Joaquin Phoenix is, while he informs me at one point, “as sensitive as any motherfucker is.” He rescued from euthanasia 13 years ago when I show up to his mission-style bungalow on a steep canyon road in the Hollywood Hills, he’s in the kitchen boiling a pot of sweet potatoes for his vegan dogs, Oskar and Soda, the latter a large white pit bull mix. Soda comes with a sensitivity to sunlight, this means she must certanly be held from the sunlight from nine to five. Phoenix purchased her a specifically made suit to attend the coastline. “She appears therefore fucking cool but she doesn’t want it,” he claims.

He lives with Mara, who as well as playing their ex-wife in her own had been Mary Magdalene to Phoenix’s Jesus Christ within the Garth Davis-directed Mary Magdalene. (“Obviously it is a component I became simply created to relax and play,” Phoenix says dryly.) He thought Mara despised him throughout the generating of Her but later on discovered she ended up being simply timid and also liked him too. “She’s the only woman we ever looked through to the web,” he claims. “We were simply buddies, e-mail buddies. I’d never done that. Never seemed up a woman online.”

Phoenix has withstood hypnotherapy to stop cigarette smoking, a practice he used as an adolescent, however it does not appear to be exercising.

Their fingernails are chewed to nubs in which he keeps two packages of US Spirits and several lighters near at hand. “I consume actually healthier,” he says. “I don’t actually like junk food. We don’t like processed foods. Appropriate? But we still can—like, I’ll fuck up a bag of potato chips. Like A subway that is fuckin’ sandwich shit.”

For Joker, he continued a exceptionally restrictive croatian online date diet—advised by the exact same medical practitioner who assisted him slim down for The Master—and lost 52 pounds. Following the film, he gained straight right right back 25, nevertheless the greasy image of their serious, wraithlike human body into the trailer for Joker arrived like a surprise final springtime, proof that Phoenix had yet again gone all in on a task. As Arthur Fleck, Phoenix leans into their real features, through the scar on their top lip ( perhaps not really a surgically fixed cleft, he states, however a scar that is nonsurgical was created with) to his leonine gaze, sad-sack grin, and swollen neck, which he ended up being additionally created with. Phillips told him he appeared to be “one of the wild birds through the gulf coast of florida that they’re rinsing the tar off.” “He’s got the absolute most interesting kind,” he says. “He’s therefore stunning.”

RIVER RUNS THROUGH IT Phoenix had been profoundly affected by their sibling, and also by their death, though he’s reluctant to attract a right line between that and his work.

Photograph by Ethan James Green; Styled by Tom Guinness.

Phillips, whom directed the comedies Old class together with Hangover show, pitched the notion of a Joker film to Warner Bros. as a form of anti-superhero movie, with virtually no CGI effects or cartoonish plots, but alternatively a realism that is dark of heroics. Phillips had found it increasingly hard, he claims, which will make comedies in the“woke” that is new, along with his make of irreverent bro humor has lost benefit.

“Go make an effort to be funny nowadays using this culture that is woke” he says. “There were articles written about why comedies don’t work anymore—I’ll inform you why, because all of the fucking funny dudes are like, ‘Fuck this shit, because I don’t wish to offend you.’ It’s difficult to argue with 30 million individuals on Twitter. You merely can’t do it, appropriate? So you simply get, ‘I’m out.’ I’m away, and also you understand what? They’re irreverent with all my comedies—I think that what comedies in general all have in common—is. Therefore I get, ‘How do I do one thing irreverent, but screw comedy? Oh i understand, let’s use the book that is comic world and transform it on its head using this.’ And thus that’s really where that came from.”

The effect is really a drama that doubles as being a review of Hollywood: an alienated white man whoever failure become funny drives him as a vengeful rage. The King of Comedy, and One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest with co-screenwriter Scott Silver, Phillips conceived an origin story for the Joker as a for-hire party clown and mentally ill loner in a late ’70s/early ’80s Gotham, drawing from the filmic palette of classics like Taxi Driver. He claims he conceived the type with Phoenix in mind and offered him the script in belated 2017. Just exactly What implemented had been four months of conversations at Phoenix’s canyon household. Phoenix queried Phillips endlessly it turns out, which also included asking his mother to examine the script before he joined the film—part of his process. In pitching the film to Phoenix, Phillips told him he had a need to think about the movie being a heist film.

“What are you currently referring to?” Phoenix asked, confused. “There’s hardly any action on it.”

Phillips cracked, “We’re gonna simply take $55 million from Warner Bros. and do long lasting hell we wish.”

For Phoenix, your decision was more individual.

“To me personally, there was clearly a period of time as soon as we think of all those great films through the ’70s, it wasn’t a genre,” claims Phoenix. “It ended up beingn’t like, this might be a drama. It absolutely was simply a movie. Like puppy Day Afternoon is, like, intense, heartbreaking, and fucking funny. And the ones will be the movies that i really like. And the ones will be the films that I pursue.”

To produce the type of Arthur Fleck, Phoenix did research on narcissism and criminology and learned the motions of Buster Keaton and star Ray Bolger, the scarecrow through the Wizard of Oz, which inspired the extremely creepy dance that so acutely expresses Fleck’s personal madness. The screenplay called for Fleck to shut himself in a bathroom after several murders, looking for a place to hide his gun during one scene. Phoenix and Phillips decided it didn’t feel right, and even though they talked about the scene, Phillips played Phoenix some newly composed music for the movie. Phoenix started dancing, a classy, tango-like motion, and Phillips asked the cameraman to start shooting by having a handheld camera, simply the three of those when you look at the space while a team of 250 waited outside. The scene became element of an eye-popping trailer, set to a Jimmy Durante tune, “Smile.”

The muse for the film, in a variety of ways, is regarded as its costars, Robert De Niro, whom plays a talk that is late-night host modeled in part on Johnny Carson. “He is my American that is favorite actor” Phoenix claims of De Niro. “i obtained the impression from him he did things in a scene, particular actions, specific gestures or movements, if the digital camera ended up being on him and registering it or perhaps not.”