Rewrites are part and parcel of the filmmaking process – and sometimes, they can be rushed through at the eleventh hour. In the case of Joker: Folie a Deux, major rewrites were put to the cast on napkins, under the wire. Starring Joaquin Phoenix and Lady Gaga and directed by Todd Philips, the crunch of getting the sequel completed in time is evidenced by these rewrites.
Gaga told Vogue (via a story from ComicBook) that on-set rewrites were regularly submitted, whereas Philips added that some of the changes, when desperate times would call for desperate measures, would be put forward on napkins.
“We’d very often meet in Joaquin’s trailer and sometimes we would just tear the script up and start all over,” Gaga said. “It was a really cool, liberating process.”
“My line about Joaquin is that he’s the tunnel at the end of the light,” Phillips said. “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.”
Joker: Folie a Deux further stars Brendan Gleeson, Catherine Keener, Zazie Beetz, Harry Lawtey, and Steve Coogan. A sequel to the first Joker film, released in 2019, Joker: Folie a Deux is scheduled to land in cinemas on October 4, 2024.
