Joker: Folie à Deux (2024) single-shot sequence - The courtroom explosion and escape

Written by Frédéric Vié

  • Film : Joker: Folie à Deux (2024)

  • Director : Todd Phillips

  • Director of Photography : Lawrence Sher, ASC

  • Camera Operator A : Colin Anderson

  • Camera operator B : Lawrence Sher himself

  • Focus pullers : Greg Irwin and Cheli Clayton-Samaras

  • Dolly Grip : John Man

  • Crane operator : Jason Talbert

  • Art Director/Production Designer : Mark Friedberg

  • Composer : Hildur Guðnadóttir (return from the first film)

  • Camera used for this scene : Sony Venice with Rialto remote head

  • Camera for the rest of the film : ARRI Alexa 65 (65mm digital large format)

  • Main lenses used in the film : 21mm Masterbuilt, 35mm Zeiss Compact Prime, 58mm Nikon Nikkor (Arthur's "intimate" lens), Prime DNA, Leica Macro-Elmar 90mm, ARRI Signature 350mm, Hasselblad ("Ottoblads" from rental company Otto Nemenz)

  • Lighting : ARRI SkyPanels and Creamsource Vortexes (LED switch as expected compared to the first film which was tungsten)

  • Calibration : Jill Bogdanowicz, ASC (Company 3)

  • Film format : IMAX-certified, aspect ratio 2.20 (standard theaters) and 1.43 (IMAX)

  • Filming location for the scene : virtual stage ("the volume"), Warner Bros. Studios in Los Angeles

  • Total filming time : 75 days (December 10, 2022 → April 5, 2023)

  • Composition of the sequence shot : 4 shots connected in the editing to give the illusion of a single, continuous take

  • Release : Venice Film Festival, September 4, 2024; USA, October 4, 2024

  • Main sources : British Cinematographer, December 2024 (James Mottram interview with Lawrence Sher); Definition Magazine, March 2025; Motion Picture Association / The Credits, October 2024; Variety, October 2024; Collettivo Chiaroscuro, October 2024

The verdict is in. The jury finds Arthur Fleck (Joaquin Phoenix) guilty of murder. Just minutes earlier, Arthur had publicly renounced his Joker alter-ego, admitting full responsibility for his actions. Then, without warning, an explosion. A car bomb has detonated in front of the courthouse. The side wall of the courtroom collapses, dust fills the air, bodies fall. The camera stays with Arthur. It follows him as he gets to his feet, dazed, in the rubble. It passes by Assistant District Attorney Harvey Dent, lying on the ground, the left side of his face burned—the visual birth of Two-Face, another future enemy of Batman. Arthur staggers toward the exit. Two men pull him from the chaos and put him in a car. The shot never cuts. Or so it seems

Why this scene is significant

It is significant for two opposing reasons, and these must be considered together

The first point: it's the only real moment of physical spectacle in the film. Joker: Folie à Deux is essentially a film of dialogue and song, asylum, courtroom, and fantastical musical sequences. Many critics have seen this as one of the film's main flaws. The explosion sequence is the only place where Todd Phillips and Lawrence Sher veer into pure action cinema. And they do so in the most demonstrative way possible: a shot that refuses to cut. It's a formal choice that creates tension in everything that precedes it, rejecting the breathing room of classic editing.

The second: it's a "fake" long take. Not in a pejorative sense, but in a technical one. Sher himself admits it in his interview with British Cinematographer : the scene is made up of four distinct shots, joined in the editing to create the illusion of continuity. It belongs to the same family as 1917, Birdman, and Rope. A family with a long history in cinema, whose codes you need to know to understand what you're watching. A long take whose principle of hidden cuts is understood remains a long take, but a long take that belongs to a specific category: that of the reconstructed continuous shot.

What makes this scene special, within this particular family, is the production context. 1917 was filmed outdoors, in natural light, with cuts hidden in dark passages or lateral camera movements. Joker 2 does the complete opposite: filmed in a studio, on a virtual LED set, a technology popularized by The Mandalorian, with a specific camera system chosen just for this moment. It's the same artistic challenge solved by the latest available technology.

How they filmed it

The choice of a virtual set, which Sher calls "the volume"—the official term for LED-walled sets—is the first element to understand. On this type of set, the environment around the actors (the burning street, the gutted courthouse, the fleeing survivors) is projected in real time onto enormous LED screens that surround the set. The camera films the actors in front of these screens, and the background reacts live to the camera movements. This process replaces the traditional green screen, with two major advantages: the actors' faces are realistically lit by the light from the virtual environment, and they can see what is happening around them. For an explosion scene, it's a logical choice; it would have been far more expensive and dangerous to reconstruct a blown-up courthouse with solid materials

The second element: the camera change. Throughout the film, Sher worked with the ARRI Alexa 65, the large 65mm digital camera he had already used on the first Joker. For this scene only, he switched to a Sony Venice equipped with a Rialto system. The Rialto is a remote head: the camera's mechanics and sensor are physically separated from the main body, connected by a cable. This allows the sensor to be placed where a conventional camera wouldn't fit, in a confined space, on a boom rig, at an unusual height. Sher chose this configuration for a specific reason, which he explains himself in his interview.

He had the set floor cut out. The courtroom floor, in the section where the camera was supposed to rotate 360° around Phoenix, was literally removed. The camera was then raised two feet (approximately 60 centimeters). The camera operator sat on a crate placed in the pit, with the camera at the character's chest height. This setup allowed him to rotate around Phoenix without any physical obstacles—no dolly tracks, no crane arms to navigate—while keeping the sensor a safe distance from pyrotechnics and dust

The result is these very short, very close-up shots that seem to glide around Arthur as he gets up. The "weightless" sensation of the shot stems precisely from this device: the camera is not guided by a mechanical trajectory; it is manual but almost freed from gravity by the pit in which its operator is positioned

Third element: the four cuts. Sher doesn't specify in his interview exactly where the cut points are located, but he clearly explains the principle. Each segment of the shot covers a portion of the action: the explosion, the exit from the courthouse, the crossing of the debris, the car that picks him up, and the transitions were designed to be invisible. Two classic techniques can be used here: the cut in rapid motion (the camera moves very quickly past a dark obstacle, a wall, a cloud of dust, and the next shot resumes at the exact moment the camera exits this obstacle) and the cut in continuous motion (two separate shots are digitally assembled by morphing the pixels at their edges). In both cases, the viewer's eye doesn't perceive the cut if it's correctly placed. This is precisely the method used by Sam Mendes and Roger Deakins for 1917; Fred has already detailed this technique on this site.

Fourth element: the improvised working method on set, consistent with the film as a whole. Sher explains that he didn't rehearse the camera movements beforehand. His dolly grip, John Mang, and his crane operator, Jason Talbert, would ask him on set, "OK, where do we start, where do we end?" and Sher would reply that he didn't know. He let the actors guide him to determine the camera position. This method, more jazz than classical, permeated the entire film shoot, but it takes on a particular significance here, where each of the four segments must seamlessly connect to the next. Improvising a four-part sequence shot means knowing, at every moment, where the camera needs to be when the invisible cut is about to occur

The camera crew deserved the special mention Sher gave them in the interview. Focus pullers Greg Irwin and Cheli Clayton-Samaras managed the focus on a constantly moving, large-format camera with shallow-depth lenses. On this type of shot, a focus error of half a meter renders the shot unusable. They had virtually no margin for error, shot after shot

Finally, the lighting. The first Joker was lit with tungsten, an older but warm and distinctive technology. For Folie à Deux, Sher switched to LEDs, ARRI SkyPanels, and Creamsource Vortex fixtures. This technological shift is far from insignificant for this scene: the LEDs are electronically controlled, intersecting and changing color in real time. In a shot that will transition through several lighting moods—the stark interior of the courtroom, the orange of the explosion, the smoky street—it's essential.

What to observe when reviewing it

  • At the moment of the explosion, watch the light on Phoenix's face. It changes in real time with what's happening in his field of vision. It's the LED wall that projects the blast and makes it react with his skin, not an effect added in post-production.

  • During the debris sequence, try to spot the moments when the camera passes very close to a dark obstacle (a wall, a body, a beam) or a curtain of dust. Statistically, this is where the hidden cuts between the four shots are located.

  • At ground level, the camera is below its usual height. This unusual height is due to the cut-out floor. Notice how Phoenix is ​​framed from a very slight low angle, a choice that visually enlarges him at the moment he symbolically loses everything.

  • Harvey Dent, on the ground, is visible for a fraction of a second. The burn on the left half of his face is the visual introduction of Two-Face. Todd Phillips has confirmed that this is indeed an origin for the character.

Did you know?

  • Sher cited One from the Heart Francis Ford Coppola's (1982) as the primary visual reference for the entire film. It was the first feature film shot in a studio with a set designed to allow the camera to rotate 360°, anticipating by several decades the volumetric technology used here.

  • The film was a major critical and commercial failure. Its production budget was $190-200 million, while it grossed $207 million worldwide. Warner Bros. estimated the loss at $125-200 million, and Deadline Hollywood at $144.25 million. It received seven Razzie Award nominations and won two (including Worst Sequel). This reception does not invalidate the technical quality of Sher's work, which was almost unanimously praised.

  • The animated Looney Tunes-style opening sequence that precedes the film was created by Sylvain Chomet, the French animator behind The Triplets of Belleville and The Illusionist. It was a direct commission from Todd Phillips.

  • The courthouse was built to scale on a Warner Bros. soundstage in Los Angeles. It is not the actual New York City courthouse (at 60 Centre Street) seen in the explosion scene, although the exterior shots of the crowd were indeed filmed there.

Sources

  • Lawrence Sher, interview British Cinematographer , December 2024

  • Lawrence Sher, interview with Definition Magazine, March 2025

  • Lawrence Sher, interview with The Credits / Motion Picture Association, October 2024

  • Lawrence Sher, Variety (Inside the Frame series), October 2024

  • Lawrence Sher, Collettivo Chiaroscuro, October 2024

  • Wikipedia - Joker: Folie à Deux (production, critical reception, box office data)

  • IMDb - Lawrence Sher's technical filmography

  • Time Magazine, "Making Sense of Joker: Folie à Deux's Baffling Surprise Ending," October 2024

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