Joker Director Breaks Down the Opening Scene

Hi, I'm Todd Phillips, director of Joker

and today we're gonna do a couple scene breakdown

from the opening of the movie.

[upbeat piano music]

[crowd chattering]

Ah!

Hey! Got it!

Go, go, go!

[Arthur] Hey!

The main job of a director, even all this stuff

we talk about, cameras and 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.

[News Anchor] It's day 18 of the garbage strike,

with 10,000 tons of garbage piling up everyday,

even the nicest sections of the city are looking like--

So I always obsess over the opening shots of movies.

My movies, the movies I watch, I think 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 make up.

So this was scene was shot pretty early in our schedule

and it's a practical location, meaning it's not a build,

we're in a really second floor storage facility

up in Harlem on the far west side on Manhattan.

It was 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 Highways,

these things we're seeing out the window there,

and we thought it was a great place for Ha Has,

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.

[Television Interviewee] My business when customers

can't get in here because of the garbage situation.

[Television Interviewee] And they're out there alone

to smell it, but I think to look at it it's terrible.

Everything in the movie is meant to be unsettling,

so anytime we kind of move 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 cards 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.

And one of the themes in the film is smile

and the idea of putting on 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.

It was really important to me and Lawrence Sher,

my cinematographer, that the movie have 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 intentional,

and we also loved these kind of

extreme close ups on Arthur.

[Television Interviewee] The idea of the National Guard

moving in and cleaning up is a good idea.

[Television Newscaster] In other news, the building

industry and landlords today--

That by the way, right here, that tear, it just happened

in one take.

Joaquin has a really interesting process.

He's not as, a lot of people always assume Joaquin

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'd spend half the time

just laughing off set and 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 Gudnadottir

who was our composer, I had her write music before

we shot the movie, which isn't done very often,

and 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.

[upbeat piano music]

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 things like that, you know we built this theater,

changed it 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 in post.

I always think this shot is particularly beautiful

and helps in just setting the stage of Arthur's world.

[upbeat piano music]

[crowd chattering]

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 learn 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 in Joker.

And this is one of the visual representations of him

having that music.

Joaquin probably practiced with this sign for about two

or three days.

It was more complicated than it looks.

Ah!

Hey! Grab it!

Grab it, go go go!

[Arthur] Hey!

And then the other complicated thing is running

in these giant clown shoes.

Like every movie, we spoke a lot about every element

of the movie, and Mark Bridges, who's a fantastic

consume 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 he 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 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 face paint

and dying his hair green.

Go!

We got the sign!

Keep running, let's go!

Stop them!

[Boy] Go!

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 basically had 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 moves.

So something like 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 in focus.

Everything else is kind of blurry,

and that's one of those things with those old films

that used to basically steal shots on live streets, right?

French Connection, you now the camera's over here

and they're just following a car in real time.

And we tried to give it that look

and it gives it a visceral feel.

[horns honk]

[Man] Hey!

[horns honk]

Joaquin has a great stunt double, named Steve Izzi,

we call him Izzi and Izzi did all of Joaquin's

kind of near misses and things like that.

[Boy] Got the sign!

You're not catching us!

Stop them!

[Boy] Come on, we got it!

I like the scope of this shot.

Again, this is all live done by Mark Friedberg,

except weirdly because I'm obsessive,

I didn't like the blank space, so this building's 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.

[Man] Get out of the way!

What are you doing?

[Arthur breathing heavily]

[Arthur] Stop them!

Hey!

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 Ben kept saying,

why is he running so much?

And I said, I feel like you never really know somebody

until you see them run. [chuckles]

And there's something about Arthur running in the opening

that really, the way Joaquin runs,

'cause 99% of this running is Arthur,

the only thing really that Izzi did there was that slip,

and it's funny 'cause when tried takes with Izzi running,

it just never worked,

because he just didn't have Arthur's run.

Joaquin is so specific in the way Arthur's run looked,

I thought it was really something.

So the slide, which is tough to do,

and impossible for Joaquin to have pulled off,

Izzi came in and did,

but everything else is really Joaquin.

[Arthur breathes heavily]

[crash]

[Boys Together] Oh!

One hit! Come on!

[Boy] Beat his ass up!

[Boy] Come on!

This guy is bleeding, he can't do nothin'.

Harder, harder!

[Boy] Beat him up!

This shot is very particular because Larry and I felt

early on, and we don't do this a lot in the movie,

but 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,

that you know, you would read and it's not a normal

necessarily movie angle, to me it feels very graphic novel.

That was an important shot for us to get.

[kids laughing]

[Arthur pants]

[mournful 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 can still fix this,

and then he rolls over [mournful music]

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.

[mournful music]

We shot 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 those, you see the grain in 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 Clark Kent walking into a phone booth,

and he comes out he's Superman,

this is something that happens over two hours,

and when you re-watch the film I think you really

get an appreciation for the work that Joaquin 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.

Does that make sense?