Joker Behind The Scenes with Joaquin Phoenix and Todd Phillips Warner Bros Entertainment

Is it just me or is it getting crazier out there? I just love bad guys. It's fun to say, well, why is he like that? What made him like that? And that's ultimately really what the goal of the movie. It's not this gigantic statement on the world today and there is stuff thematically in there but really it's like, what makes somebody that way? And with Joker, I just liked his sense of mayhem and chaos. Todd called me and he said, I have this crazy idea for this sort of alternate version of DC and the first one is the origin story of Joker. I thought, this is just so bold. This is exactly how I imagined it. Todd has a very unique way of looking at things. Nobody could have made this movie for Todd. I have never really thought about doing a comic book movie. For me, it was more about this idea of doing a character study but about somebody people have no idea who, what, where he came from or anything like that. So it kind of came at it that way. It wasn't like, oh, I want to make a Joker movie. It was really came from like, how do you make a great character study and get people to want to see it? Warner's was pretty loose with it. I pitched it to them as an idea first and they just said, okay, go explore. I met with some people at DC and then we went off and wrote it. Scott Silver and I wrote for really a year and came back with the script but there was no rules or mandates from them. How's the comedy career? You famous stand-up yet? We really departed from a lot of the comic book things. We made up a new character. Arthur Fleck, y'all. We gave him this name and we chose it out of the blue, so to speak. And maybe to the chagrin of true comic book fans, we didn't see dropping Arthur Fleck into a vat of acid and turning him white. That wasn't the movie we're making. We just wanted to make something that felt grounded in a reality. What's so funny? Freak! It's a wonderful exploration to take probably the most famous two-dimensional villain who we've watched just wreak havoc in so many forms, whether it's the comic book, a television series or various films, to say, okay, what happens if we humanize this person and let's see what could be the possible causes. We talked a lot about who would he be and why is he like this and what is his thing and where does that laugh come from and why does he wear makeup or not or da-da-da. And we really just started reading a lot about narcissism and ego and things that we think that are kind of baked into our version of Joker. Joker's a narcissist, but he's an egoless narcissist in our mind. You know, the ego is Arthur. The ego is the thing that's trying to control this wild horse that is Joker. But Joker is pure id. So we just thought, well, what happens when you go through your life wearing a mask, which a lot of people do. You're wearing a mask and you're pretending to be a certain way and Arthur is very kind of controlled, but there are these glimpses of who he is underneath. And what happens when you take the mask off, which is kind of a weird flip because actually Joker wears a mask, but the idea or makeup, but the idea is what happens when you stop living that life and live as the shadow? And then you just make the movie and you forget all that. And you just make the film and you hope it makes sense on some level. We purposely set the movie in the past to kind of remove it from anything else anybody knows. And it's not really even set in the past. It's sort of set in an alternate universe in a way. Even though we don't really say when and where the movie takes place, in my mind, it was always New York City, 1981. What did that look like? And what did that feel like? From my memory of it, I mean, I was only 11 or 12 years old, but my memory of it was kind of what you see in the movie, a very kind of run down, broken down city on every level. And that was exciting to us as a place to put this character and a place to sort of explore. So that's the Gotham that we built. Mark Friedberg, our production designer, grew up on the Upper West Side his whole life. He remembers 1981 New York as a very specific time. 1981 is the year I left New York to go to college. And it was a rough place. It was dirty, dysfunctional. Every city agency was on strike at some point. The garbage was everywhere. And the city agencies that weren't on strike were corrupt. It was a time that it felt like the social contract was coming apart. So when we introduce the city, which is a character in the movie, the city feels on the edge, like a powder keg. New York is also the city of realms. And so I wanted there to be distinction between where Arthur goes to work, where Arthur goes to a comedy club, where Arthur goes to a hospital. What's in his neighborhood, what's out of his neighborhood. On some level, those are distinguished simply by the architecture of the city. On some level, they were distinguished by how we dealt with garbage. There was the garbage of the neighborhoods, the garbage of the municipal centers, the garbage of the wealthy neighborhoods. And each had actual design to it. So we did lay out a city. It's a city of bridges and islands. It relates to the Gotham of the comic books. And we tried to relate New York to it. Everything is a riff on something. And we were kind of un-riffing it back into New York and then re-riffing it back into our version of Gotham. And in fact, we actually made a map. It helps us understand Arthur's trip, why he gets on the bus, why he gets on the subway, where he lives relative to the places he travels to and where he goes. Where's Haas? Where's Wayne Hall? Where are these places? And you may see it actually at the subway stations. We actually have a transit version of that map. The Bronx and Brooklyn, and we shot a little bit in Newark, New Jersey, bringing Gotham to life. This film opens in what we call Gotham Square, which is clearly an analogy to Times Square, which was once the heartbeat of the city. And by the time of this story, it was the most nefarious neighborhood of the city. But we were challenged to try and find that city. We actually ended up having to go to Newark, which has been a blighted city, which is on the rebound. But there's a last little bit of it right in the heart of it that really tastes of the original Newark, with the scale, the architecture, and the grit. So that's where we chose to make our Gotham Square. There's a concerted effort to try and get as much on camera as possible. Todd and Mark have tried to fill out the world around the actors so that they can actually see it. And where the camera can't reach, that's where VFX takes over. It's hard. Newark's been shot so much. But even when we're in a place that has been shot, we're making it look unique to our Gotham. It's using New York City as Gotham, but you have to take away the things that are particularly iconic about New York City. And so we're swapping out some buildings and making things look dreary, weather-worn, tiring. It's creating this background that you always feel but never look at. The absolute best visual decision we made was where Arthur's neighborhood was. I set Arthur in Brownsville initially, which is the toughest of the tough of our neighborhoods. We put him in a quasi-project, not the straight-up projects that look the same everywhere, but a version of that, in a taller, bigger building where he would be more anonymous. We liked it, and we lived with it for a long time. But one thing bugged Todd about it, and it was the lack of topography, that it's flat. Todd's idea was to set Arthur in the South Bronx, not the Fort Apache South Bronx, but the hilly South Bronx, one where he's trudging up public stairways and through alleys and in non-grid-like streets. And it confuses his world in a good way. So it added a real character to where Arthur lives and to our Gotham. People don't think of hills when they think of New York. The world Todd created with Mark and everybody else was incredible. And the score, I have to say, is also indelible. The score is incredible. It almost feels like that's what you heard if you were walking down the streets of Gotham in 1981. You know, it's not apart from the film. It's part of it. I started writing the music just after reading the script. So I just started playing the cello a bit, which is my main instrument, and just played around with some melodies and some feelings. And I kind of sat with it for a few hours. And then I was actually kind of just like practicing something else. And then I kind of stumbled onto what became the main theme afterwards. It was just like a really strong feeling of almost like like something clicking into place, because it just connected with exactly the same feeling that I had when I read the script. And I was like, you know, so I just I caught my breath. And then I was just like, OK, I just started recording. And that's kind of where the main theme was born out of this feeling. Like, this is how he feels. You know, this is what this feels like. For my whole life, I didn't know if I even really existed. But I do. Every time I've ever written a movie, I always have to write it with an actor in mind. It really just helps fuel the writing. So I really specifically wrote for Joaquin Phoenix. I remember Todd sent me a drawing of Joker in the subway and it looked just like Joaquin Phoenix. He said, yeah, I just keep getting him. I can't get him out of my head. And this is years ago. What I like about Joaquin is his unpredictability. He's playing jazz while other people are doing math. He's just doing his own thing. And I feel like that's very much what we saw the character of Arthur slash Joker as. And I just thought, if we get him, we could really do something special. For me, when I work with a director, I just want somebody that has a singular vision and a really unique take on the material. And it was clear based on Todd's screenplay that he had a real sensitivity to the challenges that Arthur is going through. He felt things in a way that I hadn't expected. Joaquin certainly had a ton of questions. And I think he also had the same thing I have, which is this fear. This is a big thing to take on. This isn't going to be a small little anonymous film. The Joker's been interpreted and done so many times over the years. And I think there hasn't been a bad one yet. So there's a certain fear. I love that fear. I kind of turn it into adrenaline and you just go and make the movie. But I think a lot of it was just us talking through that stuff. And then I'm sure he had his own reservations about having never worked with me and all these other things. It just becomes a process of getting to know each other. And I think we spent a few months doing that before he said he would do it. Having spoken to many actors, I know nothing helps them more than wardrobe. Even walking into Arthur's apartment for the first time for Joaquin, I don't think has the same effect as putting on the clothing. Putting on that skin, so to speak, helps actors that final step in. When we first meet Arthur, he is very much a John Q. Public, so to speak. Not much style. It's very practical. There's a vague young man aspect to it. But there's also vaguely an old man look to it, too. Where, ultimately, the Joker outfit comes from is something very organic. The Joker look, which is so important to so many fans and people and so iconic in every version that the Joker's been out, you can imagine their, you know, wardrobes. And we wanted to do something different but similar. And, you know, it's just a lot of discussions. I love the fact that there was a suit written into the script. The suit that he wears on stage at the comedy club is actually the same suit that he is as Joker, but we kind of subtly changed the tone of the fabric and hope you don't really notice. But it's really always that same suit. When we had our final fitting for the suit, it was all put together with the right shirt, with the right waistcoat. And the fit of it was kind of really dead-on 70s, where it's a little longer line in the jacket. Joaquin was very excited about it. And he took on this different kind of slinky, sexy walk, which is just right for this guy at the end of the story. We talked a lot about how skinny should Arthur be and how far do we want to go. And I kept saying to him, when are you going to start losing weight? Like, at what point do you start this? Because it was already, like, June and he hadn't started. And we start shooting in September and he's, like, 180 pounds, which, he wasn't fat, but he was... We're talking about getting to 125 pounds. And he goes, I got it, I got it, I got it. I go, well, you know, we can hire a guy. I got this thing, this woman who's a nutritionist might want to... No, no, that's not how I do it. I go, how do you do it? He goes, I just stop eating and I starve myself. And he just ate an apple a day for the whole summer. When I laid eyes on him at a table read, he'd lost 50 pounds. He was a shell of himself. He was fully immersing himself into the role. We never rehearsed the character. We never talked really specifically about what he would do. All we really talked about was script and story and character. But we never talked about how are you going to do it. You know what I mean? I think his process is one of surprise for himself. We were working spontaneously, which was just the flavor of this movie and what made the most sense for it. It was something that you really couldn't figure everything out in advance. We had to find it in the moment. And so you need a director that thinks that way. There were all these changes sort of that kept happening as we were filming and as they were sort of discovering the story and seeing what they had and seeing, oh, the story can move in this direction or that direction. And before we would shoot on a day, me and Joaquin and Scott and Todd would meet up in Todd's trailer and sort of rewrite scenes together. And then we'd have it printed out. And that's what we'd be doing that night. And I've never really worked with somebody who is so open to shifting as the story needs it. Well, Todd, first of all, is viciously smart. And his willingness to just go outside of any boundary to tell the story that he wants to tell, it's very hard to put him in a box. I mean, the first thing he did was a documentary about Gigi Allen. And I think once you become notable as a comedic director, a lot of people definitely see you as just that. But I've always known that he's an auteur. There's so much that comes up on a comedy that is spur of the moment, whether it's improvisation or just, you know, it'd be really funny if we do this and you just sort of throw a wrench in the whole thing and you do it because you're servicing the joke. Well, working with Joaquin wasn't all that different and you needed to be facile. Todd would come up with these great lines spontaneously and I would usually doubt them and make him feel bad and say that he's wrong, it's a bad idea. And then I would try it. I'd go like, that's really, that was a really great line. I mean, he consistently did that. He's also really good at identifying kind of rhythmically things that weren't working in the scene and would come up with really great solutions to them in the moment. We had scripted a scene where Arthur runs into the bathroom and he has to get rid of this gun that he had been given that was now evidence. And so he pulls the grate off the bathroom wall and he hides his gun in there and then he kind of washes his face, the makeup off his face and all this stuff. And when we got in the bathroom that day, it was just me and Joaquin and we're standing there, we're kind of, well, should we put in this grate? And we just start talking about, does Arthur really care about evidence? And does Arthur really care about, does he even know enough? Like, what did he see this in a movie, like hide a gun? Like, why does he even, why is it even in his language to do that? And then we're like, yeah, let's not do that. Oh, okay, well, what should we do? That scene was the second or third week or something like that, it was very early on. And for me, it was really a defining moment, both for the character, but also for me and Todd's dynamic of working together. It was originally envisioned a different way and we talked about kind of the possibilities and we couldn't really land on anything. It was really hard to identify what it was that we were after. And Todd was great, he said, let's just go onto the set, just alone, just you and me, and let's talk it through. And it really seemed like it was a moment that had to be about the emergence of Joker. We were literally in there for an hour and we were at a standstill, we hadn't really figured it out. And I said, you know, it almost seems like it's a dance, but not big movement, not a happy dance, but some kind of movement, I don't know what it is. And I said, oh, you know, I got this great piece of music I wanna play you from the composer, I think it's great. And I've just been listening to it all night, she sent it to me yesterday. And so I played it for him and he loved it and he just started doing this dance to it. It's this beautiful, mournful cello piece. And he said, oh, maybe I would just start on your foot. And so then we just said, okay, we didn't talk about it more than that. We said, let's just set it up and shoot it. And I think it's a really great moment in the movie and it's a really much more effective way of illustrating the beginning of a transformation with grace that kind of comes out of nowhere. You kind of feel that he has it in him. You know, we wrote in the script, there's a certain elegance to him and a certain romance in him when he holds the door for the woman and puts his foot out with a little bit of flair. The way he dances in the beginning of the film as a clown, he has it in him. There's music in him, so to speak. But that's the first time we really see it come out. Part of finding those moments, I have to say that I worked with this choreographer named Michael Arnold for a couple of sequences and he'd introduced me to a lot of idea about movement and dance. In particular, one clip that he showed me, which was Roy Bolger, and it's a song called The Old Soft Shoe. And for some reason it encapsulated for me like Joker trying to kind of come out, trying to emerge. Joaquin's the most nimble actor I've ever worked with. He just doesn't get stuck in anything. It's kind of otherworldly. It's unlike any other performance I've ever seen. He's so in his character from the get-go and he's filled with wonderfully inspiring ideas. You get an actor like that, you know you're going to have a plethora of takes and points of view and ways to go and modulations. And then it's just about honing that, you know, musically in the edit. It was so much fun to work on the edit of his stuff. It's what you wish for as a director. We've been editing this movie for so long because there's 18 trillion versions of this movie just based on the way he would do things so differently every time. You would come over to him and give him one line of direction and it would literally change everything in a great way. And he was just never locked into one thing. It seemed like it was the only way to do it because you have a character that's so erratic and he's not really certain of what he's going to do. And so it felt most true and most exciting and dangerous when we didn't really know what was going to happen. Hey Arthur, I heard what happened. Sorry, mate. There's a scene we had in the dressing room where, you know, he's just been fired and he's meant to be leaving. And one time he decided to come back in and punch the clock, literally. I forgot to punch out. Smashed it off the wall and we're all just kind of like, wow. I think a lot of the movie works because there's tension. Really, you feel it with everything that Joaquin does in the movie. I think this was hard for him. He really kind of went into the character and it was fascinating to watch someone really embody the absorption of a new identity. Hey. There's many ways to look at the movie. He might not be Joker. This is just a version of a Joker origin. It's the version this guy is telling in this room at a mental institution. I don't know that he's the most reliable narrator in the world. You know what I'm saying? You take, you know, Todd and Scott and pieces of me and Cap and Hepburn and Frank and Furter and you put it all together and that's our Joker. And I don't think that any of us really knew that that was going to be the ingredients for it but that's just what happened.