[Full-length feature] Empire Magazine's Feature on Joker: Folie à Deux

[HelloHangoverz 17,029]

How do you follow up a film that broke all the rules? As those responsible for romantic drama Joker: Folie à Deux tell us, you not only break the rules again, you demolish them. Ready for a sing-song?

The FBI was on the case. The army was at the ready. Not for the first time, the Joker was causing chaos and anarchy was in the air, the city on high alert. This was real, though. Really real.

It was late September, 2019. "Army officials are alerting soldiers about potential mass shootings at theatres showing the film" an ABC news reporter gravely stated. "This coming after some have criticized the film for romanticizing Gotham's clown prince of crime, some fearing the film may become an inspiration for real-world criminals." Days later, CBS news show Inside Edition ran footage of counter-terrorism cops with automatic weapons outside a New York cinema on opening night, police-cars lined up around the block, audience members being searched before going in.

It was "nonsense," says Todd Phillips. He sounds angry even now. "I was in London doing press, a week before the movie came out. CNN was on, and its running ticker at the bottom of the screen said that the FBI and the Army were expecting violence at Joker screenings across America." The media had whipped up a storm, says the director, who felt it could turn into a self-fulfilling prophecy. "But thankfully, nothing [bad] happened. It was so absurd. It was so absurd to us. It was being misinterpreted by so many people, and you started hearing, "Oh, this is gonna have an effect on the movie, people are not gonna go see it."

Nobody expected Joker to do what it did. A film about the origins of one of the most iconic characters in comic book - and cinema - history, the $55 million drama was nevertheless worlds apart from what was going on in the Marvel and DX cinematic universes. A compassionate character study about Arthur Fleck, a struggling, confused, troubled man. abused by his mother and forsaken by social services, it was an underdog. A risk. So much so, says Phillips, that he'd had to fight to get it made at all. "There were a lot of doubters, and I'm not talking about people on the internet, I'm talking about at the studio - it was a different regime running Warners at the time, a different regime running DC. There were a million reasons why they kept saying, "Absolutely not.""

Nobody, then, expected it to win top prize at the Venice Film Festival. To make a billion at the box office. To become a global phenomenon that spawned a gazillion think-pieces. To be nominated for 11 Academy Awards, winning two (Joaquin Phoenix for Best Actor, and Hildur Guðnadóttir for Best Original Score). But that's what it did. "So that feeling of satisfaction, of proving people wrong, that personally felt great," says Phillips. So, what next? After all the scandal, all the success....what do you do? A song-and-dance spectacular, obviously. Obviously.

It's June 2024, and Empire is having breakfast with Phillips in a garden terrace at LA's famed Chateau Marmont. All sorts of jokers have held court between these walls. Five years ago, to discuss the first film, Empire met Phoenix by the pool here, where he spent quite some time slowly peeling an orange while chain smoking cigarettes and not really answering our questions. Jack Nicholson was once a regular here. Heath Ledger partied here. Jared Leto launched a skincare line here. It's a breezy and beautiful summer's morning, with no other patrons within audible distance, which is by design: we're here to discuss Joker: Folie à Deux away from prying ears. 24 hours earlier, a few miles north at Warner Bros. studios in Burbank, where much of the film was shot, Empire watched footage from it, which we're still processing now over eggs at the Chateau. A wild exploration of Arthur's split personality, set largely between Arkham State Hospital and Gotham County Courthouse, where he's on trial for the murders he committed in the first film, a violent crime drama this is not. And get ready for the singing. Lots of it. This is a sequel that truly brings the razzle-dazzle. It's a swerve.

"That was literally the reason to do it," says Phillips. "The only reason Joaquin would even do a sequel is if it felt frightening to him. One thing he really got off on on the first movie was this fear. every day, this nauseous fear of like, "What are we ****ing doing?" He did not want it to be easy. And he wanted to feel as scared on this one. He goes, "Well, if I'm gonna do it, I just want to feel that it could not work." Phoenix, calling Empire a few days later, confirms this.

"It's the only way that I can do any movie," he says. "If it doesn't feel like it's dangerous, if there's not a good chance that you're gonna fail spectacularly then....what's the point?" This is the first sequel Phoenix has ever made. Although Phillips has issues with that word. "I don't think of it as a sequel. Hangover 2 was a sequel," he says, referencing his own work. "So often a sequel is more of the same, just bigger." Of course [Folie à Deux] is a sequel, but it felt like we were making something entirely different. The first one subverted the expectations of what it was. So how do you do that again?" The answer, he says, was by honouring what they were exploring with Arthur right from the start.

This was always brewing, says Phillips. "Joaquin and I talked about another one the whole time while we were making the first movie, just because we love the character. We were obsessed with Arthur. We would almost joke about it: "Oh, we should take Arthur and we should do this." There were definitely jokes," says Phoenix. "I had a curiosity about going further with the character. It felt like you could" - he laughs - "you could put him into almost any situation, and I would be interested to see how he would navigate it. I mocked up all of these posters of films that have already been made, like Romsemary's Baby and Godfather, and I put Joker in them and I gave them to Todd. There was a running joke of, "What about Joker in space?" But yeah, I was fascinated by where he would end up."

Phillips and co-writer Scott Silver started thinking about a follow-up in earnest pretty soon after the 2020 Oscars, the pandemic having kicked in, the reaction to the first film still lingering. "It became a symbol of defiance," says Phillips. "I'd see pictures of people dressed as [Joker] from protests around the world, which was cool, but the movie became this kind of unwilling, mistaken symbol. In the same way, in Folie à Deux, Arthur has become this symbol to people. This unwilling, unwitting symbol now paying for the crimes of the fist film, but at the same time finding the only thing he ever wanted, which was love. That's always what he's been about, even though he's been pushed and pulled in all these directions. So we tried to just make the most pure version of that."

This was never going to be about Arthur settling into his newly minted status as an unwitting figurehead, instigating a crime spree. "We would never do that," explains Phillips. "because Arthur clearly is not a criminal mastermind. He was never that." He wouldn't know what to do with the responsibility. "That's right. Put him on a soapbox in the rec room of the prison to talk to everybody and he wouldn't know what to say." Following on from the first film, this is more about what Joker means to everybody else.

As we find Arthur, he's in Arkham's unforgiving maximum-security wing, mentally and physically broken down, pushed and shoved and smashed about by unforgiving guards. Rehabilitation doesn't seem to be on the cards. His lawyer, Maryanne Stewart (Catherine Keener), believe that as a result of his abusive childhood, Arthur has a split personality, with his shadow self having been responsible for his murders and wants him out of there (hoping that a jury will find him not guilty by reason of insanity) and into "an actual hospital."

Alongside Keener there are more new cast-members, including Brendan Gleeson as a particularly brutal Arkham guard, and Steve Coogan as television host Paddy Meyers, modelled by Phillips and Silver on the likes of Gerlado Rivera and Tom Snyder, who both interviewed Charles Manson in jail in the 1980s. Meyers, brash and provocative, bags an exclusive interview with Arthur as he's in Arkham, awaiting trial. "He's the coolest. he's so quick," says Phillips of Coogan, whom he's known for years. "Joaquin loved him because he loves great actors. You could just tell that Joaquin loved going toe-to-toe with him."

Also in the darkness of Arkham...Arthur finds a glint of light.

"Here I am," smiles Lady Gaga. We're at the start of an in-depth video interview and we've just told her that, with Empire having spoken to Phillips and Phoenix, it was time to hear her side of the story. And yes indeed, here she very much is. 

Arthur first glimpses Lee Quinzel - singing - as he's chaperoned through Arkham's minimum-security wing, where Lee resides. When they meet, she - tightly coiled, the product of a horrendous childhood - tells him how inspired she was by his on-air murder of Robert De Niro's bullying talk-show host Murray Franklin. 'Folie à Deux' is the term for a delusional mental illness shared by two people, although Phillips also liked that it being in French makes it sound, perhaps, romantic. Arthur falls for Lee at once.

Just as Arthur is an all too human, broken take on Joker, Lee is a very real-world version of Harley Quinn, who was first introduced in 1992's Batman: The Animated Series as a squeaky, grinning, clown-hued, psychotic gymnast, and portrayed as such by Margot Robbie in the DCEU with cartoonish glee. There's none of that here.

"While there are some things that people would find familiar in her, it's really Gaga's own interpretation," explains Phillips of how he and Silver tackled her. "She became the way how [Charles] Manson had girls that idolised him. The way that sometimes these [imprisoned murderers] have people that look up to them. There are things about Harley in the movie that were taken from the comic books, but we took it and moulded it to the way we wanted it to be."

Phillips met Gaga was he produced Bradley Cooper's A Star Is Born. "I really loved her, her whole vibe, so when Scott and I started writing this with the idea of music being a large part of the movie, we wanted somebody who brought music with her." It was a no-brainer casting decision, and the script's complexities drew her in. "It's not one kind of genre, this movie," she explains. "It's a psychological thriller, it's a drama, i's a tragedy. It would be hard for me not to say that it has some comedy in it as well, because I think it's very funny. And it uses music in this extremely nuanced and particular way. I could see the needle that they were trying to thread when I read the script."

She did her due diligence with Harley's previous history, but this film wasn't that. "I did my very best to, of course, be knowledgeable about all of the various interesting pieces that would arise as I was developing this character," she says. "But I really approached Lee from a place of, "What is this story? And what does she bring to Arthur's life, for better or for worse?" What she absolutely brings to Arthur's life is music. More of it, anyway. The songs in Folie à Deux, says Phillips, "came out of this idea that Joaquin and I always talked about in the first film, which was that Arthur has music in him." Lest we forget Arthur's sashaying on the steps, his singing in the hospital. "There's a certain level of grace that Arthur had. There's something old-school about him. As ****ed-up and as left-footed as he was with the world, and still is, he has grace. He has something beautiful in him. He was able to dance in the bathroom when nobody's looking, and there's a beauty to it. So we went with that, taking it a step further."

Hildur Guðnadóttir had dreamt about it. Literally. The night before the first film's premiere, some imagery entered her subconscious: Joker, with some dancers and umbrellas. But even she didn't expect this. 

"It's a really bold, surprising decision to lean so heavily on the music side of things, but also somehow a natural progression," says the composer about Folie à Deux. She returns on score duties, this time with added tasks, as she needed to infuse her doom-laden strings into the songs, too. "It was clear to me from the get-go that we needed to somehow marry the score and the songs. Because just like Arthur's character is a split personality, so these sound worlds are slightly, in their essence, split personalities." Phillips says he would send Guðnadóttir song arrangements and ask her to "Hildurise" them. "She would ground them so they still feel like part of the movie." Her score infects the songs. "Yes," he says. "The score is infecting the standards and affecting the performances."

They are standards. Folie à Deux features songs from mid-20th century Hollywood musicals, and others by the likes of Burt Bacharach and Hal David, Anthony Newley, Jacques Brel. They fit Gaga like a glove. "I think it's probably no secret that this music is a very big part of my life," she says - the cover-albums she made with the king of the swingers Ton Bennett, and her Vegas jazz shows, are testament to that. But singing as Lee brought a challenge.

"Some of my greatest work as an actress in this project was to approach music in a way that I would not on stage, but from the perspective of my character, and of what the song or the lyrics meant as a part of a scene," she explains. "People know me by my stage name, Lady Gaga, right? That's me as that performer, but that is not what this movie is: I'm playing a character. So I worked a lot on the way that I sang to come from Lee, and to not come from me as a performer. How do you take music and have it just be an extension of the dialogue, as opposed to breaking into song for no conceivable reason? It was unlike anything I've ever done before."

Phoenix dived just as deep. As he needed to sing as Arthur, "it was important to protect that with poor phrasing and occasional bum notes," he says. "Arthur grew up hearing his mother play those songs on the radio. He's not a singer, and he shouldn't sound like a professional singer. He should song like somebody that's taking a shower and just bursts into song."

In what Empire heard, there were no traces of bum notes from Gaga, but she quickly refutes that. "For me, there's plenty of bum notes, actually, from Lee," she laughs. "I'm a trained singer, right? So even my breathing was different when I sang as Lee. When I breathe to sing on stage, I have this very controlled way to make sure that I'm on pitch and it's sustained at the right rhythm and amount of time, but Lee would never know how to do any of that. So it's like removing the technicality out of the whole thing, removing my perceived art form from it all and completely being inside of who she is."

In fact, the way the characters sing in is film challenges the perception of it being a musical. There is no dancing in the streets. No routines. No group choreography. Only Arthur and Lee sing, and not at the drop of a hat, either. "It's a movie where music is the essential element," says Phillips. "It's not like we ever thought we were making a musical in the way of Chicago - which I love, by the way - but meaning like, it was meant to feel left-footed in places. It was meant to feel alive in a different way. And so that was the fun part of it: how do you make it feel of the moment and not overly planned? Can we allow for it to just happen?"

When the idea of songs in the film first came up, singing them live on set wasn't what Phoenix expected. "I'm not a singer, I don't even sing for fun at home," he says. "I thought, 'Well, no, I'm not going to be performing live, that's ****ing ridiculous.'" But he soon realized that it would need to be organic. "We didn't want anything to be refined," he says. There were some jitters. His debut performance didn't get an overly encouraging response from Gaga. "I do seem to remember her spitting up coffee  the first time I sang, so that felt good, that was exciting, and made me feel confident," he deadpans. "She did not, but I know what he means," laughs Phillips.

In fact, says Phoenix, "Gaga was always very encouraging of just, 'Go with what you feel, it's fine.' For somebody who's not a performer in that way, it can be....uncomfortable to do that, but also very exciting."

His vocals, though, came from the same place that Gaga's did, the speed and phrasing rooted in character. "Similar to the way that I act, in which takes will vary, takes of the songs would vary, sometimes quite drastically," he says. "That kept it alive and fresh and interesting and exciting for me, because I get bored very easily. I never knew for myself which version I was going to do. I think that was the spirit of this film."

For all its earthiness, its left-turn from DC movies at large, Folie à Deux nevertheless capitalizes on its source material. The fact that the Assistant District Attorney making the case against Arthur is Harvey Dent was, says Phillips, "a great way to introduce that we're still in Gotham". It's in the aesthetic, too. Scenes featuring Arthur in court, in full-Joker face-paint, boast an absurdity and perversity that could be straight from the pages of the comics. The film's various nods to Gotham lore, says Phillips, are out of "respect for the comics".

Still, a sequel to one of the most successful films in recent memory, set largely in a hospital and a courthouse, with more than a few song and dance numbers... this is not what one might have expected. So, just like before, Phillips feels like he's taking a risk. "Totally feels like that again. This is not a lay-up sequel," he says, referring to the basketball shot classified as the safest way to score. "And that makes it really exciting for us."

In their determination to have it feel dangerous, Phoenix says he and Phillips wanted to push each other. "Todd is very comfortable doing that, at any level. He's willing to take those risks, he's willing to try things. He will absolutely experiment." And they all pushed themselves. Gaga found the experience a more personal dive than she had expected. "I was so surprised at how much of myself, in a unique way, showed up in Lee," she says. "Private things that people don't know about me, that when I watch the film I go, 'Oh, that's interesting. That made it in there.' Private pieces of yourself that are tucked away, that maybe nobody knows about you, but can kind of reveal themselves in a really fragile situation."

Phillips wanted such frisson to be felt across the board. "I always said, early on, the film should feel as if it was made by crazy people. Like the inmates are running the asylum. It does feel like a big swing. You just go, 'Well, **** it. Why not? What are we all doing here, if not to do that?'"

Voilà

[Donatellah 2,065]

 

[robotvoiceinalice 1,500]

[Nite 5,324]

9 minutes ago, HelloHangoverz said:

Gaga found the experience a more personal dive than she had expected. "I was so surprised at how much of myself, in a unique way, showed up in Lee," she says. "Private things that people don't know about me, that when I watch the film I go, 'Oh, that's interesting. That made it in there.' Private pieces of yourself that are tucked away, that maybe nobody knows about you, but can kind of reveal themselves in a really fragile situation."

 

 

Now I'm curious what she means

[palma 7,780]

3 minutes ago, Nite said:

 

Now I'm curious what she means

She's confirming Private in Public as the lead from LG7 that's what I get 

[Gagaism 11,200]

4 minutes ago, Nite said:

 

Now I'm curious what she means

Probably she got so vulnerable in certain scenes that made it show more about Stefani’s self 

[Head Empty 24,869]

16 minutes ago, Nite said:

 

Now I'm curious what she means

Probably the scenes where she uses Haus Labs Le Monster Lip Crayon ® on the glass to paint Joker's smile.

[Bradley 58,663]

You can tell Todd really has been hanging out with Gaga:

"There were a lot of doubters, and I'm not talking about people on the internet, I'm talking about at the studio - it was a different regime running Warners at the time, a different regime running DC. There were a million reasons why they kept saying, "Absolutely not.""

[Guillaume Hamon 6,285]

2 hours ago, HelloHangoverz said:

"Here I am," smiles Lady Gaga. We're at the start of an in-depth video interview and we've just told her that, with Empire having spoken to Phillips and Phoenix, it was time to hear her side of the story. And yes indeed, here she very much is.

Arthur first glimpses Lee Quinzel - singing - as he's chaperoned through Arkham's minimum-security wing, where Lee resides. When they meet, she - tightly coiled, the product of a horrendous childhood - tells him how inspired she was by his on-air murder of Robert De Niro's bullying talk-show host Murray Franklin. 'Folie à Deux' is the term for a delusional mental illness shared by two people, although Phillips also liked that it being in French makes it sound, perhaps, romantic. Arthur falls for Lee at once.

 

Just as Arthur is an all too human, broken take on Joker, Lee is a very real-world version of Harley Quinn, who was first introduced in 1992's Batman: The Animated Series as a squeaky, grinning, clown-hued, psychotic gymnast, and portrayed as such by Margot Robbie in the DCEU with cartoonish glee. There's none of that here.

 

"While there are some things that people would find familiar in her, it's really Gaga's own interpretation," explains Phillips of how he and Silver tackled her. "She became the way how [Charles] Manson had girls that idolised him. The way that sometimes these [imprisoned murderers] have people that look up to them. There are things about Harley in the movie that were taken from the comic books, but we took it and moulded it to the way we wanted it to be."

 

Phillips met Gaga was he produced Bradley Cooper's A Star Is Born. "I really loved her, her whole vibe, so when Scott and I started writing this with the idea of music being a large part of the movie, we wanted somebody who brought music with her." It was a no-brainer casting decision, and the script's complexities drew her in. "It's not one kind of genre, this movie," she explains. "It's a psychological thriller, it's a drama, i's a tragedy. It would be hard for me not to say that it has some comedy in it as well, because I think it's very funny. And it uses music in this extremely nuanced and particular way. I could see the needle that they were trying to thread when I read the script."

 

She did her due diligence with Harley's previous history, but this film wasn't that. "I did my very best to, of course, be knowledgeable about all of the various interesting pieces that would arise as I was developing this character," she says. "But I really approached Lee from a place of, "What is this story? And what does she bring to Arthur's life, for better or for worse?" What she absolutely brings to Arthur's life is music. More of it, anyway.

They are standards. Folie à Deux features songs from mid-20th century Hollywood musicals, and others by the likes of Burt Bacharach and Hal David, Anthony Newley, Jacques Brel. They fit Gaga like a glove. "I think it's probably no secret that this music is a very big part of my life," she says - the cover-albums she made with the king of the swingers Ton Bennett, and her Vegas jazz shows, are testament to that. But singing as Lee brought a challenge.

 

"Some of my greatest work as an actress in this project was to approach music in a way that I would not on stage, but from the perspective of my character, and of what the song or the lyrics meant as a part of a scene," she explains. "People know me by my stage name, Lady Gaga, right? That's me as that performer, but that is not what this movie is: I'm playing a character. So I worked a lot on the way that I sang to come from Lee, and to not come from me as a performer. How do you take music and have it just be an extension of the dialogue, as opposed to breaking into song for no conceivable reason? It was unlike anything I've ever done before."

 

In what Empire heard, there were no traces of bum notes from Gaga, but she quickly refutes that. "For me, there's plenty of bum notes, actually, from Lee," she laughs. "I'm a trained singer, right? So even my breathing was different when I sang as Lee. When I breathe to sing on stage, I have this very controlled way to make sure that I'm on pitch and it's sustained at the right rhythm and amount of time, but Lee would never know how to do any of that. So it's like removing the technicality out of the whole thing, removing my perceived art form from it all and completely being inside of who she is.

 

His debut performance didn't get an overly encouraging response from Gaga. "I do seem to remember her spitting up coffee the first time I sang, so that felt good, that was exciting, and made me feel confident," he deadpans. "She did not, but I know what he means," laughs Phillips. In fact, says Phoenix, "Gaga was always very encouraging of just, 'Go with what you feel, it's fine.' For somebody who's not a performer in that way, it can be....uncomfortable to do that, but also very exciting." His vocals, though, came from the same place that Gaga's did, the speed and phrasing rooted in character.

Gaga found the experience a more personal dive than she had expected. "I was so surprised at how much of myself, in a unique way, showed up in Lee," she says. "Private things that people don't know about me, that when I watch the film I go, 'Oh, that's interesting. That made it in there.' Private pieces of yourself that are tucked away, that maybe nobody knows about you, but can kind of reveal themselves in a really fragile situation."

That's "only" the parts about Gaga.

Edited August 13, 2024 by Guillaume Hamon

[Raivo 177]

I'm excited. All the promo, the interviews, the movie itself. Loved the 1st one ❤️ 

[jackweller 425]

I’m glad this promo is not all Gaga and she actually seems quite reserved in talking about the role and the preparation for it. Being such a huge personality that she is, it’s harmed the reception of her and her roles in the past, particularly HoG. It’s good to see that Joaquin is still the star of the film, while Gaga is there to support him and does not overshadow the whole project.  I just hope they keep it that way, and save Gaga-ness for LG7 promo 

[Red 97,750]

Hold on I’ll ask Chat GPT to summarize this

[Economy 48,966]

7 hours ago, robotvoiceinalice said:

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