Joker: Folie à Deux

Today on Art of the Cut, editor Jeff Groth, ACE, discusses editing Joker: Folie a Deux. For those of you who didn’t take French - that’s “Madness between two.”

Jeff’s been on the show before to talk about the last Joker movie, and also The Grey Man. Groth was nominated for an ACE Eddie for his work on the TV series Entourage. He was nominated for an Oscar, a BAFTA and an ACE Eddie for his work on Joker.

Jeff, thank you so much for being on Art of the Cut.

It is my pleasure. Thank you for having me.

The first question I have is about the animated opening. For those who have not seen the film, there is a section that plays as if it’s an animated short that would play in front of an old movie in the 40s or 50s.

Right. That’s the essence of it. It’s meant to evoke something that would play in front of a feature, but without trying to dirty it up and degrade it to the point where it’s something that looks like that it comes from the thirties or forties. It’s something that you possibly remember watching on your TV.

Did you edit that sequence yourself?

No. We did have input on cuts and things like that, but that was all done with Sylvain Chomet’s animation team.

Sound design of course, is really powerful in this film. Talk to me about what you did with sound design in your picture cut so that you felt like you were watching a movie - that you were getting the tone of it correct. Then how that sound design evolved as the sound team working on it.

We started our sound team very early in the process, even doing temp mixes. We essentially weren’t doing temp mixes. We were doing a long final, if you will. Early on Todd said, “This movie is gonna be made or broken on sound. It’s such a big job because you’re in a few locations, but those locations become so important.

The feeling and the depth of Arkham - like how big is this place? What’s happening in all these various places? There’s different wards.

Those different wards have different sounds because there are varying levels of darkness of what’s going on in those wards. There is courtroom and the courtroom is its own thing. It has to live out in a city.

Beyond that, all the other locations, the musical numbers and things like that all become their own sound design and in general with the music and the singing parts there are two options with musical numbers in a movie.

Either you wipe away all the background sounds and say, “It’s going to sound like what is on the album - a pristine thing - or you do what we did, which is to say the background is gonna invade everything. Like this is happening in a real space at a real time.

Like, if I were standing there, this is what I would hear in this number.

Did you have a discussion with the director to make the determination about which way to go?

We discussed that those are the options, but it was never considered that we would go the other way. The quality of singing and what the actors are attempting to do and what everybody’s really attempting to do is to make this thing feel real. It was not really discussed as an option.

In an early video interview with Arthur and the psychiatrist you used the video in its 4:3 aspect and quality as coverage. Was there anything specific that led you to choose when to cut to video?

The video is the one thing that’s straight on to him. It’s got a kind of microscope feel to it. It’s another way of looking at him. It’s where you can see his eyes and see what he’s doing. The framing of it is done such that it’s meant to catch his body movements as well.

Initially we actually did have two video cameras for that. We chose to only go with one. It was less confusing, honestly because we’re not saying this is a TV studio with multiple cameras.

The shot intentionally catches his body language as well as what is being said on his face. It seemed an odd choice to just arbitrarily go back to that to keep him stuck in that video for him. When you turn around, you see the psychiatrist, you see Maryanne - the lawyer - behind  behind as well.

It’s a creepy feeling that we were able to achieve with that camera. Every screen - we did this in the last movie, too - we are either shooting on a video camera or we’ve run things through a TV screen. When you see things on a TV screen, they were actually shot on a TV screen. We didn’t throw a filter on it. It’s legitimately shot on a tube TV.

Did they shoot the screens during dailies or is that a pickup thing or a second unit?

It’s a good question. The cameras in the courtroom are actually cameras. They’re capturing everything in those two cameras in the courtroom. What we then did to make it what we called “America’s TV” was the full screen TV shots that you see were then shot afterwards once we determined what we wanted to put onto the TV.

We then shot those moments on a TV in a dark room so you get the authentic kind of moire lines and you get the pixels and everything like that.

But you and the director chose specific moments and then went and shot just those specific moments? 

Correct. Because those cameras are running throughout all the dailies. Anytime we were in that courtroom that camera was running. Same thing with, with the interview with Patty in the prison. Those cameras are running.

And you got that video footage just as if it was dailies, correct?

These days there’s so many cameras that when you talk about footage counts at the end of the day it’s kind of meaningless. If it’s an action movie, you’ll have 32 cameras running and half of them are Go-Pros and they run for 12 hours.

So they come back with these astronomical footage counts when in reality there’s five seconds of usable footage. For the courtroom cameras, we would choose our moments and as I’m looking at the cinema cameras I see that these are great moments - now what is gonna be more impactful going into the TV?

When do I wanna remind the audience that the whole world is watching? That’s what we did in the last movie with the Murray Franklin sequence. At what point do we wanna remind everybody that the whole world’s watching?

Were those video cameras timecode synced to the cinema cameras and did you multicam it?

Yes. We had the ability to go to those cameras. We never did because the framing is that of the TV camera, so it would’ve been odd for us to choose that because that’s really the TV shot.

It was the same way with The Murray Franklin Show. We had those cameras available to us, but we never used them except for when they wanted to look like TV shots.

How do you watch a multicam? Do you have to watch every angle individually or do you mostly look at the closeup or something?

For something like this, if I’ve got those TV cameras, I don’t watch those first. I’m putting together the scene without the TV cameras. I view the TV cameras as something extra that I can always go back and look at them for specific moments.

If I have an A, B, C cam, I’ll watch  whatever the primary camera is. A lot of the time on this movie, our primary camera was the B cam, because Larry [Sher], our cinematographer operates the B cam himself, and that is really our primary camera.

He is extremely talented so it’s the one you wanna be watching throughout. So I’ll watch whatever camera he’s operating first and watch that for performance, then go back and consider all other angles after that.

I don’t often watch things in a quad situation where it’s all four cameras running at once because I just can’t really investigate all the details throughout. The first cut takes me a long time because I am looking at all the details.

There’s a montage for the song “That’s Life.” Can you describe what the challenges were, what the coverage was, and how you pieced that together?

Biggest challenge of that one was cutting it down. We had a lot of great stuff. Joaquin’s so imminently watchable that the first cut was twice as long. Obviously we love the song, so I put that together with all the best shots, but I knew it could never be this long.

Then it kind of evolved. Our music editor and score producer, Jason Ruder, took it and changed it and warped it and did all those things to it and brought the elements of [composer] Hildur [Guðnadóttir] into it so that it transitioned. It wasn’t just the same song from the first film. We made it into something different.

There are score elements in there?

It starts clean. It starts like the song starts and when the song starts, ostensibly as it is in the TV movie that they made about his life. So we’ve got that layer, then there’s another darkness that comes in on top of it that brings in our score.

How did that evolve with the music if you didn’t have the score elements to start off with when you were cutting that montage?

I just cut it with the song. It stays in time as it goes along. There’s more reverb to the voice. The original instruments strip away and it becomes a darker Hildur version of it.

When Harley and Arthur finally meet at the music therapy class and they have the conversation in the hallway where she’s smoking a cigarette, talk about what’s motivating your decision on who to be on, what shot size to be on, when to be on a two shot, those kind of things.

A lot of that for me is just what I wanna see. That’s kind of my philosophy in general: I’m just saying “what do I wanna see next?” I wouldn’t say that I’d put it solely on performance.

Certainly with someone like Joaquin, he doesn’t do it the same way every time and they’re all kind of valid, but you have to pick which is going to be best, so sometimes that’ll lock you into a couple of choices.

The way he was trending when we got to closeups is really the best here, so we’re gonna stick with the closeups for this. Then I’m also trying to honor what our cinematographer’s doing. There are some beautiful shots, so if performance all kind of trends equally, I’m gonna try and fit these shots in because they mean something.

It’s not just for the sake of a picture. He’s shooting something with intention to evoke a particular feeling and that feeling is something that we want to capture at some point in this scene. So in that hallway it’s a feeling of distance that these two are off by themselves.

Or maybe you get a little bit closer and you say, “Okay, we’re starting to suddenly feel more intimate.” And you don’t always have to do that with closeups. You kind of show that no one’s around them, but then you come back into the closeups.

As far as who to be on - they’re both doing good jobs, so it’s tough, but ultimately it’s Arthur’s story. She believes she knows who HE is at that point, but HE doesn’t know who SHE is and WE don’t know who she is, so a lot of what you need in that scene from her actually lands on his face because you wanna see how he’s reacting to her so that we know how to feel about how this meeting is going.

There are flashbacks during the trial testimony. Can you talk about the use of flashbacks? When you felt you wanted to use them? What was motivating those choices?

All the flashbacks from the first movie stemmed from the script. There’s a point at which the social worker from the first movie is giving testimony. She’s reading a journal entry from Arthur. Upon further inspection what you realize is that this journal entry is from the day when he killed Randall and Murray Franklin.

So he would’ve written it either prior to killing Randall or after killing Randall. What we had from the first movie at the time was a shot of him writing in his journal after having killed Randall, which does show up in there.

The impact of what he’s writing and when he’s writing it would be greatly heightened by knowing that he’s writing this journal while he’s covered in Randall’s blood. He’s sitting at his kitchen counter and writing in his journal.

The fact that her stops to write in the journal in that moment, it’s disturbing to say the least. And if you do catch kind of what has happened there, it’s an even more powerful image to think “Okay, she’s reading this and this is the point in time where this came from.

So that kind of led to the idea that even before we shot, we wanted to have a bigger palette from which to pull from without saying that we’re gonna go back and replay things. The idea behind the flashbacks was to just make a bigger impact with what’s being said and just reminding you of the emotions.

To say that the doctor in the court scene had access to Arthur’s records is one thing, but then to be reminded that Arthur has also seen these, it was a particularly painful time for him, so it heightens the emotion and tension in that courtroom to show: “Remember, he’s seen these awful things that happened to him.” He knows all about them and what does this bring up for him?

I seem to remember a shot of him in the courtroom in the middle of that testimony: him thinking about what she’s reading.

Yes, absolutely. There’s at least one shot of him taking in what’s being said about him. Everybody wants him to be Joker and in many ways that’s the tension: When does Joker come out?

For the flashbacks, did you restrict yourself to what was actually seen in the first film or did you go into dailies and find an interesting angle that hadn’t been used in the first movie?

We went into dailies. Some of it is in the first film. If I felt like I could have, we wouldn’t have used anything from the first film, but obviously we used the best shots in the first film. There’s one flashback of Joker with the gun and he’s in the subway and he’s chasing the last of the Wall Street Three, but we used a shot from across the subway platform.

It almost has a feeling of an observer, and at the time there were no observers. So now we’re looking at it from a more removed spot and it’s a beautiful shot. You see the subway clear and you see him run, but that’s more of our observer perspective as opposed to in the first movie when we’re close at that moment. We’re looking up at him and he’s holding the gun and he’s bearing down on the other guy.

So it’s very much not an observer, there’s nobody else in there, and it feels very isolated between these two people. Now we can step back and look at it from a greater distance.

Did you have all of your dailies from the first movie in the Avid or did you know that there are only gonna be a couple of flashback moments that you’d need?

We had the option. Everything’s archived, so we had the option to say, “This is something we wanna explore. Let’s pull up these dailies and look.” It would’ve been restrictive to have it all. It would’ve weighed it down because it would’ve been two full movies on storage.

One of the advantages of having me on this movie and on the last one is that I know the footage really, really well, so it was easy to just say, “Okay, let’s call up this scene” and it would only take an hour or so to restore it.

We had all the [Avid] Media Composer projects so it would just be opening bins and saying, “We had a cut that had this shot” - kind of remembering where things were five years ago.

There was at least one musical number that reminded me of The Sonny and Cher Show. Did you watch any Sonny and Cher? Did you watch any ’70s variety shows to prep you for cutting that sequence?

No. I didn’t really watch musicals. I didn’t do a whole lot of research for this one. I wanted it to feel like a memory. I’m evaluating it for myself, like, “What is my memory of this?” So when things feel right or wrong, it was just kind of my memories or that it feels right. Hopefully that translates.

I’m counting on that. My experience is similar enough to other people’s experience that evoking a memory is enough without being too detailed to all the specifics. So I’m going on a feeling instead of just saying, “Well, this is how they did it and let me use this blueprint.”

Did you eliminate any testimony in the courtroom?

Yes. We definitely tightened testimony, but there’s nobody that we cut out completely.

Zazie Beetz’s character testifies. It was a nice like moment. Her testimony wasn’t positive about Arthur but it was warmer and it gave a little lift out of the darkness.

I mean, Zazie’s amazing. She’s incredible in that scene. It’s a very conflicted scene. On the surface it’s just basic testimony about what happened, but there’s so much to it. The people that followed Joker put her through a lot, but she’s still sympathetic to him.

She knows what she’s saying when she talks about his mother and about how his mother was careless towards him and she doesn’t really want to say it out loud. You can see her begging with her eyes to not be forced to say those things.

There’s so much conflict going on, especially in a scene like that where it’s like she’s upset at herself, she’s upset at Arthur and at the same time she feels bad for Arthur because she knows what he’s been through.

She felt bad for him in the first movie so she doesn’t wanna do this to him, but ultimately it’s what the process is demanding of her. She’s talking about the effect on her from a TV movie and people attacking her. It’s an interesting examination of what this character went through.

Shoe leather, which I know is a horrible term for an editor, but there are reasons for it and there’s reasons why you don’t want it. The scene I’m thinking about is when Gary Puddles testifies. So you spend a lot of time walking him into the courtroom, getting him up into the witness box and having him swear in on a Bible and all that. Then I think it almost immediately cuts to the end of his testimony, right? Can you talk about the value of that shoe leather?

The value of seeing him walk in is that as he comes down the center aisle, a lot of the people in the courtroom are giggling to themselves and it’s reinforcing that Gary’s somebody that has been laughed at during his life.

Arthur’s the only one that’s ever been nice to him. Gary never wanted Arthur to do those things. He wanted Arthur to just be normal and be nice. He doesn’t want to testify against Arthur, but it’s something that he knows he has to do. His friend turned out to be a monster.

The tension-breaker is that when he passes Arthur - walking to the witness box - Arthur says, “Hi Gary! Go get ’em!” He realizes that this person was his only friend. As he said, “I said I wasn’t gonna hurt you and I didn’t.” Arthur’s actions and ultimately Joker’s actions had impacts far-reaching on everyone in his life.

Arthur mocks Gary’s name when he cross examines him.

That’s really Joker. I think that’s the essence of his case. He’s just trying to discredit Gary by saying he has a fake name. He was never really out to make his case that he was innocent. He was trying to prove that he is Joker.

That joker is him and that’s what people want from him. That’s certainly what Lee wants from him, but it’s really what everybody wants from him: is to be Joker. It seems accurate at the end that when he is back to Arthur, he acknowledges that nobody really wanted Arthur.

There’s a pre-lap when Harley arrives at the trial and Arthur is at the defense table and he’s just thinking. What do you think the value of a pre-lap is?

When we did it in here, it really illustrates the contrasts. They go together because they contrast. You can really heighten that by saying “I’m gonna show you just how much it contrasts by starting sound a little earlier.”

I think what a pre-lap can really do is that overlap makes the next thing hit a little harder when you didn’t expect it or if it’s a down moment that leads to an up moment, starting that up moment at the end of a down moment is a little more audacious.

So the contrast there is that Harley is arriving at the courtroom almost victorious - like she’s strutting in - then we cut to Joker and he’s contemplative.

Yeah. She has no idea what’s happened. The song that happens before - she couldn’t be more excited for this day. He’s presented his argument and the two of them believe that they’re going home - or some version of it.

She’s confident that she’s gonna get what she wants in that moment. What she wants is for him to be Joker and that’s where she is at that point. She really couldn’t be more victorious at that point. When she’s getting ready right before that moment and then coming to the courtroom, she’s extremely confident that this is going her way.

What she doesn’t know is how much it didn’t go his way the night before. She is as taken aback and blindsided as anyone else, by what he’s going to say.

The last time you and I talked - about the first Joker movie - we talked about temp score and the fact that Hildur had done some “temp” score herself for that movie. What happened on this movie? Did you use stuff from the previous movie? Did she write new stuff that you could use for temp?

She wrote a few things during production, but ultimately what I used a lot were pieces from the first movie. I’m sure I used some of the original pieces, wholesale as temp. There were pieces from the first movie that we didn’t use that I used as temp that ultimately were not the right attitude for that movie, but it became the right attitude for this.

So a lot of what it was is trying to get the Holder sound in there. It always meshes so well with the movie. She’ll get it and rework it, but let’s temp with the last one with as much of her music as possible, then go from there. Those original cues always fit in so well.

I definitely took things from the original score but not wanting to fully wallpaper it with that. I had the original bins from all our various edits and things that we tried. I’d say to Jason, “We had this variation that we didn’t use.

Can you take that, make it two minutes longer, I can cut with it and hand it back to you and then you can make a right?” That’s ultimately how we got the temp score. From there it was about actually composing it for real, and recording it for real.

Was it a consideration for you when thinking about putting in temp score about how much other music was already in the movie?

Yes. It was making sure that it didn’t feel like the record stopped on a song then we start up the score. We didn’t want it so delineated. It was trying to ease in and out of both of those things.

So those song moments do have elements of Holder in them many times and then you’ve got the score moments that are all Holder. Some of the score is echoing the songs a little bit.

A lot of times we’ll have some score in there that evokes the tension of the moment. Is there enough tension? Does the tension live Without the music? There wasn’t a blueprint for how to put it in and take it out.

It was kind of like, what feels right in the end and we’d just experiment. Sometimes we’d be watching it and  we’d watch three versions of a piece of score, then try it without anything. We’d watch it dry and say, “That’s the way it should play.”

And watching it dry probably doesn’t REALLY mean watching it dry, right? It means watching it with sound design.

The sound design really took off when we got into the final, but there was a lot of sound design. We would hand off reels. Todd and I worked through the movie one reel at a time. We worked through reel one, then I would hand off reel one to sound and they would start working on it just like they would for a final because it was that detailed and we would give notes on it and a couple weeks later or a month later and we would listen to it and give notes like: “There’s too many yells. It’s too active.”

When you delivered stuff to Hildur, you must have delivered it without any music, without any temp, but with the other pieces of music. She would’ve had to hear the songs…

We delivered it with temp. It gave her a blueprint of what we’re thinking. Obviously that is an ongoing conversation, once she gets it. I remember her even saying, “Well maybe this one doesn’t need score” or, “Maybe I could do something here.”

She’s got her own ideas about it and I believe that we deliver it in a way that she can turn off all that music so she can watch the movie without it, but then she can also listen and say like, “Okay, this is the feeling they’re trying to invoke.”

Did you ever find that there was maybe some place that you wanted temp and she chose a different spot for the temp? The spot you chose was different than the moment that she chose, eventually?

No, not on this one. I have had that in the past where there’s been a back and forth on the temp and where it starts and where it ends, but not with this one. It’s a little bit of a blur as to what was decided when and where because in the end it all becomes of a piece. Those songs were constantly evolving in terms of just instrumentation and everything.

Does she ever deliver stems to you?

Not to me. She does to Jason. 

Any particularly challenging scenes? Maybe something that might’ve looked easy to me or to the audience, but was difficult to execute?

When she comes to visit him in prison and they’re both stuck in cubicles.

They’re each on the other side of a glass, right?

When you look at that scene, what you’ve got is her reflecting in that glass and him reflecting in that glass and you have to cut the scene together when everybody has to be doing the right things on both sides. It’s kind of like using a closeup split screen.

That absolutely was difficult because there is also a song that happens in there and he’s reacting to that song emotionally and there’s a lot of work that has to be done in that keeping working on the mechanics level of having two closeups next to each other and keeping those things consistent as you go back and forth was certainly a challenge.

I remember seeing that scene and realizing that you could see her reflection over Arthur’s so you can’t…

…Can’t hide…

Right! You can’t hide! You can’t just say, I’m gonna be on this closeup and not worry about what the reaction is on the other side. You’re forced to match the reaction too.

Right. The other thing that it does is it means you can stay on the shot a little bit longer. You can live in some of those shots. There’s a few shots of him that that incorporate her dialogue, but you can get away with it because you’ve got these two people sitting essentially next to each other so you don’t have to just go back and forth for every bit of everything. Not that I would necessarily do that anyway, but you can live a little longer in some of those shots.

Were you able to use any split screens to be able to pull that off? I think her face was almost overlaid over his. It would be impossible to do.

I don’t think we used any split screens there. Where there are split screens that you would never see is when we’re in Arkham. A lot of times we used them to get background people in the ward with him doing the right thing.

Those are things I can temp in the AVID and we can play them and people don’t really see it because it’s kind of fuzzed in there and it’s not the main focus of the shot. So there’s a lot of split screen stuff that we ended up doing just for the details.

When we talked about the last movie, you mentioned that you used story cards on the wall. Did you do that on this film and what do you find the advantage of that is?

Yes, we did. Absolutely. That story card thing is always evolvin. What we have on the cards is typically the scene number, maybe a small description of what’s happening and then a picture. And it’s a big deal as to what the picture that epitomizes the scene.

Making those cards, you’re thinking about the movie and you’re thinking about what is the essence of each scene? We do change the pictures as the scene changes and reprint them and put them back up so that the card is more representative.

Also you see the whole thing start to build together on the wall. As I look at it in the back of my room as it starts to fill in over the course of dailies. I like to make sure that the picture is really right. and it sounds kind of silly because it’s not the work that’s being done on the Avid, but it is still actually work that’s being done on the movie. I don’t have the same process with every director.

Not every director wants to work like this, but Todd very much likes to. Even during dailies, as he walks in, it’s almost a relief to him to see a very simple visual representation as to how far we are and how much we’ve gotten done.

“Okay! We’re halfway through the movie! I can see it. It’s all right here. Even though it’s just note cards with pictures on ’em. But when you’ve put it together and you’re arranging that board, as reels develop, we put them into reels and then even just the colors - you look at it and say, “Okay, reel five looks kind of messy.”

And it ends up being that “Oh yeah, reel five needs us to go back and look at it until it shapes up on the board.

So it’s very much like a living thing that kind of sits there behind us that we refer to. There wasn’t so much shuffling. Certainly when you need to move scenes to determine the release of information throughout the movie, it’s an incredibly useful tool.

On this movie, the information is essentially released as it was in the script. We didn’t need to say, “It’s too early to know this” or “It’s too late to know this.” Their relationship and the movie very much progresses along a linear timeline, even though there are big cuts back and forth between locations and sets and musical numbers and things like that.

It’s just that everything starts in a place and it ends in a place and it, and we didn’t need to shuffle that so much.

When you pull scenes out, do you put them in a different place on the wall so that you can reconsider them?

They have their own little quadrant in the wall. They’re still there. We’re reminded of them. Todd will also come up with something that is not necessarily placed in the movie, but it’s a evocative of a feeling.

Or Todd and Joaquin will come up with something and we don’t know where it goes yet, but it’s something that Joaquin is feeling as the character without even dialogue: this piece might be worth having later to evoke a particular feeling.

So those scenes - if they aren’t placed yet in the movie - those scenes will live on the wall over there, too. We know they exist. They just live over to the side and they have their picture and then as they filter in, they end up in the reels.

I think that’s a great place to wrap up this interview. Jeff, thank you so much for your generosity and talking to us today. 

Yeah, it was a pleasure. Thank you very much for having me.