Quentin Tarantino is not among Joker 2 detractors: The film, aka Joker: Folie à Deux, is a critically reviled box-office bomb, sure. But Tarantino sees it as a spiritual successor to his Natural Born Killers script, and believes that Todd Phillips’ film feels as if it were directed by the Joker himself.
Tarantino, one of our most revered directors, is one of the few who have spoken up for Joker 2, though his Pulp Fiction co-writer Roger Avary also had kind words for Folie à Deux when Tarantino and Avary, co-hosts of the Video Archives Podcast, sat down with Bret Easton Ellis for the latest episode of his Bret Easton Ellis Podcast. (The full episode goes into more twists and turns than we can possibly enumerate here, so we recommend listening.)
Joker: Folie à Deux came up when Ellis asked Tarantino and Avary what films had lured them out to theaters recently. Tarantino said he had ventured out to see Oz Perkins’ Longlegs, and had hoped to see Kevin Costner’s Horizon but didn’t get the chance. He said he had watched the Joker sequel in an empty IMAX theater in Tel Aviv.
“I really, really liked it, really. A lot. Like, tremendously,” Tarantino told Ellis and Avary. “And I went to see it expecting to be impressed by the filmmaking. But I thought it was going to be an arms-length, intellectual exercise that ultimately I wouldn’t think worked like a movie, but that I would appreciate it for what it is.
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“And I’m just nihilistic enough to kind of enjoy a movie that doesn’t quite work as a movie,” Tarantino laughed. “That’s like a big, giant mess to some degree. And I didn’t find it an intellectual exercise. I really got caught up into it. I really liked the musical sequences. I got really caught up. I thought the more banal the songs were, the better they were.”
Tarantino on Ties Between Joker 2 and His Own Natural Born Killers
He noted that the first Joker, a massive hit that grossed more than a billion dollars for Warner Bros. in 2019, was largely an homage to Martin Scorsese’s Taxi Driver and King of Comedy. But he said he saw his own influence in Joker: Folie a Deux.
He likened Joaquin Phoenix’s Arthur Fleck and Lady Gaga’s Lee Quinzel to Mickey and Mallory, the serial-killer couple in Natural Born Killers.
“As much as the first one was indebted to Taxi Driver, this seems pretty f—ing indebted to Natural Born Killers, which I wrote,” Tarantino said. “That’s the Natural Born Killers I would have dreamed of seeing, as the guy who created Mickey and Mallory. I loved what they did with it. I loved the direction he took. I mean, the whole movie was the fever dream of Mickey Knox.”
Natural Born Killers, starring Woody Harrelson and Juliette Lewis as Mickey and Mallory, was made into a 1994 film directed by Oliver Stone. The Pulp Fiction director has said that he feels Stone’s version seemed to misunderstand his script.
Tarantino also likened the film to the 1935 film Peter Ibbetson, directed by Henry Hathaway and starring Gary Cooper and Ann Harding and based on the 1891 novel by George du Maurier.
“On top of all that, I thought it was really funny,” Tarantino said, adding that he saw it in an “almost empty IMAX theater” where he could “laugh without bothering everybody. I know I’m laughing at scenes that other people wouldn’t be laughing it.”
Tarantino Says Joaquin Phoenix Gives ‘One of the Best Performances I’ve Ever Seen’ in Joker 2
And he praised Phoenix for giving “one of the best performances I’ve ever seen in my life in this movie.”
He also cried at one point, he said. And he offered a theory about Phillips’ approach to directing the Joker sequel.
“Todd Phillips is the Joker. The Joker directed the movie,” Tarantino told Ellis and Avary. “The entire concept, even him spending the studio’s money — he’s spending it like the Joker would spend it, all right? And then his big surprise gift — haha! — the the jack in the box, when he offers you his hand for a handshake and you get a buzzer with 10,000 volts shooting you — is the comic book geeks. He’s saying f— you to all of them.
“He’s saying f— you to the movie audience. He’s saying f— you to Hollywood. He’s saying f— you to anybody who owns any stock at DC and Warner Brothers.
“This is under the under the Clive Barker rules of subversion at a massive level. Joker 2 applies under that category, under every shape and form. And Todd Phillips is the Joker. Un film de Joker, all right, is what it is. He is the Joker.”
Avary, meanwhile, said he was still interpreting the sequel, and was intrigued by how it “weaponized” its influences.
“I found it to be so insanely derivative, not just of Natural Born Killers, not just of Taxi Driver and King of Comedy — with respect to the first one — but like of One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest. And it’s derivative in ways that are weaponized. I’m not saying that it’s bad…. It’s actually deftly handled. [Phillips] knows what he’s doing, and he’s wielding them like weapons against us. It’s like taking our cultural past and reforming it together with this kind of thesis statement about who we are culturally in this moment.”
Avary also offered the interpretation that Phillips’ film is “an origin story for the Heath Ledger Joker,” the version of the Joker who appeared in Christopher Nolan’s 2008 The Dark Knight.
Ellis respectfully disagreed with the praise.
“I feel while listening to you guys that I am such a normie,” the American Psycho author said. “I”m with the overwhelming audience reaction to it, I found it excruciating, the most unpleasant movie I’ve seen in years.”
Ellis said the film’s good ideas “kept imploding one after the other by the way they were approach,” adding, “it was such a missed opportunity in so many ways.”
You can find the Bret Easton Ellis podcast here and the Video Archives Podcast here.
Main image: Joaquin Phoenix and Lady Gaga in Joker: Folie a Deux. Warner Bros.