Joker Director Breaks Down the Opening Scene | Vanity Fair

hi I'm Todd Phillips director of Joker and today we're going to do a couple scene breakdown from the opening of the movie the main job of a director even all this stuff we talked about cameras in depth of field and sets and wardrobe I think really what a director is is a purveyor of tone and I think the thing I'm most proud about this film is that unsettling tone that sort of slow ramp-up into insanity so I always obsess over the opening shots of movies my movies the movies I watch I think it's um it's a great way it's a great storytelling device the very opening of a film we have the benefit in this scene of the local news playing underneath it and we meet Arthur there alone at the mirror as he's putting on his makeup so this scene was shot pretty early in our schedule and it's a practical location meaning it's not a build we're in a real second floor of storage facility up in Harlem on the far west side of Manhattan there's a beautiful space with this very sparse view of the underside of the West Side Highway this sort of structure that holds up the West Side Highway these things were seeing out the window there and we thought it was a great place for haha' which represents the agency that kind of rents out clowns and strippers and magicians and it's where Arthur works and we find him at the beginning of the film everything in the movie is meant to be unsettling so anytime we kind of moved the camera intentionally like this it was always to give off this kind of unsettling vibe of this guy who's pretty much separated from everybody else even in this locker room space you hear the voices of four or five guys over here playing and talking about whatever and Arthur's here alone kind of not part of the group figuring out how to keep a smile on his face you know one of the themes in the film is smile and the the idea of putting on a happy face his mother told him that he was born to bring joy and laughter into the world and is something that Arthur wrestles with throughout the movie so in this scene we find him as he's literally pulling up his mouth and putting down his mouth sort of fighting the comedy tragedy that is his life I was really important to me and Lauren's share my cinematographer that the movie had a handmade feel we wanted it to feel we thought that would lend itself to the intimacy that we're trying to get with this character study of Arthur so you'll see in this scene you can feel there's an operator there and that's all really intentionally we also love these kind of extreme close-ups that by the way right there that tear that just happened and one-take walking is a really interesting process he it's not as a lot of people always assume walking would be a method actor and that people use that term loosely but where he's lost in the part the beautiful thing about Joaquin is we we were shooting this movie and we spent half the time just laughing off set having a good time but he's so amazing that he's able to then sit down action gets called and we do this slow push in and if I think I remember it right in this particular scene I was playing the score for him in the room because we had Hildur good and Natur who was our composer I had her write music before we shot the movie which isn't done very often and um she wrote it based on the screenplay and I wanted that because I wanted the music to really affect and infect the set in a way really kind of even the camera operators the set dressers the Wardrobe everybody to feel this music and if I remember correctly we were playing her score when we were shooting this and all of a sudden as Joaquin is struggling with Arthur's smile and his frown and figuring out again if his life is a comedy or a tragedy this little tear appears and we just had the scene and we moved on we called this set Gotham Square and this is sort of our version of Times Square the busy kind of market of Gotham in 1981 and this is interesting because we shot this in Newark New Jersey and here's Arthur down there this little clown in this big imposing world I would say pretty much everything from here back here is CG world building the only real stuff is what you see here in the foreground we put up you know things like that you know we built this theater changed into a porn theater of this time practically we did all that but yeah all this deep background stuff even those cars and the buildings that's all put in later and post I always think this shot is particularly beautiful and helps in just setting the stage of Arthur's world [Music] [Music] and this is really where Arthur is at home he's got a mask on he's pretending to be somebody else and he gets lost in his work it's also where we learned that Arthur has music in him something I conveyed to Joaquin was that Arthur is a guy that has music in his soul and that will continue when he transforms into Joker and this is one of the visual representations of him having that music walking probably practiced with this sign for about two or three days it was more complicated than it looks and then the other complicated thing is running in these giant clown shoes like every movie you know we spoke a lot about every element of the movie and Marc Bridges is a fantastic costume designer designed all the Wardrobe in the movie and we spoke about this particular outfit for Arthur a lot and also these shoes and how big can these shoes be for him to run through the streets of Gotham and how big can this sign be for him to actually pull off being able to do this like one of those sign guys you see on the street and his costume is inspired a little bit by Charlie Chaplin there's a grace to Arthur that if he would just let go and take off the mask he could he would find and that's kind of what happens when he becomes Joker ironically it's Arthur taking off the mask even though he's putting on white white face paint and a dyeing his hair green one of the complicated things about doing a period film is actually all these picture cars all these cars have to be of the time we've a said to take over this whole street in Newark so this is what I mean this is a big shot actually with a ton of real practical picture cars and it goes pretty deep and again I would say probably all that is CG back there it's world-building a lot of our visual references were movies that were late 70s early 80s films Larry and I really chose to shoot a ton of this really long lens so you have that real shallow depth of field that you see in some of those old school movies so some of this shot is a perfect example of how blurry everything is back here in the background and really the only focus is one two three four with the guys you really want and focus everything else is kind of blurry and that's one of those things that those old films they used to basically steal shots on live streets right French Connection you know their cameras over here and they're just following a car and in real time and we tried to give it that look and that gives it a visceral feel working is a great stunt double named Steve is he we call him Izzy and is he did Olive Joaquin's kind of near misses and things like that like the scope of this shot again this is all live done by Marc Freiburg except weirdly because I'm obsessive I didn't like the blank space so this buildings back here that's all put in because I wanted it to feel really oppressive and Gotham is always over Arthur and we just didn't love any kind of blank spaces in the skyline so to speak I remember when I was making a movie called Starsky and Hutch with Ben Stiller I wanted Ben running in this opening thing I forget what it was and that and then kept saying why is he running so much weight and I said I feel like you never really know somebody until you see them run I think there's something about Arthur running in the opening that really the way Joaquin runs because 99% of this running is Arthur the only thing really that is he did there was that slip and it's funny because when we tried takes with Izzi running it just never worked because he just didn't have Arthur's run while Kane is so specific in the way Arthur's run looked I thought it was really um something so the slide which is tough to do and impossible for what kinda pulled off is he came in and did but everything else is really walking this shot is very particular because Larry and I felt early on and we don't do this a lot in the movie we wanted the frame to feel out of a graphic novel and we don't do this framing a ton but this felt like a frame of any kind of graphic novel you know you would read and it's it's not a normal necessarily movie angle to me it feels very graphic novel that was an important shot for us to get [Music] so this is one of my favorite shots in the whole movie and it obviously depicts his loneliness and his pain but really the important part of this shot so first he's trying to reach for the sign like maybe I could still fix this many rolls over and he pushes that little button and the water comes out of the flower because what we're saying there with the water coming out of the flower flower is he's still Joker he's still there to make people laugh he's still seeing comedy in this moment of pain we shut these titles on film and then filmed them out and put them back onto the digital negative you see this little bleed you get on the edges of the letters and though you see the grain and the letters as the film moves you see the grain because again we wanted this movie to feel like it could have come out in the summer of 1979 so little details like that like going back and shooting it on an animation stand the way they shot film titles in the old days was really important to us and all the titles were filmed out that way Joaquin's performance is so nuanced so as he shifts from Arthur to Joker it's not like our Ken walking into a phone booth and it comes out a Superman this is something that happens over two hours and when Yuri watched the film I think you really get an appreciation for the work that Joaquim did to slowly turn that dial up the whole movie and I just tried to match it with our directing style so Joker is that sort of wild stallion running without a rider that makes sense

Channel: Vanity Fair

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Id: awoQuVq2yYc

Length: 12min 33sec (753 seconds)

Published: Mon Oct 07 2019