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Joker 2 director explains why he cut a scene of Lady Gaga kissing a woman
Joker: Folie à Deux director Todd Phillips is opening up a scene he had to cut from the film that featured Mother Monster locking lips with another woman.
Release the Gaga cut?
One of the popular complaints about the new movie Joker: Folie à Deux is that many of Lady Gaga's scenes that were teased during the marketing and press tour seem to have been cut entirely from the film. While this complaint is far from the only (or main) one, we here at Out are particularly incensed that many of Gaga's scenes are missing from the movie.
One of the scenes we're most upset about is one that we had seen thanks to some fans filming production of the movie where Gaga grabs a woman out of the crowd of protestors on the courthouse stairs and kisses her.
While we didn't think that the scene meant we'd see a queer romance in the film, we were excited to see Gaga's version of bisexual antihero Harley Quinn (known as Lee in this movie) kiss a woman. Unfortunately, it doesn't happen. Now, writer and director Todd Phillips has explained why he cut the improvised scene.
In the released version, Lee is doing a song and dance while walking up the stairs, and Phillips says the kiss, which Gaga improvised, didn't work because it interrupted the musicality of the scene.
"It had dialogue in it, and all of a sudden, I wanted it to be more of a music and vibe moment," Phillips said to Entertainment Weekly. "For that moment to have played it, it needed dialogue behind it. Meaning, the woman said something, and then Gaga stopped and did this thing, and it just kind of got in the way of the moment."
Many times in the movie, the song numbers are broken up by dialogue or characters stopping singing for another reason or interruption, and it almost definitely wouldn't have been strange to see it happening again here.
Joker: Folie à Deux is playing in theaters now.
Mey Rude is a journalist and cultural critic who has been covering queer news for a decade. The transgender, Latina lesbian lives in Los Angeles with her fiancée.
Mey Rude is a journalist and cultural critic who has been covering queer news for a decade. The transgender, Latina lesbian lives in Los Angeles with her fiancée.
