How this N.J. cinematographer brought his Jersey roots to 'Joker: Folie à Deux'

Lawrence Sher remembers his first day filming “Joker.”

Joaquin Phoenix’s character, Arthur Fleck, a clown and aspiring stand-up comedian, was in his social worker’s office. As the actor let out the uncontrollable laugh that would become this Joker’s calling card, he had a thought:

“It’s as if I’m watching somebody on another planet.”

“I was like ‘wow, this is pretty amazing,’” says Sher, the movie’s cinematographer, who grew up in New Jersey.

He was already a fan of Phoenix, and had high expectations for the film. But by about the 10th day of filming, Sher started to suspect that the movie, directed by his frequent collaborator Todd Phillips, would become a major highlight of his career.

“I had a feeling we were doing something that could be really special,” he says. “But you never know.”

This time, he did.

“Joker,” released in 2019, grossed more than $1 billion worldwide. Phoenix won his first Oscar, as did composer Hildur Guðnadóttir. Among the film’s 11 Academy Award nominations were nods for best picture and best adapted screenplay. Phillips landed his first for directing and Sher his first for cinematography.

“Joker: Folie à Deux,” the film’s sequel, now in theaters, sees the return of Phoenix’s Joker, aka Fleck. His bleak incarcerated existence collides with a series of musical numbers — and Lady Gaga as the movie’s Harley Quinn, Harleen “Lee” Quinzel.

Sher, who lives in Los Angeles and hails from Teaneck, headed back to Jersey to film the movie.

In 2018, the cinematographer filmed the first “Joker” on the streets of Newark and Jersey City, which were transformed into 1981 Gotham City. For Folie à Deux, the filmmakers descended on the former Essex County Isolation Hospital in Belleville, also known as Soho Hospital.

The imposing building plays Arkham State Hospital, where Fleck, who killed six people in the first movie, is locked up before and during his trial.

Production designer and producer Mark Friedberg found the location, Sher says.

“We looked all over,” he tells NJ Advance Media. “We looked up and down New York, and he found that spot and it really just fit the bill. And now they’ve built it into apartments.”

READ MORE: ‘Joker: Folie à Deux’ review: Trial by musical, fire by Gaga

One of the film’s executive producers, Michael Uslan, is chairman of the New Jersey Motion Picture and Television Commission. Uslan, who was born in Jersey City and grew up in Bayonne and Ocean Township, has produced every Batman universe film since 1989, having bought the rights to the comic from DC with his former producing partner, Bayonne native Benjamin Melniker, in 1979.

Earlier this year, Sher, whose earlier movies include Zach Braff’s 2004 directorial debut “Garden State,” returned to Jersey again to film the upcoming movie “The Bride!”

Helmed by Maggie Gyllenhaal, the highly anticipated film stars Christian Bale and Jessie Buckley in a Frankenstein-inspired story. (More on that below.)

“I love that Jersey’s going after the movie business because they’ve got so much to offer,” says Sher, who made his feature directorial debut with the 2017 comedy “Father Figures,” starring Owen Wilson, Ed Helms, Glenn Close and Katt Williams.

“If I directed a movie again, Jersey would be the place I’d wanna make it.”

Going Gaga … but not fully Broadway

“Folie à Deux” is a departure from the first “Joker” in its focus on characters singing popular songs from movies and musicals.

But when Lady Gaga came to set, Sher didn’t find an arena-filing megastar.

“I know her from her music and I’m a fan,” he says. “What I was so impressed with was — because this is hard for anybody to do, but particularly when you’re so big of a star with so many things going on in your life — that she was so immensely locked in and focused on this movie, and only this movie, that I never saw anything but the character she was playing, and in the best possible way.”

Since the actors were singing live on set, a pianist positioned at the back of the stage would play so they could follow each song. That’s when Sher would hear glimmers of the pop star warming up.

“It was beautiful and amazing and powerful … every day was extremely fun, because you’re like ‘oh right, she is still this incredible artist,’” he says. “And that was exciting every single time, that suddenly you’re just like, ‘oh right, yeah, she’s here.’ And you forgot, because mostly you were just seeing Lee.”

(Gaga recently released “Harlequin,” a companion album to the film.)

The musical element of the “Joker” sequel permeates much of the dialogue and action.

“For me, I always respond to these musicals where it’s like an extension of their dialogue, versus suddenly they break out into song temporarily, and then they go back to the movie,” Sher says. “Movies like ‘All That Jazz’ (1979) … where it’s really just this really intimate portrayal of a broken man and they just happen to have music and have songs that play throughout it.”

In “Folie à Deux,” there’s a distinction between musical numbers that happen outside of and inside of Fleck’s head.

“I think our first philosophy was there are certain scenes in which the music kind of is within the scene itself … It’s just like kind of extending the scene, as if he was using dialogue to say those words.”

But glamorous, dreamy scenes with Arthur and Lee that take place on a rooftop or in a nightclub, they’re all a product of his fantasies.

“In those scenes, the fantasy scenes, it gives us an opportunity to be much more dynamic and aggressive with both the color, the lighting and the camera movement,” Sher says of the IMAX movie.

Otherwise, the songs are woven into conversation.

“We knew the rules that we were setting and we weren’t suddenly leaving,” Sher says. “Like sometimes in musicals … all the people in the scene suddenly break into a pattern. They all step in line and start a really choreographed thing. We knew that wasn’t gonna be this kind of musical. Not that we don’t like those musicals, it’s just that wasn’t this philosophy.”

The duality of life, Joker and … ‘The Hangover’

Before the “Joker” films, Sher worked with director Todd Phillips on the “Hangover” movies.

The first one, “The Hangover” (2009), was a huge hit, grossing more than $468 million worldwide and winning a Golden Globe for best comedy. The raunchy Las Vegas bachelor party comedy, starring Zach Galifianakis, Bradley Cooper, Ed Helms, Justin Bartha and Ken Jeong, generated sequels “The Hangover Part II” ($586 million) and “The Hangover Part III” ($362 million).

Sher was there for the whole ride.

While Fleck and Joker might seem somewhat removed from all those hijinks, he sees a through line.

“The style and the philosophy of making the movie is not that different than ‘The Hangover,’” he says. “Our philosophy was, in a comedy, you have to treat each scene with the same respect as a drama. It’s more funny when the characters and everybody in the situation is playing it seriously, and yet the circumstances are comedic, so that we’re not just chasing jokes, but we’re creating something that feels real.

“In this case, yes, the subject matter can be quite dark. But … we’re laughing as much, or more, in a weird way, while we’re making ‘Joker’ than we are sometimes in making a comedy. They almost flip each other.”

With “Joker” and “Folie à Deux,” he says, “the in-the-camera stuff is so serious that we’re trying to take it light when it yells ‘cut.’”

“The truth is, every comedy needs a drama where the stakes are real, and every drama needs lightness. You need both. That’s also the duality of life. It’s also the duality of this movie … the battle between the self and the shadow self … Which is the mask you put on, which is the real self?”

“Folie à Deux” starts with an animated short from Sylvain Chomet (”The Triplets of Belleville”) titled “Me and My Shadow” that vibrantly illustrates this dynamic within Arthur.

Sher sees what he calls an “overlap” of comedy and drama in other films he’s made with Phillips, like “Due Date” (2010), a road movie with Galifianakis and Robert Downey Jr., and “War Dogs” (2016), based on a true story about two arms dealers played by Jonah Hill and Miles Teller.

“It always feels like we’re just making another movie, that each scene will tell us what it wants to be, and we treat it with that respect,” he says.

His dream movie?

Phoenix and Galifianakis in a comedy directed by Phillips.

“I’m manifesting it just by saying it out loud to you,” Sher says. “I haven’t even said that to Todd.”

Phoenix, who has a best actor Oscar to his name, is associated with big dramas, but “his go-to is actually a place of humor … he’s genuinely really funny and light,” the cinematographer says.

Town of screen legends

When Sher first met Phillips, he detected a certain familiarity in the director.

Sher put it down to shared New York-area DNA, with Phillips, 53, having been born in Brooklyn and raised on Long Island. That, and dedication to the work.

“Even if we’re making something that seems silly and could be sort of dismissed as being just like a throwaway comedy, he treats it with such love and care that it’s been such a nice journey for us to sort of challenge each other, keep making these movies,” he says.

“I still think he’s underrated, but he’s the best kind of partner and collaborator you can have … it’s been one of the best relationships I’ve had in my life, certainly creatively, and he’s a brother.”

As for Sher’s actual family, they do not work in the film industry.

His father was a clinical pathologist at New York University’s medical center and his mother was a teacher at Lexington School for the Deaf in Queens.

Sher’s identical twin brother followed their father into medicine, becoming a urologist. Their older brother works in finance.

However, considering some of the other distinguished alumni of Teaneck High School (aka The Castle on the Hill), Sher’s path doesn’t seem an outlier.

He points to a few: Damon Lindelof, a creator of “Lost,” “The Leftovers” and “Watchmen”; movie critic Leonard Maltin; and Hollywood producer Roger Birnbaum (“Grosse Pointe Blank,” “Rush Hour,” “G.I. Jane” and “27 Dresses”).

“Anytime I see them, we talk about how wonderful a place Teaneck is and was, one of the best places I could ever imagine growing up,” Sher says. “The immense diversity, the people, just everything about it, the public school. Teaneck has just all types of amazing memories for me.”

He’s been living in LA since the ’90s, but he stays active with his hometown group chat nearly every day. Class reunions are well attended.

Sher says being a “Jersey kid” is a huge point of pride for him. He sees a thread that connects Jersey people in Hollywood and beyond.

“I think it produces really solid people that, even if they leave to pursue some other dreams, Jersey never leaves them,” Sher says.

He grew up seeing movies like “St. Elmo’s Fire” (1985) and “Risky Business” (1983) at Cedar Lane Cinemas (now Teaneck Cinemas) and watching big event films like “Star Wars: Episode V – The Empire Strikes Back” (1980) and “Indiana Jones and the Raiders of the Lost Ark” (1981) in Paramus. He remembers hundreds of people waiting in line to get in — back when there were still 1,000 seats in one movie theater auditorium.

He’d take the bus across the George Washington Bridge to see documentaries about breakdancing and graffiti in the city. But it was on a school trip to Paris that Sher started experimenting with photography.

“I wasn’t even a good French student,” he says.

Over spring break, he got the chance to see Europe for the first time with about a dozen students. His father, who was really into nature photography, lent him his camera for the journey. Sher, then 13 (or 14), recalls being excited about the teacher allowing them to have some wine at dinner.

Still, taking photos with his dad’s camera was more exciting.

Just seeing his father light up and talk about the frames he’d captured made him eager for more. Photography also reignited the creativity of his elementary school years, which fell by the wayside when he started playing sports.

Then, when Sher broke his nose in his senior year of high school, he had to sit out a couple of baseball games.

“I took that same camera, took pictures in the dugout, sold them to the Bergen Record, and they ended up in the paper,” he says.

Sher ended up majoring in economics at Wesleyan University in Connecticut, but after taking a college class called The Language of Film, he had a bit of an epiphany.

“For me, it was like ‘oh wait, this is something you can craft. This is a series of images that become scenes that become a movie and there’s craftsmanship there, and you can learn it. It’s not something that is magic, that you have to be born with.’”

While he would argue a lot with his dad growing up — “a bit like oil and water,” he says of their relationship — they got closer when he decided to pursue filmmaking.

“I think in another world, my dad would have just been a nature photographer.”

Mining Jersey memories

Sher made his parents proud when the romantic comedy he worked on, 2001 indie “Kissing Jessica Stein,” headed to theaters.

With “Garden State,” from South Orange’s Braff, the cinematographer’s career started to gain momentum.

“There’s a reason that movie worked for me and I had such a connection to it,” says Sher, who stayed in his aunt’s basement while they were filming in Jersey (his parents had moved to Portland, Oregon).

He found himself drawing from memories of his friends’ houses and bedrooms, from the people in his life who reminded him of characters in the film. It’s something he does for all of his projects — thumbing through his mental database of experiences from his life in Jersey: going down the Shore after prom, hopping freight trains, taking trips to Cape May, hanging out in Teaneck outside Rocklin’s, the local candy store.

Maybe that’s why in 2014 he founded ShotDeck, a searchable database of movie stills that has become a resource for filmmakers.

“It was a tool built because I needed it to exist,” he says of the subscription platform.

Sher’s first studio movie was “The Dukes of Hazzard” (2005). He would go on to film the Steve Carell movie “Dan in Real Life” and, around the time of the “Hangover” success, “I Love You, Man” with Paul Rudd and Jason Segel and “The Dictator” (2012) with Sacha Baron Cohen before reuniting with Braff for “Wish I Was Here” (2014).

In addition to “Joker,” big movies like “Godzilla: King of the Monsters” (2019) and DC’s “Black Adam” (2022), starring Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson, followed.

Now Sher is thrilled about Maggie Gyllenhaal’s “The Bride!” He filmed what he calls “a very major scene” from the 1930s-set Frankenstein movie in an old Newark trolley tunnel.

The cast was a dream, he says — Oscar winner Christian Bale was on his actor wishlist.

“He delivered in every way,” Sher says.

Star Jessie Buckley (Oscar-nominated for Gyllenhaal’s first film “The Lost Daughter”) was also on his list.

“I really wanted that film, so I was really excited when Maggie chose me to do it,” he says of the movie, which Gyllenhaal wrote and directed.

“It’s one of the best scripts I’ve ever read.”

So yeah, he’s getting that feeling again.

“That one, I think, has an opportunity to be one of the real special ones of my career.”

“Joker: Folie à Deux,” now in theaters, is rated R and runs 2 hours and 18 minutes. “The Bride!” will be in theaters Sept. 26, 2025.