Variety has sat down with Joker: Folie à Deux director Todd Phillips to learn more about the sequel to his and Joaquin Phoenix's 2019 hit, Joker (which lost its crown to Deadpool & Wolverine as the highest-grossing R-Rated movie ever this past weekend).
Apparently, Phillips and Phoenix started mulling over follow-up ideas pretty early on, with one being to take the Clown Prince of Crime to Broadway. Literally!
"When we started really thinking about it, we realized it takes four years to put something like that together. And is Joaquin really going to give six months of his life to do that every night onstage?" the filmmaker explains. "Then we thought about doing it at the Carlyle as sort of a smaller thing. But COVID hit."
Instead, Joker: Folie à Deux opens with a "Looney Tunes-inspired cartoon" animated by The Triplets of Belleville's Sylvain Chomet before becoming a "full-blown musical" set two years after the events of Joker.
After meeting Lady Gaga's Lee Quinzel in Arkham Asylum, Arthur Fleck stops taking his meds and the duo then break into songs like "Get Happy," "For Once in My Life" and "That’s Life" to convey their shifting emotions.
"Most of the music in the movie is really just dialogue," Phillips reveals. "It’s just Arthur not having the words to say what he wants to say, so he sings them instead."
"I just don’t want people to think that it’s like 'In the Heights,' where the lady in the bodega starts to sing and they take it out onto the street, and the police are dancing. No disrespect, because I loved 'In the Heights.'"
When it's put to him that the Joker sequel cost upwards of $200 million (the first instalment was made for $60 million), he responds, "I read these stories, and it seems like they’re on the side of the multinational corporations. They’re like, 'Why does it cost so much?' They sound like studio executives."
"Shouldn’t people be happy that we got this money out of them, and we used it to go hire a bunch of crew people who can then feed their families?"
Like the first movie, it's been clear for a while that this sequel will put a fresh spin on the comics and, unsurprisingly, that extends to Harley Quinn. "The high voice, that accent, the gum-chewing and all that sort of sassy stuff that’s in the comics, we stripped that away," the director confirms, listing most of what makes Harley...Harley. "We wanted her to fit into this world of Gotham that we created from the first movie."
While Joker: Folie à Deux will be a very different movie from its predecessor, there's already been some negative chatter online. In 2019, much of that was directed at the movie supposedly glorifying violence and subsequently becoming a story that incels - an online subculture who define themselves as unable to find a romantic or sexual partner despite desiring one - can rally around.
"In complete honesty, I’d never even heard that word before," Phillips tells the trade. "And my movie was certainly not a love letter to that type of person. In most movies, they’re pulling out 42 different guns and killing hundreds of people. In my movie, six people die. But what I was doing felt too real. And you go, 'Isn’t that the point? Isn’t it a good thing to show the real-world implications of what a gun does?'"
As for whether this franchise (because, despite what was said five years ago about Joker being a standalone tale, that's exactly what it's become) could continue to expand, it seems Phillips has closed the door on Joker 3. For now, at least.
"It was fun to play in this sort of sandbox for two movies, but I think we’ve said what we wanted to say in this world," he says.
Joker: Folie À Deux arrives in theaters on October 4.