Quentin Tarantino has come out to support the critically and commercially unsuccessful film Joker: Folie à Deux.
The writer-director sang the praises of the musical sequel during a recent appearance on Bret Easton Ellis’ podcast. The second part of the movie “Joker,” directed by Todd Phillips in 2019, received a rating of 32% on Rotten Tomatoes.
“I really, really liked it,” he said. “A lot. Tremendously, and I went to see it expecting to admire the making of the film, but I thought it would be a far-fetched intellectual exercise, which in the end I don’t think it works like a film, but I will. Appreciate it for what it is. And I’m a nihilist enough.” To enjoy a movie that doesn’t quite work as a movie or is a bit of a big, giant mess and I didn’t find it to be an intellectual exercise that I really engaged with.”
Tarantino added that Joaquin Phoenix gave “one of the best performances I’ve ever seen” and that the film delivered the version of Natural Born Killers that he “dreamed of seeing.” Tarantino’s original script for the Oliver Stone-directed satire was radically rewritten in the 1990s.
He also praised Phillips. “The Joker directed the movie,” he said. “The whole concept, even him spending the studio money — he’s spending it like the Joker spends it, okay? … He’s saying fuck you all. He’s saying fuck you to the movie audience. He’s saying fuck you to Hollywood.”
The author of Pulp Fiction called it a “really funny” film and said he “really liked the musical sequences.”
The $200 million-budgeted film premiered at this year’s Venice Film Festival to negative reviews, and has gone on to gross just under $60 million in the US and $201 million so far. The 2019 original film grossed $335 million in the US and over $1 billion worldwide.
Francis Ford Coppola, who is grappling with box office failure in Megalopolis, also praised the film. “Since the wonderful movie The Hangover, he has always been one step ahead of the audience and has never done what they expect. Congratulations to the Joker: Folie à Deux,” he wrote on Instagram.
Paul Schrader, whose script for Taxi Driver was the inspiration for the first film, was no less impressed. “I saw about 10 or 15 minutes of it,” he told Interview magazine. “I left, bought something, came back, and watched another 10 minutes. That was enough.”
