Bathtub Joker Scene Cut To Get R Rating

Todd Phillips dan Joaquin Phoenix (Instagram @toddphillips1)

JAKARTA - The news about the Joker seems endless. Like a fairy tale, this film, starring Joaquin Phoenix, is still the subject of conversation. Yes, it was recently revealed that a scene was cut to earn an R rating.

While speaking with the SBIFF Cinema Society, director Todd Phillips explained that there are several scenes he has to cut, one of which is the scene where Arthur Fleck does something strange in the bathtub.

The director didn't fully explain the scene in question, but it seemed like it was very disturbing.

Typically, when a scene in an R-rated film has to be removed from a theatrical release in order to get Motion Picture Association of America (MPAA) approval, it is because it is deemed to contain pornographic content. However, Phillips called the deleted scenes not sexually explicit, but too bizarre for a film with an R rating standard to handle.

"(The scene) was not in the script, it was something Joaquin did and there were a few others, there was only one in that movie and that was when he laughed after he went to (Zazie Beetz's) apartment and he came back down the hall and she laughed alone in the living room, that's another one, "Phillips told the SBIFF Cinema Society. Launch of Heroic Hollywood, Monday, November 11.

"There were two or three people we shot, one amazing in the bath, but I don't think we could actually put him in an R rated film and it wasn't for pornography, it was just crazy," he continued.

The contents of the mysteriously cut bathroom scenes are something that will probably interest R-rated character study fans, and hopefully they are included as scrapped scenes when the DVD or Blu-Ray version of Joker is released.

For now, we only need to speculate on what scene could have caused the MPAA to remove it.