Joaquin Phoenix threw away the script for “Joker 2” and rewrote scenes “many times”

“Joker: Folie à Deux,” director Todd Phillips recently said diversity for a cover story that the goal in producing the highly anticipated sequel to 2019's “Joker” was “to make it seem like it was made by madmen. The inmates run the institution.” It seems the director got his wish in part from his leading man, Joaquin Phoenix, who threw out the script on a whim and gathered with Phillips and co-star Lady Gaga in his trailer to rewrite entire scenes from scratch.

“We would meet up at Joaquin's trailer a lot and sometimes we would just rip up the script and start over,” Gaga recently told Vanity Fair for her own cover story. “It was a really cool, liberating process.”

Phillips confirmed Gaga's story, telling the publication, “My statement about Joaquin is that he is the tunnel at the end of the light. You're like, 'Okay, this scene works, let's just shoot it.' And Joaquin goes, 'No, no, no, let's just talk about it for a minute,' and three hours later you're rewriting it on a napkin. The great thing about Lady Gaga is that she really holds her own, both off camera, when we're picking things apart in the trailer – which she probably learned to do all night before – and on camera. That was no small feat.”

“She surrounds herself with very powerful people,” Phillips later remarked about his leading lady. “I mean, Bradley Cooper, facing him from the beginning. Facing Adam Driver, [in ‘House of Gucci’]who is a beast, and Joaquin, who is a beast. She's right in the middle of it – she's really into it.”

Joker: Folie à Deux picks up the story and finds Phoenix's Arthur Fleck on trial for murder after shooting a late-night host live on television. While incarcerated at Arkham Asylum, he befriends Gaga's Lee, and the pair's budding romance influences the course of the trial.

It's not unusual for Phoenix to have to undergo a rewrite for his project. Ridley Scott revealed to Empire during the Napoleon press tour last year that casting Phoenix as the French emperor resulted in the script being completely rewritten to make the actor more comfortable in the role of the French emperor.

“Joaquin is as far from convention as you can get,” Scott said at the time. “Not intentionally, but by intuition. That's what drives him. If something bothers him, he lets you know. He has [‘Napoleon’] especially by constantly asking questions.”

“With Joaquin, we can rewrite the damn movie because he's uncomfortable. And that's kind of what happened with Napoleon,” the director continued. “We took the movie apart to help him focus on who Bonaparte was. I had to respect that, because what was said was incredibly constructive. It made everything bigger and better.”

“Joker: Folie à Deux” will be released in theaters on October 4th by Warner Bros.