Behind the scenes - Joker: Folie à Deux

Joker: Folie à Deux has been pummelled in Hollywood for not meeting the $1bn box office take of the first movie whilst crashing its franchise future. Director and co-writer Todd Phillips, lauded for Joker, has produced a sequel that has barely recouped the $200m it cost Warner Bros. to make. But is it really just the numbers that are bad?

Unlike, say, Cats, Universal’s 2019 critically savaged musical that took just $80m on a budget of $300m, Joker II may have life as a cult movie. After all, the 1980 financial catastrophe that was Heaven’s Gate has been partly rehabilitated since it broke the back of United Artists. Warren Beatty’s notorious box office dud Ishtar from 1987 has also been reappraised.

Joker II has its fans including Quentin Tarantino. “I’m just nihilistic enough to kind of enjoy a movie that doesn’t quite work as a movie or that’s like a big, giant mess to some degree,” he told a podcast recently. “The Joker directed the movie. The entire concept, even [Phillips] spending the studio’s money — he’s spending it like the Joker would spend it, all right?” Tarantino said. “He’s saying fuck you to Hollywood. He’s saying fuck you to anybody who owns any stock at DC and Warner Brothers. Todd Phillips is the Joker.”

Even the BBC is calling it “a weirdly postmodern joke at Hollywood’s expense.” Noting that in the first film, Arthur Fleck attacks Gotham’s wealthiest people and railed against the smugness of the entertainment industry. In Folie à Deux “the over-spending and underperforming of the film itself have achieved the same goal,” said the critic, “reminiscent of Heath Ledger’s Joker setting fire to a ziggurat of hundred-dollar bills in The Dark Knight.”

The film’s editor Jeff Groth is generous enough to give his own appreciation of the film’s box office failure. “Obviously, I would have hoped to have a better reaction to the movie,” he told IBC365. “I certainly enjoyed working on it and I do still love the movie. I think it’s unfortunate that a commercial piece of art gets judged in many ways monetarily and not necessarily on its artistic merits. That can be unfortunate but it is the risks that you take.”

Descent into madness

If Joker was a character study of a descent into madness then the sequel is a romantic character study of two human beings with a shared madness.

“It’s a study of the effects of what happened in the first movie,” agrees the editor, whose work on Joker was nominated for an Oscar and a BAFTA, “though in many ways Arthur is already [mad]. Arthur has a dual personality which is on the one hand sensitive and on the other it’s devilish.”

Arthur (Joaquin Phoenix) is locked away in Arkham Asylum while on trial for murder when another inmate - Harleen ‘Lee’ Quinzel (Lady Gaga) - becomes obsessed with him to the point of mimicking his appearance and actions.

“I think it’s fairly clear that Lee is in love with Joker, which is ultimately the tragedy of the movie,” Groth says. “Arthur can never be what she wants him to be and, in many ways, he can never be what everybody wants. He actually says in his closing arguments to the court that he can’t be what people want him to be. He is accepting that he’s just Arthur.”

Phillips, DoP Lawrence Sher and production designer Mark Friedberg created sets that could be shot in 360 degrees using multiple cameras in many scenes. These scenes weren’t precisely blocked in advance in order to give the actors free rein to perform in the environment.

“There was a lot of flexibility on set in terms of letting the actors do what they felt was right for the scene,” Groth says. “Joaquin very much likes to work with how he’s feeling. Because Larry’s (Sher) visuals are so brilliant and he operates one of the cameras himself that is the one I use as my primary camera. I’ll watch what he has shot first for the performance and then go back to look for different angles and details. Because of that, the first cut tends to take me a long time.”

On Joker, the filmmakers employed multi-cameras for the scene in which Arthur appears on the Murray Franklin TV show. This included mocking up ARRI 65 bodies, Alexa LF and four Alexa Minis to look like TV studio cameras from the 1970s

The same technique is used to record Arthur in several scenes of Folie à Deux including in the courtroom. These scenes are both shot by the film’s camera operators and simultaneously recorded on the TV cameras shown in the scene, the footage from which Groth edited into full-screen TV shots for the show ‘America’s TV’.

“The scene was all shot live with the original performances,” he says. “Then once we had edited the selects we wanted to appear on a TV screen, we actually shot those pieces on a TV in a dark room and inserted them back into the film. It’s almost like adding a filter to give it a TV look but we actually ran it through a TV screen so that there was no question it would have this authentic feel of the curvature and scan lines and some moire on the image as if watching TV in the early 80s.”

Groth chose not to study any musical cinema as a guide to cutting the numbers sung by Pheonix and Gaga. His approach was to rely on the memory of variety shows from the late 1970s because that would evoke the feeling of hallucination and lucidity in Arthur’s schizophrenic mind.

“We’re setting the story in a certain time and so there’s a degree of memory that you have of things from that period which I wanted to lean into. We wanted to be authentic to the memory of that time as opposed to slavishly depicting something that actually happened. I’d rather have you feel like you remember it this way than to question whether something was 100% accurate.”

The other reason not to rely on specific references was to better convey the music as coming authentically from the central characters.

“When people break out into song in the middle of a performance the challenge is to make it feel like all the talking has been done and all there is left to do is to sing,” Groth says. “We were trying to be true to that idea by having our characters sing naturalistically. There’s no sudden choreography as they break into a big song and dance routine with all the background characters – the prison guards for instance - joining in. We’re treating the musical numbers almost like dialogue scenes. They are meant to stem from the emotion of the performances and what they were telling us about their characters at that moment.”

The film flashbacks to the first film using both footage that appeared in Joker as well as shots that did not. Groth had access to the original dailies which are archived at Warner Bros. Having edited the first film, he was already familiar with the material.

“The flashbacks are meant to be something that Arthur would see or would think about at that moment. If you look at the piece in the courtroom where the social worker from the first movie is reading testimony from his journal out loud, we see him in flashback writing in his journal. What that does is help you understand that he’s writing that journal entry on the same day that he killed Randall (his workmate). He’s sitting at his kitchen counter with blood on his hands and face and he’s writing in his journal. It kind of becomes that much more horrifying when you get to see where this piece of evidence is coming from. That was not a shot that we had used in the first movie.”

To help him structure the story in the edit, Groth made story cards with a scene number, a brief scene description and an image and pinned them to a board. Editor Walter Murch uses a similar technique to help capture the essence of a scene and help suggest different ways of putting a scene together.

“I do that on pretty much every movie,” Groth explains. “It’s a technique that perhaps goes back to the days of cutting on film when you’d hand reels up. I print one picture on each card and use it more as a tool so that multiple people can quickly see a simple representation of the movie.

“Even though you’ve got a timeline sitting on the Avid with all the technical nuts and bolts of how the movie is fitting together, that doesn’t give you an overall feeling of what the movie is. We’ll look at the board frequently to gauge where we are in the process. As the thrust of the scene changes, we’ll reprint the cards for a more accurate visual representation.”