It’s been a month since Joker was first released, and we still have so many questions but it doesn’t seem like director Todd Phillips is willing to give away too much about the film now (or ever, probably).
However, there is one thing he’s setting the record straight on and that’s about single mother Sophie Dumond’s (Zazie Beetz) fate.
In the film, we find out that Joaquin Phoenix’s Arthur Fleck has invented a romance with Sophie in his mind and the pair have actually barely exchanged more than a few words to each other.
Towards the end of the film, Fleck lets himself into Sophie’s apartment and she’s shocked to find him there as he’s essentially a stranger to her and asks him to leave. He does, but we never know if she survived or if the very disturbed Fleck murdered her.
Last month, we received confirmation from the film’s cinematographer Lawrence Sher that Sophie had indeed survived, because killing her would go against Arthur’s code of conduct – he only killed those who wronged him and she never did.
Now, Phillips has revealed to IndieWire, that he originally had a scene that would have made Sophie’s fate very clear.
In the original Joker script, when Arthur appears on Murray Franklin’s show, there was a cutaway scene to show Sophie watching the violent encounter on her television.
However, the scene was cut because it wouldn’t have made sense given Joker is meant to be told entirely from Arthur’s perspective.
He added, “He doesn’t kill her, definitively. As the filmmaker and the writer I am saying he doesn’t kill her. We like the idea that it’s almost like a litmus test for the audience to say, ‘how crazy is he?’
“Most people that I’ve spoken to think he didn’t kill her because they understand the idea that he only kills people that did him wrong. She had nothing to do with it. Most people understood that, even as a villain, he was living by a certain code. Of course he didn’t kill this woman down the hall.”
Good to know!