[Warning: spoilers for Joker below]
Joker left viewers with a lot of questions: How much of the movie is “real” and how much did Arthur Fleck imagine while he was in Arkham Asylum? Did Thomas Wayne have an affair with Penny? Did it have to be a freaking Gary Glitter song? But the most speculation has centered on Sophie Dumond, the character played by Atlanta‘s Zazie Beetz. She’s Arthur’s neighbor and they seemingly start a romantic relationship, until we realize it was all part of his twisted imagination, but is she also his murder victim?
Writer and director Todd Phillips won’t say, but his cinematographer will.
“We wanted to make the interpretation of the real versus what’s not real, a part of the viewer’s experience,” Lawrence Sher told Slash Film. “For instance, his relationship to Sophie is a fantasy to him. Some people have asked me, ‘Was she killed?’ Todd makes it clear she wasn’t killed. Arthur is killing people who’ve wronged him in a certain way, and Sophie never wronged him. In terms of what we did visually to play with the real and not real, there are callbacks and scenes that mirror each other. We leave hints using imagery or way we covered scenes similarly between scene. Outside of that, I like that people can have the conversation and come to their own conclusions.”
It’s helpful to have the not-dead clarification, but of course she lived. Zazie survived the Schnappviecher — the Joker ain’t got nothing on this nightmare.
(Via Slash Film)
