It all started with Joaquin Phoenix‘s dream.
Shortly before shooting wrapped on “Joker,” Phoenix confessed to Todd Phillips, the filmmaker who had reimagined Batman’s greatest enemy as an aspiring stand-up with a Travis Bickle complex, that he wasn’t ready to leave the character behind. When he fell asleep one night, Phoenix had a vision 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 remembers. “I woke up feeling elated and called him, hoping he’d want to do a show with me.”
Even before “Joker” went on to earn more than $1 billion in 2019, the pair were already thinking about a follow-up. They discussed the prospect of taking their act to Broadway, at least 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 concept — that Arthur, who moves so uncomfortably through the world, could finally find a way to express himself with music — lingered as Phillips and his co-writer, Scott Silver, began plotting a return to Gotham City. Five years and one pandemic later, the result of Phoenix’s nocturnal brainstorm, “Joker: Folie à Deux,” is about to debut at the Venice Film Festival, and Phillips is feeling jittery about how the unconventional encore will be received. After all, instead of battling Batman, this Joker sings and dances with 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 dicey proposition that paid off, becoming a blockbuster hit and winning Phoenix an Oscar. The gritty, pitch-black look at a mentally ill loner proved that audiences would flock to something dark and challenging, provided it came in a comic book coating.
“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 answer is a full-on musical, which uses a genre associated with Judy Garland and Fred Astaire to examine a frayed mind growing even more dangerously untethered as the 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,” says Gaga. “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, particularly the younger men who form the bulk of the audience for comic book flicks, really show up for that? Phillips is banking on their appetite for something new and different at a time when the movie business is primarily interested in retreads and reboots. And he’s used the capital he accrued from “Joker” to convince Warner Bros. to back the much pricier sequel. The first film cost $60 million, and though Phillips admits “Folie à Deux” was much more expensive, he says reports of its budget hitting $200 million are “absurd.” Plus, he doesn’t understand why people care about what’s being spent.
“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 having breakfast on the patio of the Chateau Marmont, a frequent site of the brand of bad-boy debauchery that Phillips memorably depicted in films like 2000’s “Road Trip” and 2009’s “The Hangover.” The Chateau, of course, is where Led Zeppelin and Lindsay Lohan partied, Jim Morrison trashed hotel rooms and John Belushi died. It’s also a place Phillips called home for two years after moving to Los Angeles from New York in the early aughts, holing up in one of its suites while writing “Old School,” with Britney Spears as a neighbor.
“I was getting invited to employee birthday parties and celebrating Thanksgiving with the staff,” Phillips says in a gravelly voice redolent of cigarettes and black coffee (though, in truth, he takes his 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 brainier than his movies about man-children might suggest, talking in detail about Scorsese films he’s loved or the differences between diegetic and non-diegetic music. In a gray collared shirt, his salt-and-pepper hair covered by a “Lake Tahoe” baseball cap, he seems more like a hip professor with a killer vinyl collection than a raging id. Instead, Phillips’ wild side comes out in his approach to moviemaking.
“Todd and I work in much the same way,” says Phoenix, who responded to questions we sent him over email before news broke that he had abruptly left Todd Haynes’ latest movie. “We enjoy spontaneity and the thrill of failing doing what you love.”
There haven’t been many films that didn’t work. In fact, Phillips has established himself as one of Hollywood’s most successful directors, even if he’s yet to become a household name. His movies, which, until “Joker,” mostly consisted of R-rated comedies about men in various states of arrested development, have grossed $3.2 billion. And what makes his hot streak even more impressive is that they draw crowds while reveling in a certain type of anarchy and depravity.
“The Hangover,” for instance, looks at the aftermath of a bachelor party gone off the rails. It starts with three blacked-out friends waking up to discover their buddy has disappeared and then follows them as they retrace their steps while in desperate need of an Advil and some Gatorade. Along the way, a tooth gets extracted, a baby is abandoned and Mike Tyson shows up to retrieve his Bengal tiger. Somehow the movie, released before any of its stars, including Bradley Cooper and Zach Galifianakis, were A-listers, became a raunchy summer blockbuster. “Joker” was even more ambitious, evoking “Taxi Driver” and other gritty staples of ’70s cinema with its portrait of urban rot, yet doing it all under the DC Comics banner. Colleagues say Phillips thrives on making rebellious choices, often making movies for less money to keep his artistic freedom.
“He exists to beat the house,” says Robert Downey Jr., Phillips’ friend and the star of “Due Date,” another of the director’s box office hits. “He’s a one-man ‘Ocean’s Eleven.’ He just wants to take down the casino and leave it so they never know what hit ’em.”
“Joker: Folie à Deux” may be his most go-for-broke gamble yet. It’s a movie that kicks off with a Looney Tunes-inspired cartoon starring the Joker (courtesy of “The Triplets of Belleville” animator Sylvain Chomet) before hurtling through prison riots, courtroom faceoffs and a variety-show sequence that finds Phoenix and Gaga portraying a homicidal Sonny & Cher.
“The goal of this movie is to make it feel like it was made by crazy people,” Phillips says of his manic approach. “The inmates are running the asylum.”
“Joker: Folie à Deux” is set two years after the first film, which ended with Arthur shooting a Carson-like talk show host (Robert De Niro) dead on live television while outfitted as the Joker and inciting a citywide riot in the process. Now, Arthur is locked up in a psych ward and facing the death penalty. But after meeting a fellow patient, Harleen “Lee” Quinzel (Gaga), who is obsessed with him — or, rather, his alter ego, Joker — Arthur ditches his medication and prances into a fantasy world that often plays like the MGM musicals of yesteryear on acid.
As their bond intensifies, Arthur and Lee break into songs like “Get Happy,” “For Once in My Life” and “That’s Life” that convey their shifting emotions: He’s drawn to romantic ballads; she prefers music about power. Clearly, they want different things out of a relationship. Despite all the singing and dancing, Phillips struggles with the idea of labeling “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 quite landed on the proper way to categorize it 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,” he says, pointing out that most of the musical numbers exist in Arthur and Lee’s warped imaginations. “No disrespect, because I loved ‘In the Heights.’”
Beyond the whole notion of reimagining Joker as a singing and hoofing antihero, there was another Phoenix-led inspiration that helped shape “Joker: Folie à Deux.” In their early talks, the actor had also raised the prospect of pairing Arthur with a female Joker, who could serve as a dance partner in a kind of psychotic tango. That led Phillips and Silver to Harley Quinn, a supervillain first introduced in a 1990s animated “Batman” series and later brought to life by Margot Robbie in films like “Suicide Squad” and “Birds of Prey.” But as played by Gaga, this Harley may be manipulative and amoral, but she’s also more grounded.
“The high voice, that accent, the gum-chewing and all that sort of sassy stuff that’s in the comics, we stripped that away,” Phillips says. “We wanted her to fit into this world of Gotham that we created from the first movie.”
Gaga has proven that she can belt out any style of music (see her jazz albums with Tony Bennett), and Phoenix, who once channeled Johnny Cash in “Walk the Line,” is similarly gifted at carrying a tune. But Phillips and his “Joker: Folie à Deux” stars wanted to create a rawer, more unstable sound, fluctuating between euphoria and despair, even if that occasionally required 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.” Instead, the goal was to do something “nerve-racking but honest.” The result is captivating in the way that Phoenix’s uninhibited trance dancing in the first “Joker” was so wildly arresting.
In many musicals, actors will sing along to a pre- recorded track. In this film, Phoenix and Gaga did everything live, accompanied by a piano player who performed off-camera, trying to keep up with whatever tempo they established. In the editing room, Phillips then tried to sync the radically different takes into a coherent whole, something that he describes as a “nightmare.”
“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.”
Phoenix and Gaga are known for going to extremes to nail their performances: She spoke in an Italian accent throughout the shooting of “House of Gucci”; he shed 52 pounds for the first “Joker” (and he looks just as gaunt in the sequel). Did they go full Method on the set of this movie?
“I don’t even really know what Method means,” Phillips says. “Does he take it seriously? Does she take it seriously? Hell, yeah. But he doesn’t stay in character 24 hours a day. With her, I’d say she does a lot more of that than he does. But as a director, I’m in favor of whatever it takes to get them to the place they need to be.”
Phillips has always been drawn to those moments where a character’s carefully cultivated facade cracks, unleashing a primal spirit.
“I love the chaos that comes with that,” he says. “Most of us walk around with this version that we sort of present to the world, but there’s this shadow self. And I’m always fascinated with people when that mask slips off and this other side emerges.”
So in 2003’s “Old School,” audiences got to see Will Ferrell’s neutered newlywed streaking through the suburbs after funneling a few beers, while in “The Hangover,” Ed Helms’ henpecked dentist gets drugged out of his mind and marries a prostitute, bidding farewell to a lifetime of coloring inside the lines. “Joker” puts a bleaker spin on that theme, even as it inverts the formula. Arthur, neglected and abused as a child, then bullied and marginalized as an adult, finally erupts in a paroxysm of rage. But that only comes after he dons a mask, painting his face like a demented circus clown.
Niko Tavernise/ Warner Bros. Pictures
“Todd doesn’t judge his characters,” Josh Safdie, the co-director of “Uncut Gems” and an admirer of Phillips’ work, says. “He’s not exploiting them for shock value. But he’s not sanitizing them either.”
Phillips’ interest in extreme behavior can be traced to his days studying documentary filmmaking at NYU. That’s when he first encountered GG Allin, a punk rocker and heroin addict who often punctuated his sets by defecating onstage. Allin agreed to let Phillips, then 21 years old, follow him around on tour, and he captured the performer’s provocative act as well as the crowds of young fans who turned up to see him. Many of Allin’s shows deteriorated into a melee of violence as the musician got into confrontations with the audience. “He was a fascinating guy, but obviously flawed and fucked up and dark as anything,” Phillips says. “To be around that for a year with him, it was no joke.”
Phillips turned his footage into a documentary, “Hated: GG Allin and the Murder Junkies,” which was released in 1993, just a few months before Allin died of a drug overdose. Phillips’ next film, 1998’s “Frat House,” a documentary he co-directed with Andrew Gurland, found him trading the underground scene for college living, but the hazing and binge drinking that he encountered on campus wasn’t all that different from what Allin was doing onstage. At one school, Phillips went through the pledging process himself, getting locked in a dog crate and showered with beer and ash.
“I’m not pro hazing, but I do understand why, in their teenage brains, this kind of experience causes these young men to bond so intensely,” he says. “I don’t really want to equate it with being in the military, but there is a sense of ‘We went through this shit together’ that links you to each other for life.”
That particularly male form of tribalism was both foreign and fascinating to Phillips, who grew up with two older sisters in Dix Hills, a suburb of Long Island, the only son of a single mother.
“Because I was raised in a very female household, I had this early preoccupation with men and the sort of things they do to feel like men or to fit in,” he says. “My mother always taught us that the last thing you want to do is belong to a group; the last thing you want is to be faceless. But that quest for masculinity can be really funny in comedies and really heartbreaking in dramas.”
Those early, edgy documentaries helped Phillips break into the mainstream entertainment business, something that seemed impossible given that his mother was a dental office receptionist and his father was a customs inspector. “It wasn’t like I had an uncle who worked in Hollywood,” he says. “I had no connections.”
But after “Frat House” got into Sundance, “Ghostbusters” director Ivan Reitman saw the documentary and enlisted Phillips to make “Road Trip,” the story of a group of college kids who go on a drug-and-booze-fueled excursion. It was his first studio feature.
The night before shooting was scheduled to begin, Phillips panicked and called Reitman. “I asked him, ‘Do I just show up? You know, how do I start?’” Phillips remembers. “And he goes, ‘This is what you need to do: After you arrive, go get a bagel and coffee. Then pop into the makeup trailer and say hi to the actors. Then go find the first AD.’ He just moved step by step, and I’m just scribbling away, writing it all down. So that’s what I did that first day.”
At the Chateau, Phillips, directing our breakfast experience, has us relocate three different times. The first table we’re sitting at is in the sun, and Phillips doesn’t want to get burned. The second is too close to a speaker blaring music, and he’s afraid his words will get drowned out. Finally, we retreat to a quiet corner of the patio, away from the other diners. “You’re getting to see the place from every angle,” Phillips jokes.
Friends and colleagues describe him as a savage wit who delivers his sardonic observations with a seen-it-all swagger. It’s a quality Cooper borrowed from Phillips when he starred as the irreverent “Wolf Pack” leader in the “Hangover” trilogy.
“I was basically playing him the whole time,” Cooper says. “I adapted his mannerisms and the rhythm with which he speaks. Todd is like an amalgamation of iconoclasts; he harkens back to the Rat Pack with some John Cassavetes mixed in.”
Warner Bros. Pictures
But even though that wry knowingness is on display, Phillips sometimes seems to be holding back. Perhaps he’s wary of being too unvarnished with his observations or making a joke that will be picked over on social media. Some of the caution has to do with the controversy that threatened to engulf “Joker” when it was released.
Before the movie even opened, there was an onslaught of editorials and articles describing “Joker” as dangerous and faulting Phillips for romanticizing the toxic archetype of a disturbed man who becomes a mass shooter and kills innocent victims for fun. That led to concerns that the movie could inspire copycat violence. At the film’s New York Film Festival premiere, Phillips and Phoenix walked the red carpet in view of SWAT vans, the police presence a sign of how anxious and on-edge authorities were about the film’s impact.
“I was being painted like this provocateur,” he says. “Like I was trying to push buttons.”
But he insists that wasn’t his intention, and in fact, he was surprised by the original film’s reception. Phillips felt “Joker” was really about a lack of empathy in the world. If someone had only grasped Arthur’s pain, or if the social safety net had been more durable, perhaps he could have been helped before he went on a murderous rampage. As for the violence, it’s horrific, showing how much carnage one handgun can inflict. But Phillips thought he was being responsible — not sensational — by depicting the gory aftermath.
“In most movies, they’re pulling out 42 different guns and killing hundreds of people,” Phillips says, growing tense. “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?’”
Also, he was not, he maintains, trying to romanticize “incels,” the sexually frustrated, terminally online subset of men with hostile tendencies. “In complete honesty, I’d never even heard that word before,” Phillips says. “And my movie was certainly not a love letter to that type of person.”
With “Joker: Folie à Deux,” Phillips wasn’t interested in doing something as conventional as depicting Arthur’s metamorphosis into Batman’s nemesis, something the first movie seemed to be setting up by ending with the murder of Bruce Wayne’s parents. “We didn’t want to have him as the clown prince of crime or running a syndicate of criminals,” Phillips says.
Instead, he was more interested in showing the way that Arthur’s breakdown captivates Gotham. He wanted to examine how the very idea of entertainment has changed as movies and TV have come to share a stage with whatever scandal is currently being featured on TMZ or cable news. In the latest “Joker,” Arthur’s courtroom antics aren’t just tabloid fodder, they’re the biggest thing on the airwaves, attracting throngs of “mad as hell” fans.
“It’s all been corrupted,” Phillips says. “Look at the recent presidential debate: There’s a countdown clock and these gladiatorial graphics. Or take the Johnny Depp and Amber Heard trial. Everything is just treated as entertainment now, and there’s something sad and troubling about that.”
It’s hard to watch this movie without thinking of Donald Trump’s recent carnival-like courthouse appearances. And Phillips, for his part, sees similarities between Joker’s hold on his disaffected followers and the former president’s popular appeal.
“Think what you want to about Trump, but for the certain segment of society that’s in love with him, he’s a guy who’s just saying what he wants to say and doing what he wants to do. He is who he is, and people respond to that,” Phillips says.
Despite having come back for a sequel, Phillips is ready to turn the page on his comic book experience. “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. In other words, don’t hold your breath for “Joker 3.”
Nor is he going to tackle Hulkamania. At one point, Phillips was tapped to make a movie about Hulk Hogan, with Chris Hemsworth enlisted to star as the wrestling champion. “I love what we were trying to do, but that’s not going to come together for me,” he says.
Instead, Phillips is ready to return to a different type of arena by making the kinds of movies that launched his career in Hollywood. “I’d love to keep working with Joaquin but on a comedy, because he can be so loose and funny,” Phillips says. “And I think people really want comedies right now. The trailer for ‘Joker 2’ sort of sums things up when it says, ‘What the world needs now is love.’ But I would go farther: We could use a good laugh too.”
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