Todd Phillips and Joaquin Phoenix tell all on making ‘Joker 2’

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Five years ago, as the first Joker movie was released into theatres, Todd Phillips and Joaquin Phoenix might have been telling everyone that it was a one-off. But privately, the two of them already knew they couldn’t wait to revisit the Batman villain once again.

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“On the set of the first movie, Joaquin and I would talk about a sequel all the time, but it was more kind of half-joking,” says Phillips, 53, who co-wrote and directed the 2019 original and its upcoming sequel, Joker: Folie a Deux.

“So often when you make a film — at least in my experience — when you get toward the end of it, you are counting down the days for it to be over. But on the first Joker, we didn’t do that. At the end, it was a really sad day because I don’t think Joaquin or I were ready to let go of Arthur. We loved the character so much,” Phillips says in a phone interview from Los Angeles.

The first Joker was a standalone comic book movie based on the DC supervillain that followed Arthur Fleck/Joker (Phoenix), a failed standup comic who descends into madness amid life in the brutal, uncaring world of Gotham City.

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The film was a smash hit and was nominated for 11 Academy Awards, with Phoenix taking home his first best actor statuette.

Any time a comic book movie makes over a billion dollars at the box office, talk of a sequel is going to ramp up. But despite the film’s popularity there was one thing Phillips knew about his star: Phoenix doesn’t do sequels.

“Joaquin has been acting since he was eight years old, and he’s never done a sequel. I think one of the reasons he’s never done a sequel is because he wants to be as nervous and as intimidated and as afraid with a film, and sequels tend to be line drives,” Phillips explains. “I think the only way to get Joaquin to do a sequel is for him to be nervous about it. He’s not interested in a layup. He’s not going to spend six months of his life on a layup. We had to bring him something that made him say, ‘Holy s***! Really?’”

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Phillips and his co-writer Scott Silver came up with an idea of following Arthur in a new story that would lean into the music the sadsack character has heard as the soundtrack to his life.

As Fleck gets ready for his high-profile trial for the murders he committed in the first film, he meets and falls in love with a fellow Arkham inmate, Lee (played by Lady Gaga), who happens to be a Joker fanatic.

Phoenix says singing songs like the Motown fave For Once in My Life, Ella Fitzgerald’s Bewitched, Bothered and Bewildered, Shirley Bassey’s The Joker and the Jacques Brel/Rod McKuen ballad, If You Go Away, among others, help flush out his sad and broken interpretation of the Joker.

“Music just seemed like a really good tool to capture this feeling that Arthur has where he’s reemerging and coming alive again,” Phoenix, 49, says in a separate interview.

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Phoenix was unsure what it would be like working with Gaga, who is one of the biggest music superstars on the planet. But he says the 13-time Grammy Award winner was refreshingly down-to-earth and committed to playing the character that will eventually morph into another famed Batman villain — Harley Quinn.

“I hate those cliches of saying someone’s normal. But she is. That’s the best way to describe her,” Phoenix says. “I never felt like there was this superstar there that would be judging me. It was more like a partnership. It was nerve wracking.”

But despite knowing that they both wanted to revisit the canonical character and continue exploring their corner of the Batman universe, Phillips and Phoenix both say that they were only going to come back if they could do something unique.

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“I think as an artist, as a director, it’s your job to take risks and work hard,” Phillips says. “Of course, you want people to love it, but you have to divorce yourself from the result. You have to just say, ‘Let’s go. This is what we do.’”

In a pair of interviews on a recent Saturday afternoon, Phillips and Phoenix spoke more about their return to the world of Joker, working with Lady Gaga and whether we’ve seen the last of Arthur Fleck.

Joaquin, when we spoke five years ago, you said you weren’t sure about making a sequel. What changed?

Phoenix: It was something I had been thinking about when we were shooting the first one. When we got to the end, I felt like we weren’t done. But, it’s not the kind of thing I wanted to talk about because I wasn’t sure if Todd and Scott wanted to do anything else or if there would even be an appetite for another one. There was no way of knowing. But I knew I would be interested in continuing working with Todd. A lot of the movies I’ve made have been smaller films. That’s what I’ve done for the majority of my career. So it was nice having the resources necessary to make a bigger film, but also work with a writer and director who wanted to tear things apart and deconstruct them and examine them in a way that I’ve never had an opportunity to do on a smaller film. It was a very unique situation and I wanted more of it.

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So how did Joker: Folie a Deux become more of a musical?

Phillips: I got in trouble for saying it’s not a musical … It is, but my experience with musicals has always been when I watch one, I always feel better than I did before it. I’m not sure this is the same (laughs). So I’m always afraid to use that term to describe this because you aren’t going to be whistling on your way out of the theatre. But it came from the very initial conversations Joaquin and I had about Arthur, before we started the first film. While he’s clearly out of step with the world, he has a romance in him — he has a music inside of him. That stuck with Joaquin and showed up in scenes like the bathroom dance in the first movie and when he came out dancing on the Murray Franklin Show and when he was dancing down the stairs in the Bronx, all in the first movie. So we felt like if there’s this music inside of him, what happens when he meets someone who introduces love to him for the first time? Maybe that music inside would come out. It didn’t seem that crazy on paper.

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How did you conquer your nerves singing around Lady Gaga?

Phoenix: I walked in the first day and said, ‘Watch this. Just learn. Quiet yourself and just learn’ (pauses) … That’s sarcasm. I’m going to work on my delivery (laughs). It was f***ing intimidating … The nerves never went away, but we knew what direction we wanted to go in and that was important.

Did she have to change anything in her singing technique?

Phoenix: I feel like it must have been harder for her. It wouldn’t make sense for her character to have the voice (Lady Gaga) has. So she had to approach it from the character’s standpoint. I saw that happen. I was in the studio with her and her first instinct is to sing a song and make it as beautiful as possible. But the character, Harley, doesn’t sing like that. So it was bold for her to do that. She’s had a career for over a decade because of her immense and powerful voice, so to let that voice be fractured to try and capture the inner mind of the character, I thought it was pretty bold.

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Todd, did they sing live?

Phillips: They did … not only did they sing live, we had the music live. We had a pianist off camera.

Todd, you told me on the first one that you were guided by asking yourself, ‘What’s the bold choice? What’s the weird choice?’ What guided you this time?

Phillips: I would say it was the same thing. It was a little bit about asking myself, ‘How do we make something absolutely unique?’ For me, all of this is built around Joaquin and his ability to do anything and me being off camera in awe of it. So much of it, for me, was asking myself, ‘What would I like to see Joaquin come in and be great at?’ So it was the same. When in doubt, we went with the bolder choice.

Todd, you’ve been in a similar situation with The Hangover II. No one knew that Joker was going to be this massive worldwide success, and now you are trying to recreate that. Were you more nervous when making this sequel?

Phillips: I was probably more nervous for the first one … But it’s way harder to make a second one because it’s way harder to be the incumbent than the insurgent.

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When did you think about adding in the Harley Quinn character?

Phillips: It was when we started thinking about what would it look like if Arthur found love. We like playing with the comic book lore and running it through a different lens. So it felt like if we’re going to do that, then we should do our version of this character. In no way was it meant to compete or compare with Margot Robbie (who has played Harley Quinn in three other DC movies). It’s the same as Arthur Fleck. We don’t ever want to compare him to (previous Joker actors) Heath (Ledger), Jack Nicholson, or Jared Leto. We wanted this to exist in its own world.

How did you settle on Lady Gaga?

Phillips: It just felt like we should find an actress that brings music with them. That’s the best way to describe it … We thought if we could get her, it would be an interesting duo … I kind of knew her because I was a producer on A Star is Born with Bradley (Cooper).

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The Joker character has been around for over 80 years. There’s a Penguin series and the Joker movies. Why are the Batman villains so endlessly fascinating?

Phillips: The DC comic books have always felt more grounded in reality and I think villains are scarier when they feel real. Characters like Penguin and Joker felt like they were painted with a more realistic brush. I’m not talking about the look; it was the vibe of it. … I think that’s why they have such an amazing bench of villains in DC.

Joaquin, what was it about Joker that intrigued you enough to make your first sequel? 

Phoenix: You never know how he’s going to react, so it never becomes boring. At times on a film, after eight weeks of shooting, sometimes you get bored. It gets real hard to feel fresh and find a new approach. But with this character … you could almost do anything. Before we finished the first film, I made all of these mocked up posters of classic films that I had done with Joker’s face Photoshopped into them. I had The Godfather and One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest and Yentl (laughs). I should release these posters because they were really funny. But the joke was, you can put the character into any of those movies and I would be interested to see what he did.

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Have we seen the last of Arthur Fleck and the Joker?

Phillips: I love comic book movies in general, but this was fun to do because it was built around an actor that I completely worship. But it’s not a world I would want to necessarily play in more.

Phoenix: There is something that is endlessly appealing about the character, and there’s always new potential and I love working with Todd. It’s hard to articulate. I just feel like he’s a kindred spirit. So, you know, we’ll see.

Joker: Folie a Deux opens in theatres Oct. 4.

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