Joaquin Phoenix Had So Many Ideas for ‘Joker: Folie à Deux,’ Todd Phillips Rewrote Entire Scenes on Napkins

Joaquin Phoenix truly put his stamp on Arthur Fleck, better known as the Joker.

After Phoenix won the Academy Award for his turn in the 2019 comic book adaptation, the actor took more ownership of the character and franchise for the sequel, “Joker: Folie à Deux,” at least according to writer/director Todd Phillips and co-star Lady Gaga.

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In fact, Phoenix encouraged the “Joker: Folie à Deux” team to constantly rewrite scenes even during production. Phillips co-wrote the initial screenplay with Scott Silver.

“My line about Joaquin is that he’s the tunnel at the end of the light,” Phillips told Vogue. “You think, OK, 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.”

Gaga agreed, saying, “We’d very often meet in Joaquin’s trailer and sometimes we would just tear the script up and start all over. It was a really cool, liberating process.”

Those script changes also impacted Gaga’s take on character Harley Quinn, leading her to write a waltz for the musical feature.

“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,” Phillips said of the Grammy and Oscar winner. “It was not a small feat.”

During the Venice press conference for the film’s world premiere, Phoenix explained how he always knew “Joker” warranted a sequel.

“I had this dream I was performing as Joker doing songs and I just called Todd because I thought there might be something there, and there wasn’t,” Phoenix said. “Part of the joy for me was taking these songs that were standards and trying to find a way that it felt like they were specific to the characters, that it was the only way the characters could express themselves, with these songs sung in this way.”

Phillips added onstage, “If you remember the first film, Arthur has a musicality to him. He is often dancing to express the way he feels. Hildur Guenadóttir’s score is almost a character in the first film. So when [the sequel] started taking shape with actual music elements, we thought, what if we got Lady Gaga who actually brings music with her?”

Read the IndieWire review for “Joker: Folie à Deux” here.

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