It turns out that serial script saboteur Joaquin Phoenix was at it again during the film of “Joker: Folie a Deux.”
A Vanity Fair interview has both Lady Gaga and Todd Phillips confirming that Phoenix was unhappy with certain aspects of the ‘Folie a Deux’ script and that he had the team assemble in his trailer to rewrite boatloads of new material.
“We’d very often meet in Joaquin’s trailer and sometimes we would just tear the script up and start all over,” Gaga told Vanity Fair for her own cover story. “It was a really cool, liberating process.”
Phillips confirmed Gaga’s story: “My line about Joaquin is that he’s the tunnel at the end of the light. 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.”
As you might already know, this is not the first time that Phoenix has pulled such a stunt. One of the wilder Phoenix stories to have emerged recently involved his threatening to leave Ridley Scott’s “Napoleon” unless Paul Thomas Anderson was brought in to do rewrites.
He recently backed out of Todd Haynes’ 1930s gay romance, although we’re not entirely sure if it had to do with him wanting script rewrites. There’s hasn’t really been any firm confirmation as to why he decided to exit that project. During the ‘Folie a Deux’ Venice press conference, he declined to comment.
Phoenix also tried to back out of the first “Joker,” and Mike Mills’ “C’mon C’mon.” Those are the stories that we know of. But in these cases, Phoenix ended up settling down and going back to the productions.