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.”
Gaga’s version of Harley goes by Harleen “Lee” Quinzel in the movie, and she isn’t Arthur’s therapist in this film. Instead, she’s also a patient at Arkham State Hospital who finds herself drawn to the Joker. During the interview, Gaga shared her insight into Harley’s descent into love and madness.
“Harley Quinn is a character people know from the ether of pop culture,” said Gaga. “I had a different experience creating her, namely my experience with mania and chaos inside–for me, it creates a quietness. Sometimes women are labeled as these overly emotional creatures and when we are overwhelmed we are erratic or unhinged. But I wonder if when things become so broken from reality, when we get pushed too far in life, what if it makes you…quiet? … I would say that I worked from a sense-memory perspective: What does it feel like to walk through the world and be…braced, in an intense way. And what happens when you cover up all of the complexities beneath the surface?”
Joker: Folie à Deux will hit theaters on October 4.
