Director Todd Phillips Confirms He and JOKER 2 Stars Would Meet Often to "Tear Up the Script and Start All Over"
Director Todd Phillips is about to release the sequel to his film Joker. The movie, Joker: Folie À Deux, sees the return of Arthur Fleck (Joaquin Phoenix), who is now in an asylum awaiting trial after his crimes in the last film. In this new story, he meets up with Lee Quinzel (Lady Gaga), and the whole thing is a dark and twisted musical of sorts. Phillips wrote the script with Scott Silver, however he talks about how the stars of the film were major collaborators in the rewriting process.
During a recent interview with Variety, Phillips said his goal in making this sequel 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.
Gaga recently told Vanity Fair, “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.”
Phillips confirmed Gaga’s story, explaining:
“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.”
Warner Bros. is set to release Joker: Folie à Deux in theaters on October 4th.