Joker 2 Director Says Editing The Movie Was A “Nightmare”

With Joaquin Phoenix and Lady Gaga at the helm, Joker: Folie à Deux is one of the most anticipated movies of 2024, but piecing the film together in the editing room proved difficult due to the dynamic duo’s creative process.

Director Todd Phillips, Gaga, and Phoenix recently pulled back the curtain on the Joker sequel with Variety, revealing that the lead stars decided to sing live while filming the musical drama, instead of singing over a pre-recorded track.

“It was important to me that we never perform the songs as one typically does in a musical,” Phoenix said. “We didn’t want vibrato and perfect notes.”

Phillips noted that multiple takes of their live performances were later edited together, which he described as a “nightmare.” He added, “Particularly for Joaquin, so much of it is about feeling the moment as you do it. You can’t decide that in a sound studio three weeks before you show up to shoot it.”

Joker: Folie à Deux is a follow-up to 2019’s Joker and sees Phoenix reprise his Oscar-winning role of Arthur Fleck, who meets Harleen “Lee” Quinzel (Gaga) in a psych ward. In the musical thriller, the two leads cover songs like “For Once in My Life” and “That’s Entertainment.”

Gaga, who recently dropped a duet with Bruno Mars, also revealed to Variety that some of Joker and Harley’s musical numbers exist only in their minds, and explained why the characters break out into song “in the middle of a conversation.”

“We wanted to help tell the story of their shared madness in a way that felt real,” she said. “I think we all have an intimate and personal relationship with music in that there’s a score for our inner emotional lives ... That’s what we tried to capture for Arthur and Lee.”

Taking The Roles “Seriously”

Further discussing the making of Joker: Folie à Deux, which arrives in theaters on Oct. 4, director Phillips said both Gaga and Phoenix were fully committed to their roles, but Gaga remained in character as Harley Quinn more than her co-star.

“Does he take it seriously? Does she take it seriously? Hell yeah,” he told Variety. “He doesn’t stay in character 24 hours a day. With her, I’d say she does a lot more of that than he does. But as a director, I’m in favor of whatever it takes to get them to the place they need to be.”

Gaga she even preferred to be called “Lee” during production, as cinematographer Lawrence Sher told The Trenches Talk podcast in July 2023. After he initially struggled to connect with her, he said an assistant director told him about her name preference. When he used it, he saw an immediate impact.

“The next thing I said was something ‘Lee,’ and it was like everything changed,” he said. “It was like our whole connection changed.”