Director Todd Phillips’ says his ‘addiction to risk’ fueled the creation of Joker: Folie à Deux

It all began with a dream Joaquin Phoenix had. 

Just before wrapping up the filming of "Joker," Phoenix shared with Todd Phillips, the director who had reimagined Batman's iconic adversary as a struggling stand-up comedian with a Travis Bickle complex, that he wasn't ready to let go of the character. One night, Phoenix dreamt of Arthur Fleck, the man behind Joker’s clown makeup, performing onstage, telling jokes, and singing.

“Todd was in the wings talking to me through a headset,” Phoenix recalls. “I woke up feeling elated and called him, hoping he’d want to do a show with me.”

Even before "Joker" grossed over $1 billion in 2019, the duo was already contemplating a sequel. They even considered taking their act to Broadway until reality set in.

“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?” Phillips says. “Then we thought about doing it at the Carlyle as sort of a smaller thing. But COVID hit.”

Still, Phoenix's initial idea—that Arthur, who moves so awkwardly through the world, could finally find a way to express himself through music—lingered as Phillips and co-writer Scott Silver started planning a return to Gotham City. Five years and a pandemic later, Phoenix's dream has materialized into “Joker: Folie à Deux,” set to debut at the Venice Film Festival. Phillips admits to feeling anxious about how this unconventional sequel will be received, especially since, instead of fighting Batman, this Joker sings and dances alongside Lady Gaga.

“Why do something if it doesn’t scare the shit out of you?” Phillips asks. “I’m addicted to risk. I mean, it keeps you up at night. It makes your hair fall out. But it’s the sweat that keeps you going.”

"Joker" was a risky venture that paid off, becoming a blockbuster and earning Phoenix an Oscar. The dark, gritty portrayal of a mentally ill loner proved that audiences would embrace something challenging if presented within a comic book framework.

“The question became, ‘how can we top ourselves?’” Phillips says. “And you can only do that if you do something dangerous. But there were days on set where you’d look around and think, ‘Holy fucking shit! What did we do?’”

The result is a full-on musical, blending a genre associated with Judy Garland and Fred Astaire to explore a mind increasingly untethered as Joker stands trial for five murders.

“Todd took a very big swing with this whole concept and with the script, giving the sequel to ‘Joker’ this audacity and complexity,” Gaga says. “There’s music, there’s dance, it’s a drama, it’s also a courtroom drama, it’s a comedy, it’s happy, it’s sad. It’s a testament to [Todd] as a director, that he would rather be creative than just tell a traditional story of love.”

But will moviegoers, especially the younger male demographic that typically supports comic book films, show up for this? Phillips is betting on their craving for something different at a time when Hollywood is mainly focused on reboots and retreads. He leveraged the success of "Joker" to convince Warner Bros. to back the more expensive sequel. The first film had a $60 million budget, and while "Folie à Deux" was pricier, Phillips dismisses reports of a $200 million budget as "absurd." He also questions why people care about the costs.

“I read these stories, and it seems like they’re on the side of the multinational corporations,” Phillips says. “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?”

We’re discussing this over breakfast at the Chateau Marmont, a notorious spot for bad-boy debauchery, where Phillips once lived for two years while writing “Old School.” The Chateau, where rock legends and Hollywood stars like Led Zeppelin, Lindsay Lohan, and Jim Morrison partied, became home for Phillips after moving from New York to L.A. in the early 2000s.

“I was getting invited to employee birthday parties and celebrating Thanksgiving with the staff,” Phillips recalls with a voice reminiscent of cigarettes and black coffee (though he actually prefers his coffee with half-and-half). “So eventually I realized, I’ve been here too long. Time to get my own place.”

Phillips is more reserved and intellectual than his films about man-children suggest, often discussing his admiration for Scorsese films and the nuances between diegetic and non-diegetic music. Dressed in a gray collared shirt with salt-and-pepper hair under a "Lake Tahoe" baseball cap, he appears more like a cool professor than a wild party animal. His rebellious side emerges more in his filmmaking approach.

“Todd and I work in much the same way,” says Phoenix, who responded to questions via email before abruptly leaving Todd Haynes' latest film. “Todd and I work in much the same way.”

Phillips has had few misfires, establishing himself as one of Hollywood’s most successful directors, even if his name isn’t as well-known. His films, mostly R-rated comedies about men in various states of arrested development, have grossed $3.2 billion. What makes his success even more remarkable is that his movies, filled with a certain brand of anarchy and depravity, continue to draw large audiences.

For instance, "The Hangover" follows the aftermath of a wild bachelor party, where three friends wake up with no memory and a missing groom. The movie, released before its stars Bradley Cooper and Zach Galifianakis were A-listers, became a raunchy summer hit. "Joker" was even more ambitious, drawing inspiration from '70s cinema with its gritty portrayal of urban decay, all within the DC Comics universe. Colleagues note that Phillips thrives on making rebellious choices, often working with smaller budgets to maintain creative freedom.

“He exists to beat the system,” says Robert Downey Jr., Phillips’ friend and star of “Due Date,” another box office hit. “He’s like a one-man ‘Ocean’s Eleven,’ always aiming to outsmart the house and leave them wondering what happened”

"Joker: Folie à Deux" might be Phillips’ biggest gamble yet. It starts with a Looney Tunes-inspired cartoon featuring Joker before diving into prison riots, courtroom showdowns, and a variety show sequence where Phoenix and Gaga play a homicidal Sonny & Cher.

“The goal is to make the movie feel like it was made by crazy people,” Phillips says of the film’s chaotic approach. “The inmates are running the asylum.”

"Joker: Folie à Deux" is set two years after the original, where Arthur, who ended the first film by shooting a talk show host (played by Robert De Niro) on live TV, is now locked in a psychiatric ward and facing the death penalty. After meeting Harleen “Lee” Quinzel (Gaga), a fellow patient obsessed with him—or rather, his alter ego, Joker—Arthur stops taking his meds and retreats into a fantasy world, reminiscent of MGM musicals on acid.

As their bond grows, Arthur and Lee perform songs like “Get Happy,” “For Once in My Life,” and “That’s Life,” reflecting their shifting emotions. Arthur leans towards romantic ballads, while Lee prefers powerful anthems, highlighting their differing relationship goals. Despite the musical elements, Phillips hesitates to label "Joker: Folie à Deux" a musical.

“Most of the music in the movie is really just dialogue,” Phillips says. “It’s just Arthur not having the words to say what he wants to say, so he sings them instead.”

Phillips hasn’t settled on how to categorize the film yet. “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.”

Beyond reimagining Joker as a singing antihero, Phoenix also suggested pairing Arthur with a female Joker, leading Phillips and Silver to Harley Quinn. However, Gaga’s portrayal of Harley is more grounded, devoid of the high-pitched voice, accent, and sassy demeanor seen in comics and earlier films.

Gaga, known for her vocal versatility, and Phoenix, who showcased his singing ability in “Walk the Line,” aimed for a raw, unstable sound in the film, fluctuating between euphoria and despair, sometimes even singing off-key.

“We asked ourselves what would need to be true for two people to just break into song in the middle of a conversation?” Gaga says. “Where does the music come from when no one can hear it but the characters? Neither Arthur nor Lee are professional singers, and they shouldn’t sound like they are.”

Phoenix agrees. “It was important to me that we never perform the songs as one typically does in a musical. We didn’t want vibrato and perfect notes.” The outcome is as captivating as Phoenix’s trance-like dancing in the first “Joker.”

In many musicals, actors lip-sync to pre-recorded tracks. In this film, Phoenix and Gaga performed live, accompanied by an off-camera piano player, creating a challenge for Phillips in editing as he tried to sync their different takes into a coherent whole.

“Particularly for Joaquin, so much of it is about feeling the moment as you do it,” Phillips says. “You can’t decide that in a sound studio three weeks before you show up to shoot it.”

Both Phoenix and Gaga are known for their extreme commitment to their roles—Gaga spoke in an Italian accent throughout “House of Gucci,” and Phoenix lost 52 pounds for the first “Joker,” looking just as gaunt in the sequel. Did they go full Method for this movie?

“I don’t even really know what Method means,” Phillips says. “Do they take it seriously? Hell, yeah. But Joaquin doesn’t stay in character 24/7. Gaga does more of that than he does. But as a director, I’m in favor of whatever gets them where they need to be.”