Without Meaning To, Todd Phillips Exposes The Chaos Of Making ‘Joker: Folie a Deux’ And The Difficulty Of Working With Joaquin Phoenix
The cat appears to be out of the suffocating bag as far as what a clown show it was making Joker: Folie a Deux. The film’s director Todd Phillips and its co-lead Lady Gaga admit as much in a recent interview, but they spin it in a nice way.
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Speaking with Vogue for a piece about Gaga’s career, Phillips revealed (as Variety puts it) the inmates – or inmate in this case, as in Joaquin Phoenix – essentially ran the Arkham Asylum this time around.
The director explained that Phoenix would persuade him to rewrite scenes at a moment’s notice and to do so, called meetings with Phillips and Gaga in his trailer. They’d last for hours and result in the script being thrown out constantly.
“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,” Phillips said.
Common sense dictates this is unprofessional behavior and unfair to your costar, but Phillips says Gaga could hold her own. “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,” he continued.
Fair or not, she was up to the challenge and considered the process “liberating.” “We’d very often meet in Joaquin’s trailer and sometimes we would just tear the script up and start all over,” Gaga said. “It was a really cool, liberating process.”
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It may be “cool” and it may be “liberating” creatively, but it’s a chronic habit of Joaquin Phoenix that his collaborators are too quick to write off. Ridley Scott had a similar experience with the actor on Napoleon where he was “constantly questioning.”
“Joaquin is about as far from conventional as you can get,” Scott said to Empire. “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…film because he’s uncomfortable. And that kind of happened with Napoleon,” Scott added. “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.”
All well and good – however, there is a clear difference between having the creative freedom to make a film as good as it can be on the fly and the implacably recurring dissatisfaction of a prima donna.
Both cases come with consequences but they are magnified in the latter scenario. The first signs came out last year in reports of on-set conditions and restrictions on bathroom breaks for extras.
We’re not saying for a fact that Phoenix’s demands and emergency meetings contributed to that and similar affairs where scenes were held up or background players were stuck in the same place for hours, though they can’t be unrelated.
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