was, I just know I wanted to be one when I was six. I think a lot of that came from watching Batman Forever. I was obsessed with that movie when I was a kid.

I have this very early memory of my dad taking me to see it in theaters, and it was my first time watching a PG-13 movie, which was historic because I was raised very strict Catholic and content was very gatekept in our house, but it was also just the most colorful live action movie I’d ever seen. I think it was kind of the first movie that I remember seeing like, “Oh, a film can be anything. It doesn’t have to just be a comedy or a drama. It can be like a live action cartoon.” I didn’t know who Joel Schumacher was at that point, but I was obsessed with him kind of instantly. That movie also was just an instance where there’s definitely not one moment in my life that I realized I was trans, but I remember that being one of the earliest moments was seeing Nicole Kidman in that movie and just feeling represented by her in some way, as a six-year-old “boy” I wanted to look like her. I wanted Batman to look at me the way he looks at her.

We ended up parodying that experience in The People’s Joker, of course. But the Joker of it all specifically – I think there were kind of two channels that really influenced, or at least really made it clear for me like, “Oh, there’s a trans story in here.” The first one really was just seeing Todd Phillips’ Joker. I think it’s incredible that Warner Brothers released a movie that’s called Joker. It’s a Joker movie, it’s a Batman movie, but it’s also about mental health, class struggle, and it’s about this person who’s basically just trying to be a comedian and he’s not good at it and society won’t let him, and is also actively exploiting him and harming him and his family structure’s falling apart. I resonated with that just as a trans woman. I think a lot of people can project really horrible political shit onto any movie, especially that one just because of how mythic and angry it is, in a lot of ways. But for me, it really helped me tap into just what I was feeling at that time about being a trans woman and making my way through America.

Then just the last piece I’ll say is, I just love these characters so much, and Joker and Batman to me specifically have just always been kind of toxic queer lovers, even just on a very basic level, but also literally sometimes in comics, particularly in the way that Grant Morrison writes about them in “Arkham Asylum: A Serious House on Serious Earth.” I’d say that if I could point to one specific Batman comic that influenced me, not just for this film, but just in general in life, it’s that one. Joker is grabbing Batman’s ass in that one and stuff. It’s also just got this beautiful, I don’t know, mythic quality to it that just feels like about identity and also about why somebody would be pushed to that brink where they’re like, everything to them is chaos and they are making it their mission in life to just make themself laugh at the expense of everybody else.

That is, to me, the archetypal trans woman shitposter on Twitter, and of which I am slowly not that. I’m really trying to take a break from Twitter just since the trailer for this movie came out, but I really think all of that was kind of there. And just also, I think when the idea really clicked into place, it was like, “Yeah, Joker the Harlequin obviously needs to fall into a vat of estrogen because Joker fell into a vat of acid.” Find those surface level similarities and then all the boring academic stuff that I just talked at you about.

CD: Well, it’s funny when you said, “I didn’t know what a director was, but I knew I wanted to be it.” I feel like that is such a reflection of how we queer people come to terms with our identity. We see something at a young age and we go, “Something about that is pinging in my head. I don’t really know what it is yet, but I like it.”

VD: Totally. It’s interesting because I think that’s what’s missing from the conversations about representation is it’s not in the context of even just like, “Oh, it sucks that…” Because I grew up in the nineties, so my representation was Jerry Springer and Howard Stern, and I watched both religiously. I watched Jerry Springer every single day after school as a kid. But for me, it’s like I think what’s actually really interesting about not only that era of just representation, but even now queer people can still turn to art and see themselves in it. The fact that I could see that in something that is not overtly about transness. I think there were a lot of other movies that were along those same lines for me when it came to making The People’s Joker, like Pink Floyd’s The Wall is one of them specifically.

CD: Okay, yeah.

VD: It’s funny because I don’t think most people think of Pink Floyd as trans lesbian rock, but for me, I can’t think of it as anything but that just because of the way Roger Waters specifically writes about longing and identity and stuff. That’s just a movie for me that I watched. I watched that movie religiously in high school because I related to Pink so much. Just somebody who had this really complicated, emotionally codependent relationship with his mom and also this real urge and pull towards art, but at his own expense. I feel like I learned so much valuable stuff about burnout and what making art is actually not about from that film, and just identity and what it’s like growing up in a post-war hellscape with an overbearing mother. I think all of that really ended up in The People’s Joker as well.

CD: Well, speaking to the Joker as a character, we’ve seen him on-screen so many times in so many different iterations, do you have a favorite portrayal of the Joker specifically on-screen?

VD: Yes. I love it when people ask me this and they don’t ask me enough, so thank you. Cesar Romero is my favorite Joker of all time from the 1960s Batman. I love a good swashbuckling Joker. I think Joker is always supposed to be sort of pirate-adjacent just because pirates are so annoying. Think of the people you know that are obsessed with pirates. They’re the worst people on the planet, and that’s why, to me, Joker should be sort of a pirate. But Cesar Romero’s Joker just has, I don’t know, he embodies anarchy just aesthetically in a way that I think the other Jokers don’t. Just by the mere fact that he refused to shave his mustache and just painted over it, there’s nothing more chaotic and anarchic than that, I think. Yeah.

CD: I always love the painted-over mustache. It’s very drag.

VD: Oh yeah, no, totally. He was definitely the one I was thinking about the most. I don’t know, I love Mark Hamill’s Joker too. I mean, he’s probably, I think he was actually called The People’s Joker at times over the course of his run just because he really is. Whenever I read the comics, I hear his voice as Joker, thankfully not my own.

CD: Well, the thing about this movie is it’s totally your own creation. You directed it, you star in it, you edited it, you wrote it. Did you find any of these four roles more challenging than the others?

VD: I didn’t really. It’s not even that I found one role more challenging than the others. I think just juggling all of that at once was really intense. I’ve always really prided myself on kind of being a multi-hyphenate – another category of annoying people, people who love pirates and multi-hyphenates. I came up as an editor in TV, but also had a performance background. I started performing comedy when I was 13 at Second City in Chicago, and I had a sketch in their touring company by the time I was 18. I was performing on their stage before I could vote, but always had wanted to be a director. I think I’ve always come at video and film and just art in general from the perspective of wanting to wear a lot of different hats. But this was the most extreme version of it that I had ever really subjected myself to.

I’m really grateful that I did. I definitely don’t think I could ever make a movie like this this way ever again. Just from the mere fact that I aged four years into my thirties a little bit more while making it was like, “Okay, cool. It’s a little harder to do the all-nighters and the late nights and stuff now.” I think there was a lot of joy in navigating all those different arenas just because of what I said, I like playing in a lot of different departments. Also, it just felt like directing on crack, just this pure version of it, like there’s so many aesthetics happening at once. I also gave my collaborators a lot of freedom to do whatever they wanted aesthetically. I really encouraged all the artists in the movie to lean into their sensibilities as artists and what their general aesthetic is for the kind of art they make for themselves.

And most of these artists, too, are people who didn’t really have aspirations of working in film or TV or anything, so it was always going to be me that was the through line through it, both in the fact that my dumb face is going to be on-screen for most of the movie, but also I was going to be the one doing all the final compositing and VFX and dialing in our color correction after we get it back from Stephanie Park, our colorist. It being that end of the road, like nobody’s giving me notes and I just get to really go like, “Okay, this shot’s done. ” That’s the coolest experience in the world, and I’m so thankful that I got to make this movie the way I did because it was my first experience of making something where nobody was giving me notes, and I just got to lean into every sensibility that I was encouraged not to lean into as an editor and break all the rules that I do hold dear. I think you should know all the rules so that you know how to bend them and play around with them.

CD: Well, I’m glad you brought up Chicago earlier. Just to close things out here, I actually am currently living in Chicago, so I wanted to ask if you had any other experience with the comedy scene here. I know you mentioned Second City.

VD: Yeah, Chicago, for me, it was my Gotham City. Really, the version of Gotham City we see in The People’s Joker is a hybrid of my experience living in Chicago and also coming up in LA. Improv comedy and sketch comedy for me were really…they saved my life, I think, when I was a kid because I was such a little freak. I didn’t know who I was on any level. I knew I wanted to make art, and I knew a general path that I wanted to take. I think I remember, I think it was watching Whose Line Is It Anyway? or something. Also, honestly, SNL, SNL was a huge influence on me when I was a kid, and I think I had dreams of ending up there. The only thing that was a clear path to any of that was Chicago’s Second City, which thankfully, I mean, it’s one of the few things my parents did when I was growing up was like, they’re like, “Okay, you can take the train with your friend Lauren Kezon”, who actually did my makeup in the movie, “and you guys can go do your silly improv.”

It meant the world to me to have that. And it was a space for me where I could explore identity, not only just in terms of…because I was just so autistic. I was undiagnosed and had no comprehension of who I was, but here was this place where I could just try on every identity, and it’s encouraged. And then ultimately, that led to doing drag too. I did stand-up only for four or five years, which I loved. I really loved it, but I really only loved it when I was doing it in Chicago. I think I only really loved it because I only ever did it in drag, and this is when I was a “straight man.” It was this space for me not only to explore myself in this general way, but also it was the only place that I could really be queer.

I’m glad I had it, but I think it also at times kept me in this cycle of self-deprecation. I think stand-up in particular for me was just high concept self-harm. I think when it came to writing The People’s Joker, I really wanted to process all of that experience of comedy both informing identity and just being this place where you can just relive your family trauma, but do it in a way that was over the top and fantastical. My original idea for The People’s Joker wasn’t even a Joker parody. It really was just about a drag queen who was physically addicted to irony and lived in this world where comedy was outlawed, but also weaponized against people. To me, at its core, that’s really what The People’s Joker is about, because that’s my experience with comedy.

It’s funny because I think I meet a lot of younger comedians and people just starting out and talking to people sometimes, I think they get the sense that I really hate comedy because I don’t really go to shows anymore. I don’t do performance really anymore. I want to act a lot more and film and stuff, but I don’t really like doing live performances as much. I don’t hate comedy. I think I’ve just had a relationship with it for 25 years that has been mostly toxic, and The People’s Joker was me healing my relationship with comedy, I think.

CD: Well, I just want to say thank you so much for sharing this time with me. I’m, again, just really excited for more people to get to see The People’s Joker, as I’m sure you are. Thanks for chatting with me, Vera.

VD: Thank you.

The People’s Joker opens in New York City on Friday, April 5 at IFC Center, in Los Angeles on Friday, April 12 at Landmark’s Nuart Theatre with a nationwide rollout to follow.