Do you ever hear someone describe a friend or co-worker's behavior, and it's meant to be charming—but mostly just sounds like a massive pain in the ass? After all, this friend—let's call him "Joaquin Phoenix," to pick a name at random—has just done something slightly whimsical, like tear up the script pages you were planning on shooting with him on your very expensive new comic book blockbuster musical, because he's decided you should have a multi-hour meeting this afternoon about what you should film instead. Maybe your other friend, "Lady Gaga" is there, too, even though she has been working hard to learn her lines, and you (let's call you Joker: Folie à Deux director Todd Phillips, just for the sake of argument), have a lot riding on this because sure, the last one made a billion dollars, but this is Hollywood, and you're only ever one bad movie from getting sent back to Hangover town.
Hypothetically.
All of this brought to you by a piece in Variety today, describing what a wacky, not-at-all nightmarish situation it was to work with Phoenix on the new Joker movie, where every day was an opportunity to have the script get tossed out because he had some thoughts. "“My line about Joaquin is that he’s the tunnel at the end of the light," Phillips says, with the assumed jovial tone of a man who has a very long press tour looming ahead of him. Responding to a story Gaga told about Phoenix "very often" holding meetings in his trailer where "We would just tear the script up and start all over," Phillips added, "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." Which we're sure was a lot of fun for the army of people assembled to film the movie's big musical numbers or other setpieces.
Again, everyone directly involved in this process describes it as freeform and fun, with Gaga calling it, "a really cool, liberating process," while Phillips just carefully praises Gaga herself for being able to roll with it. As Variety notes, it's reminiscent of comments Ridley Scott made while working with the actor on Napoleon, where he very diplomatically said "If something bothers him, he’ll let you know. He made [Napoleon] special by constantly questioning.” And maybe we're reading too much into things, and no one was profoundly irritated by these tendencies (or just accepted them as the price of a good performance)—although it's hard not to read this stuff and think of Phoenix recently walking away from Todd Haynes' newest film over "creative differences," leaving the entire project, and the many people attached to work on it, left in the lurch.
