Lady Gaga Says She And Joaquin Phoenix “Tore Up” And Revised Joker 2’s Script
In just under a month, Joker: Folie à Deux will introduce movie fans to Lady Gaga’s incarnation of Harley Quinn opposite Joaquin Phoenix’s Arthur Fleck/Joker. While Gaga is a veteran musician and singer, this is only her third major film in a leading role. But Gaga got an unexpected education in collaborative filmmaking from Phoenix when they rewrote lines from the script during production.
“We’d very often meet in Joaquin’s trailer and sometimes we would just tear the script up and start all over,” Gaga told Vogue. “It was a really cool, liberating process.” Director and screenwriter Todd Phillips confirmed Gaga’s account and gave an example of how their process worked.
“My line about Joaquin is that he’s the tunnel at the end of the light,” said Phillips. “You think, ‘Okay, this scene works, let’s just go shoot it. And Joaquin’s like, ‘No, no, no, let’s just have a quick meeting about it,’ and it’s three hours later and you’re rewriting it on a napkin. What’s great about Lady Gaga is that she really holds her own both off camera when we’re in the trailer tearing things apart–which she probably spent the night before learning–but also on camera. It was not a small feat.”