Many years before he won the Academy Award as Best Actor for the title role in Joker, Joaquin Phoenix was director Darren Aronofsky’s first choice to play the title role in his Batman: Year One screen adaptation.
While that has been public knowledge for a few years now, Aronofsky recently revealed who Warner Bros. wanted for the role and ultimately why his vision of a Batman origin movie fell apart long before Christopher Nolan tackled it in Batman Begins.
“The studio wanted Freddie Prinze Jr and I wanted Joaquin Phoenix,” Aronofsky told Empire. “I remember thinking, ‘Uh oh, we’re making two different films here.’ That’s a true story. It was a different time. The Batman I wrote was definitely a way different type of take than they ended up making.”
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Aronofsky, a huge fan of Batman: Year One writer Frank Miller’s work, wanted to go even grittier than the seminal DC comic did, with Miller saying Aronofsky’s “vision of Batman was darker than” his own.
“The Batman franchise had just gone more and more back towards the TV show, so it became tongue-in-cheek, a grand farce, camp,” Aronofsky explained back in 2012.
“I pitched the complete opposite, which was totally bring-it-back-to-the-streets raw, trying to set it in a kind of real reality — no stages, no sets, shooting it all in inner cities across America, creating a very real feeling. My pitch was Death Wish or The French Connection meets Batman.”
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Such ’70s movie influences ended up coming into play with director Todd Phillips’ Oscar-nominated Joker nearly two decades later.
While Aronofsky’s vision of a young Batman didn’t pan out, director Matt Reeves’ The Batman, currently on hiatus due to COVID-19, will see Robert Pattinson’s Dark Knight early in his career as a crime-fighter, with Reeves citing two particular ’70s film classics as his touchstones for the film.
Source: IGN.com Aronofsky on Almost Casting Phoenix in Batman: Year One