Two and a half years after its festival premiere, The People’s Joker is finally getting its Irish theatrical release. I first encountered Vera Drew’s debut feature when it was included in Dublin’s own GAZE International LGBTQIA+ Film Festival lineup in September of 2022, before being yanked from venues after only one screening at the Toronto International Film Festival earlier that month. The film is an autobiographical trans coming-of-age story that uses pop culture as a paintbrush, lovingly paying homage and absolutely dunking on properties as wide ranging as Joel Schumacher’s Batman Forever, David Ayer’s Suicide Squad, and Todd Phillips’ Joker, (as well as Saturday Night Live, among other things), many of which are the intellectual property of Warner Brothers. It was understood that these depictions fell under parody and fair use protection, but the night before the film’s TIFF premiere, some lawyers got catty, and The People’s Joker received a sharply worded letter from an unnamed “media conglomerate” designed to scatter the festival release and scare off distributors.
In the intervening months, The People’s Joker continued garnering praise from all those who were able to see it, while Warner Brothers shuffled from one corporate overlord to another. Vera’s film was back on the festival circuit a year later, where I finally got to watch it. The cinema was packed with excited fans, and I left the screening with the unique elation of having seen something totally unprecedented. Vera stars as Joker the Harlequin, an aspiring comic who moves to a dystopian Gotham City, ruled by a fascistic Batman and the United Clown Bureau, who regulate all media. Joker must juggle love, ambition, and resistance as she navigates transition and fights for the freedom to express herself. The film is not only the rare comedy to effectively satirize the icons of 21st century culture, but for many (myself included) it is an emotional evocation of what it’s like to carve out an identity for yourself in a media landscape dominated by corporate interests and slop.
The film was picked up for US distribution by Altered Innocence and is being brought across the Atlantic by Matchbox Cine. It’ll be playing at the IFI on February 22nd and 27th, as well as The Lighthouse for a special Valentine’s Day preview screening in conjunction with the Trans Image, Trans Experience Film Festival. I got the chance to speak with Vera about the emotional journey of the film’s distribution and what’s up next for her career. We also spoke a lot about the late, great David Lynch, whose films will also be screening at the Light House over the next couple months, and some of Vera’s favorite classics of the queer canon. And porn.
I first saw The People’s Joker at GAZE a year and a half ago and loved it so much.
Thank you! I’m glad you got to see the movie there. I wish I could’ve been at that screening.
It was a great night. Let’s start this interview about The People’s Joker by talking a little bit about David Lynch. I know his work was dear to you, as it was to me. Have you been revisiting it at all in the weeks since his passing?
Yes. The day David Lynch died, my partner and I re-watched Mulholland Drive. That’s my favorite David Lynch movie – it’s probably my favorite movie that’s ever existed. I think there was something about him passing away, knowing that he probably died because of complications from his emphysema, and the fires happening in LA, it felt like…I don’t know how to put words to it, but he had this magic vision of Hollywood. It’s this movie that accurately shows the dreams and nightmares of making stuff out here. It felt appropriate.
We were already in the middle of a Twin Peaks rewatch, so we’ve been working our way through that again, and that’s been a lot of fun. And I sat down and watched Elephant Man the other night. Jesus Christ, what a picture. He was just the most empathetic filmmaker that we had. The experience of watching the reaction to his death and how much he mattered to people—he transcended artist to this almost spiritual, prophetic entity.
Just one of the all-time greatest humans that ever lived. I’ve been thinking all week since watching it with how scary things are right now, that line in The Elephant Man where John Merrick’s like: “I’m happy every hour of the day because I know I have love in my life.” That is just profoundly something we all need to hold onto right now. Everybody needs to make that the priority, especially in times like these when everything is so scary.
Is there any David Lynch film that you feel is spiritually connected to The People’s Joker?
Absolutely. I would’ve never made The People’s Joker if it hadn’t been for Twin Peaks: The Return. I’d been a Twin Peaks fan for over a decade at that point, and I watched The Return every week it was airing. That first night, I knew that it wasn’t what I thought it was going to be. It’s going to be about how we can’t return to Twin Peaks. You can never truly go home.
As this piece of digital cinema, it broke my brain. It really showed me the ability of art to subvert expectations. And how the whole subversion of expectations is a lie; It’s really just following your intuition as an artist and telling a truthful story. As a spiritual source of inspiration it changed my life. Watching that movie—I think of it as an eighteen-hour movie—I was like: “It is time for me to start transitioning. It is time for me to start making art that only I can make”. It was this wake-up call to stop waiting for the green light from other people, that only I was going to be able to create that for myself. And for every other artist of value that’s the only way you get to the other side.
And it completely ruined TV for me. I can’t watch TV anymore. I remember when those last two episodes aired, just sitting there and being like: “I’m different! My brain is different now! He changed my brain with art!”
I finished The Return ten minutes before midnight on New Year’s Eve and then he died a few weeks later. It felt like I was in the show.
Isn’t that the thing about his art? He didn’t think of his characters as fake people. He thought they existed. He was providing a window into some other dimension. Whether he was or not, he believed it, and because of that everyone who consumes that art gets to have experiences like that.
As far as it relates to The People’s Joker… I wanted to talk about the trans experience as an inter-dimensional experience; It’s not just about matching your soul to your body, it’s about transcending those things completely. The entire third act of The People’s Joker is my character transcending time and space and going through this gender-hell-stargate and that was trying to circle a similar thing.
Making The People’s Joker, it broke down that barrier of reality, where things I was writing for the movie would then show up in my life. The entire third act of the movie as it relates to Joker telling her story and facing off against this corporate media landscape is what it felt like releasing the movie and having Warner Brothers come after it. And that was weird because it was like: “What the fuck? I wrote this two years ago and now I’m going through it?” But I think that’s what happens when you write something really personal, and you approach it from this sort of chaos magic angle of making stuff.
I’m so thankful I had David Lynch as an unknowing mentor. I never got to meet him, but I feel like all of his art really showed me how to do that. We’re all lucky that it exists and that there’s so much of it, too. So much to revisit.
It took a while to make The People’s Joker and partially because of Warner Brothers you’ve had this unusually long press cycle. How do you feel like that’s shaped your relationship to the characters in The People’s Joker, and the movie overall?
There’s probably already quotes of me saying this, but I don’t love doing press. I remember I showed up at one of our screenings in LA after a particularly difficult podcast experience, and Tim Heidecker was our Q&A moderator and he was like: “This is all great! Look at all these people dressed up and stuff, how’s it goin?” And I was just like: “I don’t know, man. I’m so burnt out on talking about this movie.” And he just looked at me and was like: “Yeah, well, that’s the job.” So I’ve tried to think of it as that.
But it’s also helped me understand why I made the movie. It’s been more useful than therapy at times. Like when I try to talk about making The People’s Joker in therapy, I don’t really get close to the truth of what I learned from these characters and what I learned making this art. As far as leaning into recovery and meditation and taking care of myself, all of that really came from how much visibility the project got after the controversies hit. Getting to talk about it with people allowed me to get to this place of experiencing real gratitude for what we accomplished and how it’s been received.
By and large, when I’ve done press for this movie, I end up having to talk about a lot of the same stuff. In conversations like this, I get to talk about things I don’t normally get to. It’s a lot of fun. It feels like a gift. At the end of the day, it’s embarrassing to complain about the fact that people wanna know about something I made or listen to a podcast or watch a video about something I made. Like what more could I want as a first-time director? All you could ever want from a film is a never-ending press cycle.
Has being with The People’s Joker for so long impacted what you want to do for your next project? Would you want to make something similarly DIY or something totally different?
It’s interesting because my next movie is aesthetically very different from The People’s Joker, but I’m also using a lot of what I learned from The People’s Joker to pull it off. I tried to write a script that was small and focused and not some big, ever-expanding piece of mythological all-ness, and I was unable to do that. My next film is a horror movie and is maybe more personal. It’s about making The People’s Joker and is a trans coming-of-age story, but it’s a different type of trans coming-of-age story. It’s about that period after you came out, when you have to contend with the fact that maybe you weren’t the innocent little lamb that you thought you were. I think there’s a lot in it that will make people say: “That’s the same crazy bitch who made The People’s Joker!” but it’s certainly a very different type of movie tonally, and that’s what I want out of my career.
Speaking of Twin Peaks, my friend Josh Fadem is in The Return, and he’s got this new podcast called “Here Come the Details”. He was just talking to Michael Ian Black about people who come into a scene having made something and people perceive them a certain way because of it. They end up getting a persona and leaning into it. I don’t know how I would do that. I don’t know how I would stick with making things like The People’s Joker because it’s so unsustainable. It’s such an unsustainable way of making a movie. And like I can’t be the Joker forever, even just for legal reasons.
So I feel like my career is gonna be trying something new every time I sit down and make a movie. Which I think kinda should be the goal for every filmmaker. I think I’m a very different type of artist than Stanley Kubrick, but I look up to his diversity of filmography. All of his films are an entirely different genre, and I think that’s kind of what I want.
The People’s Strangelove would be pretty sick.
Hell yeah. Dr. Strangelove is a fucking crazy movie. That was probably the first Stanley Kubrick movie I ever saw. And now when I watch it as an adult, it’s such a deeply horny movie. It’s crazy how horny that movie is! Especially for something made in the ‘60s. It’s just about sex. It’s barely about politics. It’s about men and their boners! God. Good on ya, Stanley.
Since you first watched Todd Phillips’ Joker, has there been any other film or piece of art that you’ve seen yourself in?
I definitely see myself in my contemporaries, like Alice Maio Mackay and Louise Weard. I relate to the stuff they’re talking about. I was really into queer film before making The People’s Joker, especially John Waters and Bruce LaBruce, but I also hadn’t seen a lot of stuff, especially in porn.
I’m really getting into porn lately, as a genre. I’ve really fallen in love with Jean Rollin. He’s got this whole series of vampire movies; I don’t know if I see myself in them, but I really relate to him as a smut peddler. Because I think he makes art that is so beautiful. He made this movie called Requiem for a Vampire that has no dialogue for the first 40 minutes. It’s just these lesbian clowns getting away from a heist, and they somehow end up in a vampire castle. And then in the middle of the movie there’s a 15-minute S&M sequence. It’s crazy! I feel so lucky that there’s so much art I get to discover. Especially queer art.
I should also give a shoutout to Liz Purchell’s movie, Ask Any Buddy, which is a remix of gay porn. I remember going to see it, which was my first experience watching porn in a theater. I can’t remember if there’s any explicit trans characters in it, but it feels like a trans movie to me. It’s this beautiful bridge that a lot of us trans women and trans femmes cross where we first come out. Everyone’s thinks you’re a gay man. And then you start living in that world and then you’re like: “Oh no, I’m something else entirely.” Everyone should check out Ask Any Buddy, if they get the chance. It’s one of my favorite queer movies ever made.
Very real. There was a Trans Sex on Screen screening here at the Irish Film Institute programmed by the Small Trans Library. We were all sitting in this beautiful cinema watching a trans girl fake an orgasm and I was like “this is amazing.”
Yeah! If you’re a genre filmmaker, it’s important to watch porn. Some of the most beautiful stuff. The people making digital porn are the only people who know how to light people. You can learn a lot technically!
One final question; we’ve got a special Valentine’s Day preview screening of The People’s Joker coming up in Dublin. Do you have any dating wisdom for audience members?
Oh, God. Um. There’s nothing hotter than having sex in clown makeup. I highly recommend it.
Tickets are available now for The People’s Joker on Friday 14th February at the Light House Cinema, and on Saturday 22nd and Thursday 27th February at the IFI.