At the Academy: JOKER
“We started to have this idea of doing an origin story for this character, and thinking about Gotham, a city that would make a guy like that, a city with a loss of empathy, how a guy like that would be created.”
That potent concept kicked off a new kind of comic book film, Joker, as explained by writer-director Todd Phillips at a post-screening appearance at the Academy with producer Emma Tillinger Koskoff and cinematographer Lawrence Sher. He also appeared in Los Angeles for a Q&A with Sher and editor Jeff Groth.
Numerous actors have embodied the villainous Joker on the big screen including Jack Nicholson, Jared Leto and, in a comic book movie first, an Oscar-winning Heath Ledger in The Dark Knight (2008). Bringing a new take on the character here is three-time Oscar nominee Joaquin Phoenix, who lost considerable weight for the role and even integrated his real dislocated shoulder into his performance. Phoenix “put everything into it,” says Phillips. “I think he’s one of our best actors of our generation, and to get him to do the movie was a big thing, I think because of how committed he would end up being. But really, it was three months of sitting in his house, and going through it page by page, and talking about it… as an essentially invisible person in this city. If you read two pages of the script and watch those two pages of that scene, it’s jaw-dropping how additive he is to every single thing and how much thought he put into all of it.” He also adds, “One of the first things I said to him when we started talking about the character, I said, ‘You know, Arthur has this grace in him that we don’t see at first. He has music in him.’ And it’s funny when you talk to actors… It was something I said with 42 other things, but it really stuck with him and that’s what informed a lot of the dancing. In the script, there was really just two moments of dancing. In the movie, there’s like five or six.”
Set at the turn of the 1980s, the film takes place in a Gotham inspired by gritty studies in Manhattan psychosis like Taxi Driver (1976). “The city speaks for itself,” observes Tillinger Koskoff. “New York is so multifaceted in its architecture and the vibe it lent. Todd knows New York so well and had very specific ideas of where he wanted Arthur’s neighborhood to be, and our Gotham’s Time’s Square to be.” The environment also allowed the creative process to run wild with what Phillips called “floaters,” bits of inspired acting like the film’s refrigerator “duet.” “Whenever we had time on the day, at the end of the day, I would just be like, these were things that weren’t in the script. And I would say to Joaquin, ‘We haven’t shot in the kitchen a lot. What can we do in here?’… We would call them these studies in insomnia and do these things in the middle of the night. And two of them are in the movie, three of them aren’t. One of them is just genius, but we can’t put it in the movie. It’s just too much. But the fridge thing is one of those.”
“We all love those ’70s and early ’80s movies, the characters pieces that they were,” Sher notes. “So they’ve infested our minds with all kinds of imagery. And so there was no way we weren’t going to reference some but interestingly enough, every time we specifically referenced them thinking this may become the template for what the movie should look like, we always dismissed it because it didn’t quite feel like this movie.” Phillips continues, “So then it became, ‘Let’s just make it a movie that feels like it came out in the summer of 1979 if they made comic book movies.’”
That process allowed Sher to explore visual extensions of the film’s theme of a mentally ill man descending rapidly in a society on the edge of collapse: “After he kills those guys in the subway, he runs… underneath the bridge in that tunnel, and his shadow proceeds him. And it’s like his shadow is now leading him to his next destination which is his true self.” He adds, “We tried to be as pure to the time of which it was made, no modern day lighting units because also they were being photographed. So it was all the old Mole-Richardson tungsten units and sky panels.”
Aiding the crew was the music score by Hildur Guðnadóttir, which was composed beforehand and used to powerful effect during shooting. “We had the score on set, and we were constantly playing the score in the camera operator’s ear on playback in my ear while scenes were going on,” Phillips explains. “Joaquin would hear the score constantly on set. So when he’s dancing in the bathroom, that music that’s playing was playing there in his ear or on set. For me, that was the first time where score really informed that act. And that’s what I mean about the score even being another character. He was acting with the score, and so it was pretty thrilling.”
As Groth puts it, the editing process was driven by adhering to the steady progression of Phoenix’s Arthur Fleck from defeated loner to agent of anarchy. “I think the most difficult thing really was modulating that,” he says. “Each individual scene was always kind of working but actually putting them in the right order and saying, ‘Okay, how do we tighten the screws on Arthur and at the same time loosen the leash on Joker over the course of the movie?’ was the biggest challenge.”
The volatile nature of the character and storyline have provoked a wide range of reactions among audiences, but Phillips had no interest in going through the traditional test screening process on this film. “I have had final cut on movies for a long time now,” he says, “but with my comedies we always would bring them into Northridge or Burbank and show them to 500 people and go, ‘We stay on that too long. We overdid it there.’ And I think the testing process is invaluable. On this movie, first of all, there’s no real laughter in it unless you’re a maniac, and it’s DC who doesn’t necessarily want to show their movies in Northridge to 400 people. Everything’s under wraps. What we did on this was we were editing at my house and we would just invite friends that were writers or filmmakers to come by. We’d show them a few reels, show them the movie, we’d get feedback, but we never really did a big screening.”
Ultimately, Phillips feels the film is designed to play differently to viewers based on their own life experiences: “I think there are 21-year-olds that watch this movie and think it’s just a really interesting new take on a Joker origin story. And then there are other people that resonate a little bit more with the themes whether it’s childhood trauma, lack of love, loss of empathy in society. Joker in all of those versions always has a little bit of chaos in him and a little bit of mayhem, which is the thing that attracted to me even starting the process about Joker… One thing Joaquin has in him is a little chaos. Just personally when you meet him, he seems like he’s got that in him. So it felt like a great match.”
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