Lady Gaga and Joaquin Phoenix Sang All Their Songs Live on the Set of ‘Joker: Folie à Deux’
One of the most anticipated sequels and movies of this year, Joker: Folie à Deux, is coming to theaters on October 4, 2024, and as the release date is slowly approaching, more and more information about the movie is being released or leaked. We know that Todd Phillips is back as director and co-writer, and Joaquin Phoenix is reprising his role from the original movie. He will be joined by Lady Gaga as Harley Quinn, but the approach will be a bit different.
The movie has been described as being a “jukebox musical,” and while Phillips tried to explain that the movie was not actually a musical but actually a movie in which actors simply sing part of the dialogue(???), the fact that Gaga and Phoenix are going to sing in the movie has been intriguing fans for a while now.
In a recent interview with Variety, Phillips revealed that they did not pre-record anything and that both Phoenix and Gaga sang live on the set of the movie, which ultimately proved to be a nightmare for the editing department.
As stated, Phillips is going to have a tough job getting people to believe that the upcoming Joker sequel is not a musical, although he and his cast members are doing their best to convince us that it is in fact a film in which dialogue is sung, rather than a musical, which is also a film where people sing their lines… yeah, but here’s what Phoenix said about this in the Variety interview: “It was important to me that we never perform the songs as one typically does in a musical.”
As for Phillips, here are his comments on this:
“We didn’t want vibrato and perfect notes. (…) It’s just Arthur not having the words to say what he wants to say, so he sings them instead. (…) Particularly for Joaquin, so much of it is about feeling the moment as you do it. You can’t decide that in a sound studio three weeks before you show up to shoot it.”
Source: Variety
Lady Gaga also provided her own opinion on the music-making process which was quite unorthodox:
“We asked ourselves what would need to be true for two people to just break into song in the middle of a conversation?. Where does the music come from when no one can hear it but the characters? Neither Arthur nor Lee are professional singers and they shouldn’t sound like they are (unless perhaps a fantasy). We wanted to help tell the story of their shared madness in a way that felt real. I think we all have an intimate and personal relationship with music in that there’s a score for our inner emotional lives. A score that no one can usually hear but us. That’s what we tried to capture for Arthur and Lee. The music inside them.”
As you can see, this is a somewhat different approach than is traditionally used when making musicals, but we’re still not convinced. What is interesting, though, is how this is going to sound in the final version of the movie – as the editing department had a lot of work to do because they had to use these live recordings and combine them with the music, which is not easy as the actors did not sing to the music – which is why we’re somewhat intrigued, as it might turn out to be good and authentic.
As said, the movie is coming to theaters on October 4, 2024, and until then, be sure to keep following us for all the latest news and updates! Have something to add? Let us know in the comments below!
