Joker has quickly become one of the most successful comic book movies of all time, grossing a historic $737.5 million. And while the film has been lauded as a masterpiece, its star, Joaquin Phoenix, is convinced one of the movie’s best moments didn’t even make it in the final cut.
In an interview with Collider, Phoenix and director Todd Phillips discussed the making of Joker. The two revealed the film’s first cut was over two and a half hours, which means Phillips had the task of cutting about half an hour of footage. “There’s plenty of deleted scenes, yeah, but they’re not going to be on the DVD. I don’t do deleted scenes,” Phillips explained. “The movie that exists is exactly the movie we want it to be— I feel like all that adding deleted scenes do is confuse it.”
Unfortunately, for Phoenix this means what he deems “one of the best scenes” will never see the light of day. The scene in question sees him and Randall (Glenn Fleshler) in the stairwell leading up to the Ha-Ha’s offices.
Phoenix eventually understood the director’s decision, saying “That’s just what’s so cool about movies, right? You can have a great scene, it’s something that makes sense, but the movie is the collection of all of these scenes and they have to work together to tell the story, and it actually made that whole sequence so smooth.”
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