Paul Schrader was not a fan of Joker: Folie à Deux, to say the least, opting to leave the theater to buy something instead of screening the film in its entirety.
During a new sit-down conversation with Jeremy O. Harris for Interview Magazine, the filmmaker and screenwriter mentioned offhandedly that he had gone to watch the musical follow-up to the 2019 Joker, which stars Joaquin Phoenix as failed comedian Arthur Fleck and Lady Gaga as Harley Quinn.
“I saw about 10 or 15 minutes of it,” the Oscar-nominated director said. “I left, bought something, came back, saw another 10 minutes. That was enough.”
The interview then drifted toward other topics before landing briefly on musicals, when Schrader revisited Joker 2, calling it a “really bad musical.” When questioned by Harris why he thought it was “so bad,” the Taxi Driver scribe laid out his grievances, no holds barred.
“I don’t like either of those people,” he said. “I don’t like them as actors. I don’t like them as characters. I don’t like the whole thing. I mean, those are people who, if they came to your house, you’d slip out the back door.”
In its second weekend at the box office following its Oct. 4 premiere, Joker 2 is still — as Deadline reported — a “sad clown,” flopping globally with just $165.3 million made thus far. The Todd Phillips-helmed DC pic, which cost Warner Bros. around $200 million to make, stands to lose around $150-200 million, likely failing to break even throughout the duration of its theatrical run.
Schrader is currently gearing up to film his forthcoming feature Non Compos Mentis in November, about “the stupid things men do for love.” In late August, the Oh, Canada director said he was drafting the feature The Basics of Philosophy, which is about an intellectual university philosophy professor, in the vein of his “Man in a Room” spiritual trilogy, First Reformed (2017), The Card Counter (2021) and Master Gardener (2022).
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