Joker director Todd Phillips has opened up about his decision to cut one of Lady Gaga’s scenes from the film’s sequel Folie À Deux.
Before Joker: Folie À Deux had even hit cinemas, it was already proving controversial when it emerged that several moments featured in the film’s trailer, and others that Gaga was caught on camera shooting last year, did not make it into the finished movie.
Among the moments in the latter category was a sequence in which the Grammy winner, in character as Harley Quinn, ascends the stairs at Gotham City courthouse, briefly pausing to kiss a female bystander.
Speaking to Entertainment Weekly, the filmmaker claimed that this sequence was ditched as he wanted the scene to be “more of a music and vibe moment”, suggesting the kiss would have disrupted the flow.
“It had dialogue in it, and, all of a sudden, I wanted it to be more of a music and vibe moment,” he said.
“For that moment to have played, it needed dialogue behind it. Meaning, the woman said something, and then Gaga stopped and did this thing, and it just kind of got in the way of the moment.”
Todd also claimed that the moment was improvised by Gaga on the day, and was not something he’d written in the original Folie À Deux script.
Other moments cut from the final film include Arthur and Lee dancing together on the iconic steps from the first film, and Gaga performing one last reprise of That’s Entertainment before saying goodbye to Joaquin’s character forever.
Joker: Folie À Deux is in cinemas now.
The movie had its premiere at the Venice Film Festival last month, and while it was initially met with mixed reviews, this has skewed much more negatively since as more critics have been able to see the film.
It also fell well below expectations at the box office, making around half of what the first film did in its opening weekend.