The 92nd Academy Awards nominations were revealed this week, and the movie with the most nominations wasn't Quentin Tarantino's nostalgic Once Upon A Time In Hollywood, or Lulu Wang's superbly warm and empathetic The Farewell, or the epic WWI film 1917, or Greta Gerwig's gorgeous adaptation of Little Women, or Martin Scorsese's mob movie elegy The Irishman. Instead, it was Todd Phillips's polarizing Joker, which cleaned up with eleven nominations, including Best Picture, Best Director, Best Actor (Joaquin Phoenix), Best Adapted Screenplay and more. And it won't be too surprising when it wins at least some of those awards.
It's become an undeniable success story: an R-rated film that has grossed over $1 billion worldwide. Since it first premiered at the Venice Film Festival last September, Joker has also been a lightning rod for controversy, complaints and exhausting conversations. Is it a gritty and empathetic look at alienation through a comic book lens? Is it a third rate Martin Scorsese ripoff with a persecution complex? Is Phoenix giving one of the most graceful, balletic performances of his career? Or is his work in service of a shallow film about violence and rage that is unpleasant to watch?
The film is undeniably provocative, and arguably nihilistic, in telling the story of Arthur Fleck, the aspiring stand-up comedian with mental health issues who transforms into Batman's archenemy The Joker over the course of the film. While Bruce Wayne appears in the film as a young child, for the most part, Joker eschews the usual comic book world-building in favor of a grittier, more realistic look at life in Gotham City.
To create Gotham, the movie was largely filmed around NYC and nearby areas, in upper Manhattan, the Bronx, DUMBO, Jersey City, Newark and elsewhere. Production designer Mark Friedberg, who grew up in the city and now lives in Brooklyn, worked closely with Phillips to capture the "extreme decay and the visual dissonance" of the city in the late '70s/early '80s: "When I first sat with Todd, I pitched an unforgiving view of this version of Gotham. Gritty. Hard. The version of NYC that Travis Bickle and Rupert Pupkin prowled. Harsh but real. I didn’t think we should stylize the world, particularly. It should look like we were a crew that tumbled out of a van and just started shooting."
Reflecting on the production and the explosion of interest in the so-called "Joker stairs" in the Bronx, Phillips told IndieWire, “Mark created a Gotham where everything feels kind of oppressive. We wanted everything to be always above Arthur, always sort of the city bearing down on him. That was something, so the steps [were] obviously a big location that Mark and I finally found… We kept just thinking about these steps and sort of the topography in the Bronx and everything just being ultimately a hill that Arthur has to climb.”
Friedberg is no stranger to collaborating with major filmmakers. His IMDB page is filled with projects in which he worked with some of the best directors in the business, including: Ang Lee (The Ice Storm, Billy Lynn's Long Halftime Walk), Jim Jarmusch (Broken Windows, Patterson, Coffee & Cigarettes), Wes Anderson (The Life Aquatic, The Darjeeling Limited), Charlie Kaufman (Synecdoche, New York), Darren Aronofsky (Noah), Barry Jenkins (If Beale Street Could Talk, the upcoming series The Underground Railroad), Ava DuVernay (Selma), and Todd Haynes (Wonderstruck, Far From Heaven, Mildred Pierce).
We spoke to him in December, a few weeks before the Oscar announcements, to learn about the process of transforming modern day New York into Gotham.
Something I noticed is that besides The Amazing Spider-Man 2, you really have shied away from comic book movies throughout your career. What was different about Joker? What interested you about it to convince you to dip back into that genre? Did you see it?
Joker? Yeah, I did. It's not really a comic book movie.
Well, it's the origin story of the comic book character The Joker... Well, when I was first called about it, I said no. Do you want to read it? And I said, no. They said, why? And I said, I don't want to do those kind of movies. I want to do the kind of movies that I would go see, and we left it alone.
I had some other things cooking that I was considering doing, but I did have a lot of friends who were close with Todd Phillips and who had knowledge of the script. And finally, I was convinced that I might not have been right in prejudging it and that I should probably give it a read before I say no. And like ten pages in, it was clearly not a comic book movie and it was incredibly compelling.
So I would say that I don't have anything against comic book movies in the way that like [Martin] Scorsese's speaking out against them. But I just don't go to see them, not my taste. And at my ripe old age of 700, I'm just more interested in focusing my efforts on the kinds of movies that I would embrace and go see.
What is the upside, for a production designer, of doing one of these comic book movies? What you get is a lot of budgets and a lot of opportunities to make a lot of things. Those budgets are huge, and comic book movies are why there's still movie theaters—it's arguable, I'd say. On a low-budget movie, as a designer, a lot of what you do is with your mind, but not with your hands and not with a crew. There's no money to spend, and it can be very limiting what you can do as a designer. But having said that, it's still not really the kind of thing I'm interested in.
Doing Spider-Man was the movie that helped me understand that. Up until that point, all I wanted to do was try one of those movies. I was just so curious what they were like, and it just was not for me. I like to work on stories where I know what the beginning is and what the end is. That's why I've never done any episodic films. Nothing against episodic, sometimes I've even watched them. It's just not my thing. As a designer, I feel like I'm not designing spaces, I'm designing stories. And so the beginning and the end are largely what defines the stories, where you started and how and where you ended up.
So what made Joker stand out for you? The other thing about the Spider-Man film was that there were a lot of rules: brand rules, franchise rules. Joker is not a movie that's set in some alternate reality where people can fly or have magical powers from ingesting insect juice or whatever it is. It's a movie largely about the world we live in—which, if you haven't noticed, is kind of fucked up for a lot of people a lot of the time. And I think that's why people related to the movie. Even though we don't live in 1980, and the version of the misery that we live in now is slightly different, there's a lot that I think is identifiable to normal people and normal lives in that story. It's somewhat magnified—he's obviously an extreme case. But the point of our way of making that movie, and the point that Todd had when he wrote it, was that the stakes are real.
That attracted me to the script, which was also uncompromising. It was tough, as is the movie. It's relentless. But I like that. I hate compromise, and I also know that as a creative person that really the only chance of succeeding, besides just sheer luck, the only real chance of succeeding creatively is when you take risks, when you take chances. So this guy shows up with this crazy ass script, and the first thing is when you read it, you're like, how is this getting made? It would take someone with his stature and his track record, as a guy who puts asses in the seats, to get something like that made.
And in Todd's case it was an incredible risk. Here he is making a drama, having mostly been a comedy director. So it's already a chance for the studio, because it's something different. And then he's taking a storied character—it's arguable that Joker is the most famous comic book villain, he's certainly been portrayed by some of the most famous actors very successfully in lots of different ways. So here's the studio giving this character up to Todd and letting him experiment with him. It's very unusual that something like that would happen, and for all those reasons I was very attracted to the project.
Were you and Todd on the same wavelength about the tone of the film from the start? I sat and met with Todd. I said that I was very moved by the script, but that I felt that for it to be a successful version of that script, we would have to be uncompromising in the way that we made the film. If we took that crazy ass story that he wrote but tried to shoot it kind of faux noir comic style, or in a slick big epic-y way that a lot of these movies get made, I thought we would lose the humanity. [To me] that was what really was his story, this terrifying portrait of an un-empathetic world. It really brought out my humanity. And he was already like, "Yeah, no problem." And I was like, "Really? To really go for it, it might not be popular in the theaters." And he said, "This is the script I'm making and we're going to make it in an uncompromising way." And it went even beyond that. Truly, these guys were very brave—these guys being Todd and Joaquin [Phoenix] and obviously the people who supported the film. But those two guys really went for it.
So Joaquin was attached before you got involved? Yes he was. He's the only person Todd wanted to make the movie with. I don't think anybody would argue that Joaquin is one of the great actors of our time, but up until now he hasn't necessarily been the person you hired because you want to make money—you'd hire him because he's good.
Without getting into that stuff, those are conversations I wasn't privy to, I just know that there were other pressures on Todd to consider other actors and he hadn't been interested in that. In his mind, it was always this actor playing this character. I can't speak for Todd and say that he wrote it for him, but I believe he certainly had him in mind. And also, even while we were shooting, Joaquin did some crazy ass stuff that wasn't in the script that ended up becoming part of the movie and he became a creative partner to Todd.
Either way, it was a draw for me. Because he is clearly one of the great actors I've ever watched: the way he works, the way he just completely immerses himself, and the way he really could care less about, on some level, the reaction to his work. It's not that he doesn't care, but he's not doing his work to get a reaction. He's doing his work in the way that he feels is true. That's pretty cool. And it's so hard to find non-independent work that could be considered artistic or creative. It's not easy to come by, which makes sense. Putting a lot of money up, you want it back. Most people don't feel that going out on the limb is the way that you're most likely to get the money back.
And in this case, it certainly made a lot at the box office. In terms of your process of transforming the New York City of today into the Gotham City of the '80s, were you drawing from what Todd had already written in the script, or did you pitch him on your vision of what it should look like and where you should shoot in the city? Well, the script didn't say where things were. The script just says "Arthur's apartment."
To answer your question in multi-parts, the designer's job is to come up with a coherent vision of the world of the story. That's my job. That doesn't mean I do it completely on my own—I have a big team, and different kinds of directors bring different points of view. In this case, Todd is a visual director and he's a son of New York City. He grew up there, so he knew this world and he knew it at the time of this story—he's a little younger than me, but not a lot. And he lived in New York in this time, as did I. I came of age in the time of the telling of this story. I have a very complicated relationship with that version of the city because it was a fucking disaster, but it was also my favorite version of it. I almost prefer it to the one we have now. Yes, there was garbage on the streets, and no, there weren't bike lanes, but it was more of a city of individuals and now it's becoming a city of corporations. It's bad.
Somebody turned Manhattan into glass when nobody was looking. I've spent extraordinary amounts of time in my life driving around the city, and while I'm not necessarily saying I know more than anybody else or even understand what the word "expert" means, I can tell you I've spent the better part of the last 57 years trying to figure out what that city is. And I spend a good amount of my awake time on its streets, whether it's shooting or scouting or making or building. So I'm a person who knows New York pretty well, I think. And this version of New York [in the film] is one that I miss.
The map of Gotham
What defines that period of NYC to you? I love street art, which was everywhere then. I love graffiti. I'm not sure I love garbage, but I don't mind everything not being perfect. That period was maybe not a great time as far as city services or economics, but there's a lot of great art that came out of New York at the end of the '70s and the beginning of the '80s, in all areas. Music and painting, for sure. Sometimes I think about Anselm Kiefer's quote, "Over your cities, grass will grow." Sometimes it's the rebel that allows the weeds to start growing, and when everything's perfect it's hard for that to happen. You know, there's not a lot of artists living in Manhattan right now. We segregated our artists to the next neighborhood to be gentrified, but not unless they have good success.
What is your process like picking locations? The first few months that I was a part of the job, it was really just me and Todd. I started very, very early in the process. I had been recovering from surgery, so I wasn't working, and we spent an enormous amount of time trying to talk about and map the version of Gotham, and ultimately we mostly spent our time in the car. Even before there were scouts, my first comment to Todd was, "let's get in the car." That's how I tried to see what Gotham is. This was a city inspired by the New York of the late '70s/early '80s. Clearly that's what this scripted Gotham was, and that's the world that Arthur lived in: a place that on a lot of levels was failing and bearing down on him.
I would say that for Todd, one of the great inspirations for this movie was Taxi Driver, which is not that hard to see. That version of the city doesn't exist anymore. And as any New York person who knows what DUMBO looks like now, it's like Rodeo Drive or something, finding anything that's in any way imperfect in the five boroughs is a challenge. Any kind of down neighborhoods that's not just straight-up projects or public housing, where the city just doesn't care. There's no economic incentive, I guess, to spruce them up. We actually considered having Arthur live in the projects, and ultimately we shied away from that idea.
That was a terrific experience in mapping, and it wanted to be New York-like, but not New York. Ultimately we decided not to shoot at Lincoln Center and we decided not to see landmarks where possible, I think you can see a bridge or two, but for the most part to keep it a generic version of New York, a non-iconic version of New York as far as architecture, but maybe iconic as far as texture and tone.
Because if you saw Lincoln Center or something like that, it'd be too recognizable, and take the audience out of this version. Because Lincoln Center is in New York City, call it what you want. I could put a "Wayne Hall" sign on it, but it's Lincoln Center and therefore we are in New York. There's not a lot that you can look at in that movie and say, "Oh yeah, that's New York. That's where that is."
Well, there's one exception. ...What's that?
The exception is the 'Joker stairs,' which are most definitely in NYC. The stairs were not iconic New York until two months ago. No one heard of them, no one even knew they existed. I think I got a note from the writers when that all started happening saying, "You broke the Bronx." And I do feel somewhat awful about it. Like, really? Unless it's become good for people who live around there...If it's fun for them, great. I've seen in pictures how beautifully cleaned up it is now, how nice it is. That was a pretty smelly place.
So that must have been a pretty unexpected turn, the fact that this became the standout, iconic spot. I think all of us thought that was unusually amazing. I really don't think any of us expected that. But choosing the Bronx is a perfect example of what I'm describing. The Bronx is very New York, it's da Bronx, especially the South Bronx, we were ten blocks from Yankee Stadium when we shot that. But it's also not the New York that people shoot New York as. When people think of a hilly city, I don't think they think of New York—the Bronx is like San Francisco, at least that part of it. And that was good for us because it has a lot of the characteristics of New York that we wanted to portray, without being too particularly New York, to help it become Gotham.
And in the Gotham lore, there is a New York. They both exist, they coexist. I don't imagine this is going to turn into like a 10-part thing, where Arthur goes to New York eventually. But if it did, one day, there might be [one]. In the world of DC, Gotham is not New York and they both exist. That much I know now.
Huh, so there's a New York in the DC universe? In the world of this, yes. In the world of this telling, in the world of Batman and Joker, in the world of DC's Gotham. Now there's a bazillion incarnations. Different artists, different movies have come out in different ways. And again, I'm not a comic book expert. I just looked at the ones that happened to have Joker in it when we got started. So in one of those versions, there is a New York. We literally mapped out the city that we wanted, but it’s not as much as the movie sometimes feels, like we’re just randomly following this crazy guy around random places, which was the hope—that it felt loose and unmade in a lot of ways. You didn’t necessarily feel the hand of a filmmaker so much.
When you say you mapped this out, you literally drew out a map of Gotham? We wanted to always know where Arthur was, and where he was going from or to and how he was getting there. We ended up creating a map and they worked in concert—how much time it would take, if he left in the night, if he went this way, he went up a river, and then took the subway, there's overhead subway and underground subway here and here. We knew all that because we drew it, we mapped it and we made neighborhoods. The comedy club is over here, and then Chinatown is way over there...this is where the Ha-Ha's is because it's near the old amusement park and "Amusement Mile," which you can kind of make out through the window in that shot. [Ha-Ha's was shot under the elevated West Side Highway on 136th Street.]
I think the reason people are reacting to Gotham as having a real sense of place is because it was. It has a real sense of place. It was figured out, even though it's not all explained in every frame of the movie, it's there. If you look in the distance of any subway car and you see the subway maps on the wall, that's our town! We did put a great amount of effort into figuring out the specifics of the relationship between the places in the neighborhoods and how they went together within the city.
The other aspect of the shoot that really interests me, because I've talked to other productions about this and I've heard that it can be difficult to get approval for it, was that you guys were able to shoot on the real subway in Brooklyn. What was that like to— Shooting on the subway is not difficult.
No? Shooting on the subway is not difficult. Filming [isn't]. Shooting a gun on the subway is impossible. That they don't want you to see. They don't want that in the cars. You can't shoot it in that moment but you can do it, some of it digitally and stuff. We ended up doing a combination of shooting at real subway stations that were active, like some of the ones up in the Bronx, both the aboveground ones and the belowground ones. And we shot at an abandoned station at Ninth Street in Brooklyn. And we also brought a car onto the stage.
Was that a retired car? This particular car ironically I did use on the Spider-Man movie as well, and someone who used to work at the MTA—I don't remember his name, he's part of a transit museum in Connecticut but he's still connected to the MTA on the technical side, he's a guy down on the tracks—but I rented this car on Spider-Man, and we rented the car from him again for this. He still had it and it was an old G train. But the hard part was that there aren't many of them, and we had to match it to another train, to the exterior of that train, and it was slightly different because we actually had to go in the car and change some of the window shapes and doors.
We had like an hour to do it, not even [that much time]. It would be the morning of the shoot kind of thing. So we had to have it very figured out. I always had a lot of support from the MTA film division. They're great and helpful and generous and understand that New York is not New York without the subway. When you do use the New York subway, it's a particular kind of subway. Maybe less so now that the city is getting so slick and the subway is not quite so slick. But the subway is a character in the story, it's how Arthur gets around this world.
In a lot of scenes, especially the subway ones, there's a lot of graffiti everywhere. Are you doing that on a soundstage or are you assembling that out in the field? How does that work? You can't. You have to do it digitally. The MTA doesn't want you to put graffiti on their subways, which I can understand, I guess, because they're the ones who have to clean them. And because people who put the graffiti on don't consider the doors opening and the windows functioning and all that stuff.
Having said that, and having grown up in New York in the ‘70s, if you went back in time and took all the graffiti off the subways, I would not be the same person I am today. That's the essence of what subways were once. And again, particular to this time, that graffitiing of subways actually started up in the Bronx. And it started with kids who were creative and knew they had worth. I think that the world they lived in didn't acknowledge that they were creative or had worth, that they existed even. It was a way to make something and see it in the world, to see something you made go into the world and travel around it.
So there is a beautiful part of that as well, but I understand why the MTA limits what we can put on their trains. The one that was shot on stage we did do graffiti on ourselves, and the ones that we shot in the stations, even though we designed it ourselves, was mostly applied in post, and nowadays that is just not unusual. More and more of what we do visually in movies is done in computers, and less and less of it is done practically. When people get shot in the face now, we very, very rarely can really do blood hits anymore. Most of that happens in post. I'm doing scenes today where that's happening, and to me, it's just a huge savings for the company because it's just a lot less reset. But you have a lot of control about the way things look. But anyway, subways [were] cool. We did graffiti but mostly in post, in those days.
You also did a certain amount of filming in New Jersey as well, right? We shot three sets there. We shot Gotham Square [at Market and Broad Street] in Newark, which is where Arthur is a clown who gets his sign stolen and he runs into the streets, and that's also where the riot is at the end. We shot Wayne Hall at the courthouse in Jersey City. And we also shot the theater where Thomas Wayne is murdered in Jersey City.
Newark was awesome. It burned in the '60s and it's still working its way out. A tough city, but it's also a city that is gentrifying and it is growing and you can see it developing, and the parks we found were just the last of it. And [nothing that] looks like that exists in the five boroughs anymore. It did maybe five or eight years ago maybe.
But even when I did Across the Universe, God knows how many years ago that was, we had to depict the riots and we figured, "Oh, well we'll just go up to the South Bronx and find it." It wasn't there. When you look at pictures of New York in 1975 to 1980, when you really look at the pictures of the streets, they don't look real compared to the world we live in now. They're just unorganized, dysfunctional. There's graffiti everywhere, things are broken, the buildings have cracks. And it's cool, but it's so different than now. And to try and find that now is very difficult and you almost have to quilt it together. And to your point, in our case, we went over the river to do it.
You've worked with a lot of very different kinds of directors over the years—what was your relationship like with Todd on set? He's a committed director. He was available. He always wanted to see the details. He always wanted to know what we were doing. I think he felt supported by the art department. He was a friend of the art department, and I think he understood how the visual language of the movie was available to him. There's directors who focus on words, the directors who focus on camera, and directors who focus on acting. There's all different kinds of focus for different directors, and I won't generalize because it just doesn't matter. You can make a good movie all different ways.
Jim Jarmusch is one of the most amazing [directors]. One of the reasons I do movies is because of Jim Jarmusch, and I've gotten to work with him a lot. But a lot of making a set for Jim is taking things out of the room. He's curious about negative space, and truth. That's a version of experimental with him.
Someone like Wes Anderson, every screw, every little teeny thing is sorted out, and that's the vocabulary of the way he tells stories. Those worlds are pretty organized. They're pretty much what's there distinctly, because he put it there. That's when they're looking at.
Todd's different than both of those guys. He was looking for a kind of raw energy to come out of the set. In a lot of ways in this particular story, it's arguable that Gotham City is Arthur—that it's really just what he thinks it is. And it's even arguable that none of this happened, that he's in a cell the whole time and this is what's happening in his head. But either way, it's Arthur's Gotham. It's the thing that bears down on him, that pushes him to be what he is, for better and for worse, but it's perhaps also an analogy of him as well. We're making, you know, we're making poetry.
The last thing I just wanted to ask was that the Hollywood Reporter reported a couple of weeks ago that Todd Phillips was in talks to do a sequel to Joker, and I was wondering whether you— Not with me. Not with me.
Have you talked to him about that at all? No, I have no knowledge of that. When we were making the movie, he said he was not going to do that. That's all I know.
Right. If he came to you, would you be interested in doing it? Dude, what kind of questions are these? What do you think? I'm going to say, "No, I don't want to work with Todd Phillips?" No.
Of course! But a movie could take a year. So to get all the timing to line up is complicated. But sure, that was cool. It was a cool experience. I love that Gotham. As long as it's not like the Joker when he's 60, and you have to shoot it in present day.
I don't imagine that Todd is a guy who's going to all of a sudden rest on his laurels. He's perhaps the most successful comedy director, and one of the most financially [successful] directors ever. And here he is out there really going for it, risking everything. I don't think just because he had another success, he can all of a sudden stop being that guy.
He trusted that his audience could handle something that was not polished. That they could handle something that wasn't spoon-fed. That they could handle something that wasn't repetitive, and that they could handle something that was downright challenging. Not only because of it being violent, but also because that movie challenges the people who watch it. I feel it made me identify with Arthur, and to a point, feel like what he did was okay. To a point. And I think everybody has a moment where, hopefully, it stops being okay. And where that is, is perhaps different for everybody, and maybe in my case, I went too far. I was like, "Yeah, get him, get him." And then I'm like, "Oh, wait a minute. I don't believe in killing, do I? Shit. Fuck."
So it's a challenging movie and I think he's curious about that stuff, and I am. Anything that's risky, I want to do it. I don't want to do boring things. We're going to be dead soon. These are kind of messy times, man. I think the thing that's going to help us right now, it's not new economic policy, I think it's the arts that are going to get us out of this shit. Not to say how it’s going to save the world. But artists who are not afraid to experiment, successful artists who are not afraid to risk things. That's good. Risking things is good. Art is good. Creativity is good.
This interview has been condensed and edited for clarity
