How Joaquin Phoenix created his ‘Joker’

VENICE, Italy – After being voted the Golden Lion, the top prize at the Venice Film Festival, “Joker” enters awards season with Joaquin Phoenix’s dominating, dazzling interpretation of Batman’s most celebrated villain.

Phoenix spent “eight months” collaborating with “Hangover” writer-director Todd Phillips on this stand-alone, original origin story.

“We spent months talking about the character, the script, the laugh, how he dresses and we would go pretty deep into it,” Phillips recalled.

“In the beginning, I’d go up to his house, and as we started making the movie it continued and it never stopped.”

Phoenix’s Arthur Fleck is mentally ill. He lives with his batty invalid mother (Frances Conroy) and dresses as a clown for his lowly street job.

The first step for Phoenix, 44, was “the weight loss” which looks frighteningly skeletal.

“The first thing is it affects your psychology and you go mad when you lose that much weight in that amount of time. I started there.

“What was so attractive about this character for me is he’s so undefined,” Phoenix continued. “You don’t really want to define him. There are times I was identifying motivations and I’d back away from that.

“In the course of shooting, every day we felt we were discovering new aspects of the character. Up until the very last day.”

“The more things become clear for Joaquin,” Phillips said, “the less he likes it.”

As for Arthur’s laugh, which will come to express how scary he is as he transforms into Joker, “Before we read the script, Todd came over and talked me through what he wanted,” Phoenix said.

“He described ‘the laughter that is something almost painful’ — it’s Joker trying to emerge.

“That was an interesting way of looking at this laughing, a new, fresh way of looking at it. Honestly, I didn’t think I could do it.

“I practiced alone and then I asked Todd to come over and audition my laugh. I felt I had to do it on the spot and it was uncomfortable and I didn’t want to fake it. I had to find it.”

“It was a process finding that laugh,” Phillips said. “There are three of them. One is an affliction laugh and one of the crowd and me and the laugh at the end which is authentic joy. All are with these modulations on it, which we talked about too.”

 

 

 

from Boston Herald https://ift.tt/2nNHkZO