Todd Phillips breaks the comic-book movie rules as he takes criminal mastermind Joker into new territory

LOS ANGELES - Director Todd Phillips will be the first one to tell you that he's not exactly a huge comic-book person. Sure, Phillips - best known for raucous hit comedies like "Old School" and "The Hangover" - read comics as a kid and he's seen films like Tim Burton's "Batman" and Christopher Nolan's "Dark Knight" trilogy. But for the most part, going to see comic-book movies, let alone making them, has never really been his bag. Âś "I've been offered a few over the years and my thing was always: I don't watch those movies," Phillips said on a recent afternoon at his production office on the Warner Bros. lot in Burbank. "It's not because I don't think it's cool. It's just like, quite frankly, they're always so loud." He laughed. "It was just never something I imagined doing."

It may seem surprising then that, with his highly anticipated new film, "Joker," Phillips finds himself delivering a fresh take on the origin of arguably the comic world's most iconic villain, a fiendish