Vera Drew: ‘At least they’re not saying “banned filmmaker” anymore’

It’s been a wild two and a half years since Vera Drew’s The People’s Joker made a major splash at Toronto International Film Festival, where it premiered to an enthusiastic midnight audience only to have any and all of its follow-up screenings canceled. There was quite an ongoing scandal around The People’s Joker due to the film’s liberal use of Batman characters in telling the tale of a trans woman who herself becomes the Joker and brings the “anti-comedy” movement to Gotham City. That the notoriously litigious DC Comics and Warner Bros were nervous about Drew’s film is no surprise, but they should have had no fear: everything about The People’s Joker was grounded in a love of these comics and characters.

As the feature finally makes its way to the UK thanks to Matchbox Cine, I catch up with Vera Drew over Zoom – where we chat about the film’s creation and longevity, the tools and collaboration that led to it, its place in what some call a new trans canon, the influence of filmmakers like David Lynch and Joel Schumacher, and (perhaps most importantly) her bid to help reboot Sega’s Ecco the Dolphin.

LWLies: How does it feel still having The People’s Joker going strong and spreading further into the world after two and a half years?

Drew: It feels great. I definitely never could have imagined I would still be talking about the movie in this capacity; it was really something that I thought I was just making for myself, so even now it’s kind of hard to really even know how I feel. When I ran into you at TIFF years ago, I was still very much in this same state of wondering, “How did I end up here?” This is just something I was making in my house for my friends and I.

Yeah, it’s like you have gone so far beyond the idea of ending up a “cult film” and becoming something that everyone has talked about.

I never want to correct people when they describe it as a cult classic, it’s easier to just nod my head. At least they’re not saying “banned filmmaker” anymore. When I think of cult classics, I think of things that are a real slow burn as far as independent films go; after that TIFF premiere, I found a distributor less than a year later. I wasn’t even in distribution limbo that long! But it’s been pretty cool seeing the reach that it has had, y’know? I even met Elijah Wood recently and he was like “I’ve heard of you.” Like really? Lord of the Rings is so important to me. You’ve heard of little old me? And he’s like, “Oh yeah, Warner Bros. sued you or whatever.” It’s like no, they didn’t, but it’s always that. [laughing] It’s cool though!

It’s taken the pressure off whatever I want to do next in a way. I almost feel more emboldened to do whatever I want as an artist now just because that’s what I was doing on the first one.

I feel like that love and passion you poured into The People’s Joker also extends into your collaborative nature too. What was it like building this collection of human beings who are willing to go full force into creating this massive vision with you?

I don’t think we’d even be having this conversation if it hadn’t always been like a DIY art project. When I put out the call for any artists that wanted to help and built this website with Justin Gaynor, who I knew from working on Tim and Eric and On Cinema, we had this entry form for anybody that wanted to participate to come aboard and work on it. I really wasn’t expecting that many people to reply to it, I just thought it was going to be like maybe five or six people and then that call to action would become part of “getting the word out” about the movie.

But that ended up being the primary reason the movie became what it was. Hundreds of people ended up saying they wanted to contribute in some way and that was what dictated the aesthetic too. I had so many different types of artists and animators and filmmakers that just wanted to get involved, and I remember when that happened, it was like, “Okay, I really have to do this now,” because I couldn’t think of any other filmmaker that had ever had the opportunity to make something with that many people, and using the DIY collectivist approach as a model for filmmaking seemed kind of scary and interesting.

I also don’t really subscribe to auteur theory. I would communicate my ideas to people, with the qualification being “I want you to lean into your aesthetic”. There wasn’t any micromanaging of styles, per se, and it was so cool because I got to discover what the film looked like while we were making it. And I think that keeps it fresh rather than sticking with any sort of rigid vision of what I had in my head. I work better as somebody who’s discovering along the way, so I was really propped up by the people that were working on it with me. That also carried over into getting the movie out there after the TIFF debacle; I just have this community of artists, filmmakers, and critics like yourself, to thank for continuing to spread the word about this movie. I would really not have been able to do it on my own and was really propped up by queer cinema and genre cinema in this way where people were like, “This movie needs to get out there.”

Now that you bring up being propped up by queer cinema, our friend and fellow filmmaker Louise Weard wrote about how all these filmmakers (including you) are doing different and unique things but are lumped together, and I’m wondering how you feel about being thrown into the current “trans cinema boom” and your place in it.

In the beginning, I found any conversation around it very annoying. I remember in April 2023 I was doing secret screenings of The People’s Joker, and during a Q&A in Australia, somebody asked me what it felt like to be a part of the “trans cinema movement” with that exact phrasing. I was probably very rude in how I responded, like “What are you talking about? Who?” and I remember them specifically mentioning Jane [Schoenbrun] and Mia Moore Marchant, who’s in The People’s Joker [as Helena the Huntress] and she just finished her first feature like months ago. It was just a weird question to get asked what it was like to be part of a movement I was pretty sure just didn’t exist. That was my first introduction to the idea of some “moment” happening.

And I think the stock joke I came up with that night for any time the question came up was: “It’s not really a movement. We’re not all having meetings at Jane Schoenbrun’s house about the trans agenda.” You know, I’ve never met Jane. I’m friends with Louise [Castration Movie and Computer Hearts], I’m friends with Alice Maio Mackay [T Blockers and Satanic Panic], I know Henry Hanson [Dog Movie and Bros Before] in Chicago; I know a handful of trans filmmakers and have become friends with them but we’re not all doing some sort of coordinated attack.

It’s funny because Louise’s take is interesting because she specifically points out there’s more people than just “Jane and Vera” making this stuff, which I’ve always appreciated. Louise actually made this hour of content with Matchbox Cine [Louise Weard: UNSEE] that was kind of a companion piece to her Castration Movie, which everybody should see, that is, to me, the trans movie of the decade.

Just look at this past month and everyone sharing their experiences with David Lynch [after his passing] – we’ve all been sharing our feelings and I thought your thread was so moving and beautiful, but completely unique to you and your own being.

To me, that’s what gets lost when people try to describe all the trans filmmakers as some sort of monolith. Art, in and of itself, and how it’s created and how it’s processed by the viewer, is so personal. I can’t help but think of New Queer Cinema going on in the 90s; I can understand the frustration that a lot of those artists had in being lumped together because a lot of us are coming at our art from very different perspectives and very different economics. I didn’t have A24 money in my movie and Louise, with Castration Movie, is shooting on DV tapes and cashing in every favor she can. But I think the thing worth noting is that we’re all in a similar age range and all kind of reached this point of maximum frustration where it’s like, “Now’s our time to get in there while Hollywood is burning down.” I’m so interested in seeing where we all go as artists, especially someone like Alice, who has already made five or six movies.

Just to jump off this notion of the “humanity” of filmmaking, there’s been endless discourse around AI, specifically generative, and I remember you providing this nuanced take on AI tools and misunderstanding around them for The People’s Joker a while back. I’d love to hear you talk a little about working with this kind of thing as a filmmaker, editor, and performer, while still being critical of generative AI.

I think generative AI is unethical; the kind of AI that people are against that mines pre-existing art and is very bad for our environment. I’m obviously against that, but AI assisted tools for visual effects have existed for decades. And, when it came to doing our green screen removal, I wouldn’t have been able to finish the movie without them. It’s tricky to talk about because the term “AI” itself has just become such an immediate red flag for some people, which I get because there is a level of how it can and has affected labor.

I think the way people talk about it as this boogie man is almost giving it too much power and the conversation around it should be less about replacing artists and should really be about the environment. It’s in the way that these servers require so much water. My city doesn’t have breathable air right now because of fires and that feels to me like a much bigger concern with AI and not just, “Oh no, a human being might not be able to make Blank Panther 6.” I don’t give a shit and I don’t think anybody should.

What matters is that we can even survive to create anything.

Yeah, and theoretically, advances in technology that the user has direct access to should democratize cinema in a way, so I’m hoping that’s what things come to, especially if we find more ethical ways of just creating the energy to do this stuff. I think about the conversations around “digital versus film” a lot. Just speaking of David Lynch, I remember how much shit he got all the time when he said he was done making stuff on film and talked about how it’s too expensive and a waste of money. And he was right! Inland Empire is gorgeous! There’s so much you can do with digital. I don’t know that I would have ever been able to become a filmmaker without it, and I definitely would not have been able to make The People’s Joker, so hopefully more advances in tech just allows DIY to become even more of a thing.

You want people to discover new ways of telling stories through different mediums, that’s what art should be. And since we keep jumping back to Lynch, a lot of what I’ve noticed recently is that people are appreciating his sense of humor and his sincerity. I think The People’s Joker knows they exist in tandem as well. What is it about those two modes that you’re drawn to in your filmmaking?

I guess I just like camp. And I think the definition of camp that most people have is wrong. Most people describe it as “bad on purpose” or “so bad it’s good” and to me, camp is the most sincere thing there is. It’s leaning into the fact that you can tell a story that’s the whole dinner; it doesn’t have to be gritty and edgy to be telling an emotionally grounded story. I think of Joel Schumacher specifically; his movies are so operatic and gay and colorful, but they’re still a real human thing. I wish that people talked about Schumacher the same way they talk about De Palma or Scorsese for that reason. It’s the same thing of being hyper-stylized and kind of silly and camp, but there’s a real emotional core to it. When you’re creating a space where you can do all of those things at once, they only feed off each other in a way that makes the other stronger, whereas if you’re just making a movie that’s like, “here’s my sad movie about being a little gay weirdo”, you don’t get to circle the truth in a way that’s like you do when you’re learning into all parts of that whole spectrum.

And I know Joel Schumacher is so key for you in making The People’s Joker too. I remember watching a pre-show video collage you made for its screening and seeing the trailer for The Incredible Shrinking Woman, which caught me off guard. It’s interesting to see all the different branches you’re pulling from in your influences. Was that pre-show almost like a blueprint collage or more borne out of the film?

Kind of both I think. I hadn’t seen The Incredible Shrinking Woman until I was already starting to dig into it and right before shooting the movie. When I saw it, I was like “this is our color palette, this is our aesthetic.” Our aesthetic is the Schumacher Batman movies, but also the range of color and texture and grain in those early Schumacher movies were the thing I had my DP and colorist watch. When I’m working on something, my mood boards are very chaotic. One of the next films I’m working on, I’m looking at the movie My Girl a lot [laughs], with Dan Ackroyd, but also Stuart Gordon movies… like my next movie is just “what if Stuart Gordon made My Girl.”

[laughing] I can’t tell you how into this I am.

Yeah, I just like a lot of different things and I don’t know if it’s because I used to do a lot of ketamine, but my brain just connects all these dots in this way and that’s how I find my aesthetic. Tourmaline [the activist and filmmaker] actually just sent me an article, which I can’t believe is a sentence I can say now [laughs], that apparently Sega is potentially developing some Ecco the Dolphin content, and Ecco the Dolphin is like my favorite video game series of all time.

The second I saw the article I was texting my fucking agent because I’ve had an Ecco the Dolphin movie in my head since I was ten and I can only imagine what the mood board for that would be because there’s just so much there. I wouldn’t say I’m influenced by Stanley Kubrick, per se, just because that’s like saying you like pizza or The Beatles, but the thing I do really look up to him as a director for is how much research he did. He would absorb himself in the subjects he was circling, and it’s why he never ended up making his Holocaust movie; he was like, “I can’t read about this anymore and I can’t subject myself to more of this shit.” But I think about something like The Shining, where he was reading stuff about all the genocides and going to hotels around the country to take pictures, almost building this collage of ideas, and then getting to a place where “this is the movie”, that’s what filmmaking is to me. It’s almost like putting together a conspiracy corkboard.

More filmmakers should have insane inspirations! And just to close out by talking about one of your most important motivational texts, Todd Philips’ Joker, I have to ask the question that’s on everyone’s mind: what are The People’s Joker’s thoughts on Joker: Folie a Deux?

I never could have predicted that my journey with Todd Phillips and Joker would end like this, but I loved Joker 2. It was maybe one of my favorite movies last year, just because it was so… it did not need to be like that. There was no reason for him to make a movie that was that antagonistic against its own audience. When the movie got announced and Lady Gaga was in it, I was actually like, “Oh shit, it’s going to be like a love story and like The People’s Joker; it’s going to be a big gay musical.” And then it’s not. It’s the most depressing two and a half hours, like if a cigarette learned how to sing. And I loved that, I loved all the music in it and that whole sequence where Joaquin Phoenix is just singing “Bewitched, Bothered, and Bewildered”; the way his voice is, I literally get chills talking about it.

All the renditions of the songs are just so beautiful, but even all that stuff aside, there’s a sequence where the Joker loses his virginity to Lady Gaga and he cums in less than four seconds. How was I not going to love Joker 2? It’s like they made a movie only for me. I’m glad I liked it because it made me feel better about the fact that The People’s Joker didn’t end up on John Waters’ top ten of the year, but Joker 2 did. And you know what? I kind of agree with him.