Quentin Tarantino has come out in support of the critical and commercial flop Joker: Folie à Deux.
The writer-director sang the musical sequel’s praises during a recent appearance on Bret Easton Ellis’s podcast. The Todd Phillips-directed follow-up to his 2019 hit Joker scored a 32% rating on Rotten Tomatoes.
“I really, really liked it, really,” he said. “A lot. Like, tremendously, and I went to see it expecting to be impressed by the film-making 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. And I’m just nihilistic enough to kind of enjoy a movie that doesn’t quite work as a movie or 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.”
Tarantino added that Joaquin Phoenix gave “one of the best performances I’ve ever seen in my life” and that the film offered the version of Natural Born Killers that he “would have dreamed of seeing”. Tarantino’s original script for the Oliver Stone-directed satire was drastically rewritten back in the 1990s.
He also praised Phillips. “The Joker directed the movie,” he said. “The entire concept, even him spending the studio’s money – he’s spending it like the Joker would spend it, all right? … He’s saying fuck you to all of them. He’s saying fuck you to the movie audience. He’s saying fuck you to Hollywood.”
The Pulp Fiction auteur called it a “really funny” film and said that he “really liked the musical sequences”.
The $200m-budgeted film premiered at this year’s Venice film festival to negative reviews and went on to make less than $60m in the US and $201m to date. The 2019 original made $335m in the US and more than $1bn worldwide.
The film was also praised by Francis Ford Coppola, who is grappling with his own box office flop in Megalopolis. “Ever since the wonderful The Hangover, he’s always been one step ahead of the audience never doing what they expect. Congratulations to Joker: Folie à Deux,” he wrote on Instagram.
Paul Schrader, whose screenplay Taxi Driver served as inspiration for the first film, was less taken with it. “I saw about 10 or 15 minutes of it,” he said to Interview magazine. “I left, bought something, came back, saw another 10 minutes. That was enough.”
