Joaquin Phoenix’s Joker was ‘a betrayal of the mentally ill’, says Gone Girl director David Fincher

The director David Fincher has accused Hollywood of turning its back on innovative filmmaking, and claimed that studios are taking their creative cues from past glories while streaming services like Netflix push the medium forward.

“I think that the studios are happy to say, ‘We’re going to spend $250 million on this, and $4 million on this, and leave everything in the middle to somebody else,’” he told the Telegraph, in an interview to be published tomorrow. “I think they’re happy to get that stuff off their plate. But I also think the middle-budget, challenging movies tend to define where the bigger movies are going to go.”

He suggested Warner Bros’ $1 billion-grossing supervillain origin story – whose star Joaquin Phoenix won the Best Actor Oscar earlier this year – as an example of a franchise-era studio product taking its creative cues from more original work.

“Nobody would have thought they had a shot at a giant hit with Joker had The Dark Knight not been as massive as it was [in 2008],” he said. “I don’t think anyone would have looked at that material and thought, ‘Yeah, let’s take Travis Bickle and Rupert Pupkin and conflate them, then trap him in a betrayal of the mentally ill, and trot it out for a billion dollars.’”

Travis Bickle and Rupert Pupkin are the protagonists of Martin Scorsese’s Taxi Driver and The King of Comedy – two classic films from the ‘New Hollywood’ era of the 1970s and 80s to which Joker has been widely compared. Both characters were played by Robert De Niro, who appeared in Joker as talk show host Murray Franklin.

“I'm sure that Warner Bros thought at a certain price, and with the right cast, and with De Niro coming along for the ride, it would be a possible double or triple,” he added. “But I cannot imagine that movie would have been released had it been 1999.”

Fincher’s new film Mank – a black-and-white noir drama starring Gary Oldman, about the turbulent writing of Citizen Kane – was made for Netflix as part of an ongoing partnership which has already yielded the series House of Cards and Mindhunter. The 58-year-old has worked with a number of major studios in the past, including Columbia Pictures on his 2010 founding-of-Facebook drama The Social Network, which was an international critical and commercial success.

But he forged an alliance with the streaming platform after making Gone Girl at 20th Century Fox, and realising that the appetite within the studio system for bold, challenging stories was waning as they re-centred their business model around franchises.

“The reality of our current situation is that the five [major studios] don’t want to make anything that can’t make them a billion dollars,” he said. “None of them want to be in the medium-priced challenging content business. And that cleaves off exactly the kind of movies I make.

“So what I feel like the streamers are doing is providing a platform for the kind of cinema that actually reflects our culture and wrestles with big ideas: where things are, what people are anxious and unsure about. Those are the kinds of movies that would have been dead on arrival five years ago.

He continued: “[Gone Girl] would have been impossible to get a movie with that discordant, evaporating ending made if we hadn’t been able to point to the original book’s place on the New York Times bestseller list.”

Read the full interview with David Fincher in the Daily Telegraph tomorrow, and online from 6am