notice that are part of what makes his characters
so amazing and vivid.” On set, he needed to put
his adoration to one side. “I had to block it out,”
he says. “You just wanna hold him down and say,
‘Tell me everything.’ But you don’t.” Phillips was
less restrained. “I did,” he says. “I did it in Bob’s
office when I first met him. I said, ‘I just gotta get
this out of the way. Just for 10 minutes let me
speak to you, and then on set I’m gonna be a
director, a grown man.’ I couldn’t not do it.”
De Niro had bigger fish to fry. “The first day
we shot with Bob was the morning he got the
bomb sent to him,” says Phillips. On 25 October,
2018, an explosive device was sent to the building
housing De Niro’s production office and his
Tribeca Grill restaurant in Manhattan. It was
intercepted by a bomb squad, who also removed
similar packages sent to outspoken critics of
President Trump. “We had FBI guys showing up
to search the set,” says Phillips. “And I thought,
‘Oh God, what’s he gonna be like?’ And he comes
in like it’s nothing, just ready to rock, knew his
shit. He’s amazing.”
Jokeris, though, very much the Joaquin
Phoenix show. The shoot “was an intense ride,
an intense 58 days”, says Koskoff, because of the
demands of Arthur Fleck. “He’s a profoundly
troubled man, and for Joaquin I’m sure it wasn’t
easy, living in that space. What he delivers
in this movie is breathtaking.” Phillips is just
as effusive. “I can’t get enough of him,” he
says, looking at Phoenix smoking on the
monitors. “I’ve seen this movie 4,000 times
and I can just stare at that face. I just wanna
watch him forever.”
Watching the beginning of the film with
Phillips, we notice that its production title —
these things exist to attempt some secrecy —
was ‘Romeo’. Why? “Because I find him to be
super-romantic, and because he has a certain
elegance to him,” Phillips laughs, talking of
Arthur. He hopes we feel for Arthur — initially,
at least. “We’re treating a guy who’s ultimately
a villain, or supervillain, in comic-book terms,
like a real person you love. We hope you’re on his
side, until you can’t be on his side any longer.
When the film begins, we hope you feel empathy
for this little flower growing on a cracked
sidewalk. At what point are you gonna water it
and give it light, or just ignore it? How long can
you love that flower for?”
Phoenix is less keen to discuss Arthur.
Any such distillation of the character frustrates
him. “I don’t wanna talk about things... in the
most broad clichés, it sounds awful,” he says.
“Fuck.” But then: “Part of it is about the
emergence of this other thing that has been
inside of you your whole life. That you have
tried to suppress. It’s about trying to fit in,
whether it’s material, or behaviour... and then
the deliberation when you no longer look to
others for validation.” There’s a correlation with
himself. “I feel like in my forties it’s sort of
happening,” he says. “It does take some time.
But... my forties have been amazing. It’s just
been the best.”
Above:
Darkly
dapper.
Right:Zazie
Beetz’s
Sophie
Dumond,
a Lower
East Side
single mum,
steps out
with Fleck.