Todd Phillips Tells All on Making ‘Joker 2’: Musical Numbers & more

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“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 shite 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 fricking shite! 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.

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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?”

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“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.”

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