By Filmmaker Todd Phillips has done an extensive feature interview with Variety about the upcoming “Joker: Folie à Deux” film which will premiere in just a few days at the Venice Film Festival.
In it he makes one thing quite clear – don’t expect a “Joker 3” as he says: “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.”
For a while there was confusion that the movie was going to be a full-blown musical with inspiration taken from Coppola’s “One from the Heart,” but those involved have since revealed that’s not exactly the case.
Phillips reveals that much of the talk came about because he and Phoenix were initially considering the idea of setting the follow-up as a Broadway musical until they realised the massive time commitment to both set it up and run it. Then COVID hit and it scuttled those plans.
So it became a film with the character singing and dancing alongside Lady Gaga, who plays a version of Harley Quinn called Lee. The film will see Joker standing trial for five murders and his frayed mind grows even more dangerously untethered.
He also ditches his medication, allowing sojourns into a fantasy world that “plays like the MGM musicals of yesteryear on acid”. However Phillips says it’s not a musical as people think as the musical numbers exist in Arthur and Lee’s warped imaginations:
“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.’”
Phillips has dismissed the reports of a $200 million budget as “absurd” and hates people getting fixated on budgets: “I read these stories, and it seems like they’re on the side of the multinational corporations.”
The piece also reveals that the film commences with a “Looney Tunes-inspired cartoon starring the Joker” crafted by celebrated “The Triplets of Belleville” animator Sylvain Chomet. That leads into the beginning of the film with prison riots, and a scene with “Phoenix and Gaga as a homicidal Sonny & Cher”.
“Joker: Folie a Deux” opens in cinemas October 4th.
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