‘Suicide Squad’ Should Have Had Jared Leto’s Joker As Its Main Villain, Admits Director David Ayer

David Ayer has taken to Twitter to candidly discuss his hugely divisive blockbuster Suicide Squad, which was released in the summer to mixed reviews but still went on to gross over $745 million at the box office.

Rarely for a filmmaker, David Ayer admitted that Suicide Squad has some flaws, and even revealed that he wished he’d made Jared Leto’s Joker the main villain of the blockbuster.

David Ayer was provoked into being so open about Suicide Squad after he received a gushing review on Twitter. User @PensFanboy sent the following post to the director,

https://twitter.com/PensFanboy/status/822938065933111296

David Ayer was so moved by @PensFanboy’s post that he decided to write out a lengthy response where he opened up about his true feelings regarding Suicide Squad. At first, he just thanked @PensFanboy, before acknowledging that Suicide Squad wasn’t to everyone’s liking.

Thank you so much. I know it’s a controversial film, I really tried to make something different, with a look and a voice of its own. I took inspiration from the insanity of the original comics.

David Ayer then went on to talk about just how difficult it is to make a blockbuster on such a large scale, and how he tried to avoid the norm with Suicide Squad, which clearly left some viewers a little cold,

Making a movie is a journey, not a straight line. I learned so much. People want what they want, and everyone has a personal vision of how each character should look and walk and talk. If you set out to make a mass appeal movie, it’s easy to end with vanilla. But I went for it.

It was at this point that David Ayer confessed that he knows that Suicide Squad has its flaws, while also discussing how he responded to the tidal wave of bad reviews for the film,

And I know Squad has its flaws, Hell, the World knows it. Nothing hurts more than to pick up a newspaper and see a couple years of your blood, sweat and tears ripped to shreds. The hate game is strong out there.The movie was wildly successful commercially. And the world got introduced [to] some very cool characters in the DC Universe. And that success is due exactly to the wonder and power of DC, of its characters.

It was at this point that David Ayer opened up about the lack of the Joker in Suicide Squad, admitting that if he had the opportunity again, he’d have put Jared Leto’s villain front and center of the film.

David Ayer continued,

Would I do a lot of things different? Yep, for sure. Wish I had a time machine. I’d make Joker the main villain and engineer a more grounded story. I have to take the good and bad and learn from it. I love making movies and I love DC. I’m a High School dropout and used to paint houses for a living. I’m lucky to have the job I have. I have to give the characters the stories and plots they deserve next time. Real talk. (And no, there isn’t a secret edit of the film with a bunch of Joker scenes hidden in a salt mine somewhere.)

David Ayer’s disappointment with Suicide Squad mirror the comments that Jared Leto previously made to IGN around the time of the film’s release. Leto told the publication that various scenes that featured the Joker were sliced down and that plenty of this “experimentation” and exploration of the character ended on the cutting room floor. Leto remarked,

Were there any that didn’t get cut? I’m asking you, were there any that didn’t get cut? There were so many scenes that got cut from the movie, I couldn’t even start. I think that the Joker… we did a lot of experimentation on the set, we explored a lot. There’s so much that we shot that’s not in the film.

[Featured Image by Warner Bros]