“YOU HATE YOU HATE ME ” Joaquin Phoenix is pretty sure Empire hates him. We don’t. “It’s okay, man, it’s okay,” he says. “You hate me.” We’re 30 minutes into our interview about Joker, and there’s been little direct Joker talk. “I don’t know how to talk about this movie, man!” he says. He hates talking shop at the best of times, but the experience of making Joker has so profoundly affected him that he doesn’t want to ruin it with anything approaching explanation. Dressed in black here by the pool at Los Angeles’ A-list hideaway the Chateau Marmont, he enthuses forever about working with Joker’s writer-director Todd Phillips, but you want to know how he feels about his character? Good luck. “Am I the worst that you’ve ever had to deal with?” he asks. “You’re like, ‘Oh God, he doesn’t give you anything, and then when he does it’s just worthless?’” We didn’t say that. He laughs. “Do you understand, I’m not wanting to give you a hard time or anything… Come on, man! You came such a long way. It breaks my heart.”
He explains why sitting down to pick this apart is so tough. “My connection with Todd and what we were uncovering in this movie is something really special to me,” he says. “Lucky for you,” he continues sarcastically, “you’re the first” — he hasn’t done any prior press for the film — “and so I haven’t figured out yet how to let go of my personal feelings. Because it feels like talking about a romantic relationship with somebody. An intimate relationship. We were just together all the time.” Phillips, who we meet the next day, is similarly affected by what’s gone on. From day one, this has been very, very special.
They would seem to be winning. IT’S JUNE, AND in the Los Angeles editing suite where Phillips is overseeing Joker’s post-production, the film has been paused, landing on a close-up of Phoenix’s Arthur Fleck smoking a cigarette. Empire sits on a sofa facing many monitors, all displaying the image. The Joker — or at least the man who becomes him — surrounds us. He’s engulfed Phillips for three years. In the summer of 2016, Phillips was promoting the Miles Teller/Jonah Hill drama War Dogs, his take on the true story of two young arms dealers out of their depth. Talking about it for weeks prompted him to think about the films he loved growing up, and most, he realised — One Flew Over The Cuckoo’s Nest, Serpico, Taxi Driver — were character studies. Great ones today are few and far between, he thought. “And getting people out to see them on a large scale is really difficult because the movie business is so comic-book-oriented. And then I thought, ‘You could do a character study if you do it about a comic-book character.’ And I always liked Joker, because I like mayhem.”
This is clear if you’ve seen his films, and even more so here in Los Angeles where, on a corkboard behind the monitors, he has pinned various documents from his filmmaking career: photos from the Hangover films; Will Ferrell on the set of 2003’s Old School; a handwritten letter from shit-slinging punk rocker GG Allin, the subject of Hated, a notorious 1993 documentary Phillips made when he was still a student at New York University. In all of his films there are disruptors: Ferrell in Old School, Tom Green in Road Trip, Zach Galifianakis in Due Date. “Oh, there’s a thread,” he says. [The Hangover’s] “Mr Chow is the Joker. GG Allin is the Joker. I just love the energy that a disruptor brings. So I thought, ‘A Joker origin story would be cool; nobody’s done that.’ I read comic books as a kid, I knew enough about Frank Miller and the Dark Knight series, and The Killing Joke. I also knew that he didn’t really have an origin story, so I thought, ‘Oh Jesus, are we able to do that, is it legal?’”
Thoughts coalesced, and at the after-party for War Dogs’ Los Angeles premiere in August 2016, on the Sunset Tower Hotel’s pool terrace, overlooking Hollywood itself and thinking about the future of the movie business, Phillips pitched Warner Bros.’ executives on the spot. He suggested they begin a division called DC Black, separating itself from the current crop of DC films. “I said, ‘Let Joker be the first, then let’s get fucking great filmmakers to come in.” It was also a way to differentiate from Marvel. “Instead of trying to live in the shadow of that beast, let’s do something they can’t do,” he said. Budgets should be around $30 million, he recommended, films without all the CGI hoopla. “I said, ‘Let’s just strip that all away. It’ll be liberating.’”
THE EXECS TOLD Phillips to go write his Joker script, which he did with Scott Silver, writer of Curtis Hanson’s 8 Mile and David O Russell’s The Fighter. They had complete creative licence. “We didn’t follow anything from the comic-books, which people are gonna be mad about,” says Phillips. “We just wrote our own version of where a guy like Joker might come from. That’s what was interesting to me. We’re not even doing Joker, but the story of becoming Joker. It’s about this man.” The studio loved it, and while they didn’t commit to DC Black, they greenlit Joker. “I thought it was crazy-ambitious,” says Bradley Cooper, who’s producing the film. “Todd said to me, ‘I have this idea, I wanna tell the origin story of the Joker.’ I said, ‘Wow. Okay!’” The pair hit it off while making The Hangover in 2009, and in 2014 formed a production company, at which they would make films they wanted to see, each providing creative eyes and ears for the other. War Dogs was the first, then Cooper’s A Star Is Born, and now Joker. Elements from the comics are in there, “because it is The Joker”, says Phillips: the film is set in Gotham, 1981, where we’ll meet powerful businessman Thomas Wayne and his young son Bruce. It’s set then because Phillips didn’t want mobile phones and the internet in the film, but also because he “didn’t want it to take place in the world of Zack [Snyder] and [Christopher] Nolan or any of those guys,” he says. “We just want it to be its own thing.” And that thing is Arthur Fleck, an unbalanced individual who’s been “in the system for a long time”, says Phillips, in and out of institutions for a condition the film doesn’t specify. Fleck was written for Phoenix, with blind optimism; Phillips didn’t know him, and the actor has not dallied with genre material since working with M. Night Shyamalan on Signs (2002) and The Village (2004). Since 2005’s Walk The Line, he’s done consistently incredible work in much smaller character studies. He was in talks to star in Doctor Strange, but those talks fizzled — indeed, it’s hard to imagine Phoenix signing up for endless Marvel movies. Phillips, though, was determined. “I think he’s the greatest actor,” he says. “We had a photo of him above our computer while we were writing. We constantly thought, ‘God, imagine if Joaquin actually does this.’” By the pool in Los Angeles, Phoenix, behind his sunglasses, throws Empire some crumbs. “I did read comics growing up, I collected them when I was 13,” he says, mentioning Grant Morrison and Dave McKean’s Arkham Asylum graphic novel as one that particularly grabbed him. Coincidentally, a few years ago he’d had a similar idea to Phillips regarding superhero territory. “I called my agent and said, ‘Hey, wouldn’t it be cool to do a movie like that but low-budget, kind of a character study? But I didn’t get very far.” That might explain, though, why he was receptive when Phillips sent him the Joker script.
Phillips directs Robert De Niro, another heavyweight additon as talk show host Murray Franklin. Phillips was hopeful that Phoenix would react positively, as the director calls Joker “the most un-studio studio movie that’s been made in a really long time. But a huge problem for him is that it was called fuckin’ Joker. And it was a DC thing. Just getting it to him was a thing, and convincing him to read it was a thing.” But he liked the script. “I just get a feeling,” says Phoenix of why he took it on, why he takes anything on. “It’s that it has inspired something in me, and I wanna know more, I wanna get in it more.” He signed up, and at Phillips’ request lost quite a bit of weight — the director thought Arthur should look hungry, sickly. And for eight weeks before shooting, the pair hung out at Phoenix’s apartment, talking through the script, exploring tone. Finally, says Phoenix, after much time re-reading the script, listening to music, making notes, everything clicked: “At some point, it just becomes part of your life, you’re no longer studying. And that’s the best stuff. When you just let go, and come from more of an instinctive place.”
New York stood in for Phillips’ Gotham. “In the most reductive way it’s the New York of 1981 that I remember,” says the director, who grew up there. “It’s a broken-down city, and the people in it are broken down.” He was always going to shoot on the streets. “The energy you get from an actor is different on 179th Street and Jerome Avenue in the Bronx than if we did that green-screen, which, by the way, I don’t even know how to do shit like that,” he laughs. “There’s not one green-screen in this movie.” Phillips knew that through filming he’d want to devote his time to Phoenix. “I needed to be there with Joaquin,” he says, and he was able to do so thanks to powerhouse producer Emma Tillinger Koskoff, who has worked on every Martin Scorsese feature film since 2006’s The Departed. Phillips had sent the script to Scorsese, who loved it, and there was talk of him exec-producing it, but the director had his hands full with The Irishman. Koskoff, though, was able to tap up many crew members who work with Scorsese to join Joker, so that Phillips and Phoenix, she says, could “have that quiet space to work and be shielded from the craziness of the filmmaking day.” For the past decade or so, Phoenix has worked exclusively with directors who allow him to work instinctively. “You don’t hire Joaquin Phoenix and say, ‘Okay, stand on that line and say it just like this,’” says Phillips. “You show him the set, then you stand in the corner and see where he goes. It’s thrilling.” And after 15-hour days on set, the work continued. “We went home,” says Phoenix, “and would text each other for hours and then finally go, ‘We gotta just talk,’ and we’d call each other and talk for two hours about the day, and the scenes coming up. We were just immersed in it. It’s the best way to work.” Phillips is just as enthusiastic. “This was an experience I’ve never had. He questions things, breaks it apart, we put it back together. And we have to get up in four hours.” Did Phoenix just want to be clear about what they were doing? On the contrary, says Phillips. “There’s never gonna be clarity with Joaquin. He doesn’t want clarity; he wants it more jumbled than it is.”
After an hour of talking to us, Phoenix tells Empire that he wants to say one more thing about acting. What he’s really looking for, he says, is “humiliation”. That’s what he wants to feel. “There is a bravery that comes with exposing yourself in that way,” says Phillips, musing on this. “I think one of the great skills of being a director is making an actor feel comfortable enough to be vulnerable and fuck up. Brave is a cliché, and a big term, but Joaquin is the bravest.”
PLAYING OPPOSITE JOAQUIN Phoenix in a supporting role is Robert De Niro, as talk-show host Murray Franklin. It could only have been De Niro. For one, Phillips needed someone at least as good to go up against Phoenix, and the two of them both revere De Niro above all others. Also, though, The King Of Comedy’s Rupert Pupkin is a spiritual ancestor to Murray Franklin.
“Bob really loved the script,” says Phillips. “I met with him and said, ‘I’d be lying to you if I said we weren’t influenced by a lot of your movies.’ I talked with him about Taxi Driver, and about The King Of Comedy, which is one of my favourite movies of all time.” While Murray Franklin is not Rupert Pupkin, the inspiration is there, says Phillips, who told De Niro he thought it “would be really fun and fucked up” for fans if he was the talk-show host, as Jerry Lewis’ character was in Scorsese’s film.
Murray and Fleck are bound in twisted ways. Phoenix loved working with him. “It’s the details, these little gestures you may not even notice that are part of what makes his characters so amazing and vivid.” On set, he needed to put his adoration to one side. “I had to block it out,” he says. “You just wanna hold him down and say, ‘Tell me everything.’ But you don’t.” Phillips was less restrained. “I did,” he says. “I did it in Bob’s office when I first met him. I said, ‘I just gotta get this out of the way. Just for ten minutes let me speak to you, and then on set I’m gonna be a director, a grown man.’ I couldn’t not do it.” De Niro had bigger fish to fry. “The first day we shot with Bob was the morning he got the bomb sent to him,” says Phillips. On 25 October, 2018, an explosive device was sent to the building housing De Niro’s production office and his Tribeca Grill restaurant in Manhattan. It was intercepted by a bomb squad, who also removed similar packages sent to outspoken critics of President Trump. “We had FBI guys showing up to search the set,” says Phillips. “And I thought, ‘Oh God, what’s he gonna be like?’ And he comes in like it’s nothing, just ready to rock, knew his shit. He’s amazing.”
Joker is, though, very much the Joaquin Phoenix show. The shoot “was an intense ride, an intense 58 days”, says Koskoff, because of the demands of Arthur Fleck. “He’s a profoundly troubled man, and for Joaquin I’m sure it wasn’t easy, living in that space. What he delivers in this movie is breathtaking.” Phillips is just as effusive. “I can’t get enough of him,” he says, looking at Phoenix smoking on the monitors. “I’ve seen this movie 4,000 times and I can just stare at that face. I just wanna watch him forever.” Watching the beginning of the film with Phillips, we notice that its production title — these things exist to attempt some secrecy — was ‘Romeo’. Why? “Because I find him to be super-romantic, and because he has a certain elegance to him,” Phillips laughs, talking of Arthur. He hopes we feel for Arthur — initially, at least. “We’re treating a guy who’s ultimately a villain, or supervillain, in comic-book terms, like a real person you love. We hope you’re on his side, until you can’t be on his side any longer. When the film begins, we hope you feel empathy for this little flower growing on a cracked sidewalk. At what point are you gonna water it and give it light, or just ignore it? How long can you love that flower for?” Phoenix is less keen to discuss Arthur. Any such distillation of the character frustrates him. “I don’t wanna talk about things… in the most broad clichés, it sounds awful,” he says. “Fuck.” But then: “Part of it is about the emergence of this other thing that has been inside of you your whole life. That you have tried to suppress. It’s about trying to fit in, whether it’s material, or behaviour… and then the deliberation when you no longer look to others for validation.” There’s a correlation with himself. “I feel like in my forties it’s sort of happening,” he says. “It does take some time. But… my forties have been amazing. It’s just been the best.”
Phoenix’s integrity, his refusal to say anything that isn’t 100 per cent honest, carries through to his performances. You don’t get one without the other. And his work in Joker is transfixing, says Phillips. “He’s unsettling in the movie. The movie is unsettling, and I think that’s a great thing. The Joker movie should be unsettling.” It will, naturally, be rated R in America. “I don’t think you can even smoke cigarettes in PG-13 movies any more,” laughs Phillips. “This guy smokes more than Humphrey Bogart.” For all the film’s reality, it is rooted in its character’s legacy. The aim is to present “a very clear-cut interpretation of Joker’s origin story”, says Phillips. Still, he wants to clarify that this is not your regular genre flick, let alone a superhero extravaganza. “This is not an action movie,” he says, calling the film a slow-burn. “This is a character study about a guy on the brink.” And despite the heritage, the prior concern is honouring this take. Decades of other interpretations could not distract them. “It’s its own fictional story,” says Phoenix. “Of course there are such fans of the comics, so every once in a while that thought process will creep in. But you just have to say, ‘We’re not doing that, we’re doing this.’” For Cooper, the film perfectly straddles both worlds. “The movie’s utterly real and believable,” he says, “but as you’re watching it, you’re aware of the mythology of what you’re watching, and that’s a very hard thing to pull off. Todd was able to walk the line of both things throughout the entire film. At the very end you’re very pleased with where you end up.”
JUDGING FROM THE footage Phillips screens to Empire, the film delivers everything we’ve been discussing. It is intense, intimately so, and gorgeous — and odd. A scene involving Arthur dancing on his own, to Hildur Guðnadóttir’s disquieting, cello-heavy score, is particularly disconcerting. It was improvised by Phoenix on the day. Phillips gets lost in it. “I just love watching him,” he says, before snapping out of it. “I don’t know how the Fast & Furious crowd are gonna take that!” he laughs. “Interpretive dance.” It does feel beautiful. “Yeah, it’ll be interesting to see how people react to this film. It’s bonkers, I’ll tell you that much.” Phoenix is just as taken with the work they’ve done. “The process was one of the most gratifying I’ve ever had in my career,” he says. It surpasses the vague notion he had a few years ago to do something interesting with a comic-book character. “I could never have imagined anything this cool,” he admits. This film might just be a little miracle.
