“Joker: Folie à Deux” director Todd Phillips recently told Variety for a cover story that the goal in making the anticipated sequel to 2019’s “Joker” was “to make it feel like it was made by crazy people. The inmates are running the asylum.” It appears the director got his wish in part from his leading star Joaquin Phoenix, who would throw out the script on a whim and gather with Phillips and co-star Lady Gaga in his trailer to rewrite entire scenes from the ground up.
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“We’d very often meet in Joaquin’s trailer and sometimes we would just tear the script up and start all over,” Gaga recently told Vanity Fair for her own cover story. “It was a really cool, liberating process.”
Phillips confirmed Gaga’s story and told the publication: “My line about Joaquin is that he’s the tunnel at the end of the light. You think, ‘Okay, this scene works, let’s just go shoot it.’ And Joaquin’s like, ‘No, no, no, let’s just have a quick meeting about it,’ and it’s three hours later and you’re rewriting it on a napkin. What’s great about Lady Gaga is that she really holds her own, both off camera when we’re in the trailer tearing things apart — which she probably spent the night before learning — but also on camera. It was not a small feat.”
“She puts herself around very powerful people,” Phillips later noted about his leading lady. “I mean, Bradley Cooper, to be across from him out of the gate. To be across from Adam Driver [in ‘House of Gucci’], who is a beast, and Joaquin who’s a beast. She’s in it — she went full in.”
“Joker: Folie à Deux” picks up the story with Phoenix’s Arthur Fleck standing trial for murder after he shooting a late-night host dead on live television. While incarcerated at Arkham Asylum, he befriends Gaga’s Lee and the two’s burgeoning romance impacts the course of the trial.
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It’s not out of the ordinary for Phoenix to generate rewrites in his project. Ridley Scott revealed to Empire during last year’s “Napoleon” press tour that casting Phoenix as the French emperor resulted in the script being entirely rewritten to make the actor more comfortable.
“Joaquin is about as far from conventional as you can get,” Scott said at the time. “Not deliberately, but out of intuition. That’s what makes him tick. If something bothers him, he’ll let you know. He made [‘Napoleon’] special by constantly questioning.”
“With Joaquin, we can rewrite the goddamn film because he’s uncomfortable. And that kind of happened with ‘Napoleon,’” the director continued. “We unpicked the film to help him focus on who Bonaparte was. I had to respect that, because what was being said was incredibly constructive. It made it all grow bigger and better.”
“Joker: Folie à Deux” opens in theaters Oct. 4 from Warner Bros.
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