Todd Phillips ‘Can’t Say Yes or No’ About Joker 3

But he can explain how he “scared” Joaquin Phoenix into doing a sequel in the first place. Photo: Warner Bros.

Five years ago, Todd Phillips’s Joker snuck into Venice and emerged an unexpected winner of the Golden Lion, the first trophy in an awards-season hot streak that eventually saw Joaquin Phoenix hoist the Best Actor Oscar. Now, what do they do for an encore?

As Phillips revealed at the official Venice press conference for Joker: Folie à Deux, that pressure gave the follow-up to the 2019 hit much higher stakes. “It’s a lot easier coming into something as the insurgent as opposed to the incumbent,” Phillips said. “On the first movie, we flew under the radar — or as under the radar as you could be on a movie called Joker. Nobody knew what we were doing. The hard part about doing this is you feel the eyeballs on you.”

Those eyeballs were readily apparent from inside the Palazzo del Casinò. All week, Venice has played host to one big star after another: first Angelina, then Nicole, then Brad and George, then Daniel Craig. In the hour leading up to the Folie à Deux press conference, however, I heard a vocal disturbance outside that I’d never heard before. Was it some kind of protest? Then it hit me: Lady Gaga was entering the building.

Folie à Deux has found a novel way to address the heightened stakes for a Joker sequel: make it a musical, and add one of the biggest pop stars in the world. In the press conference, Gaga needed no introduction. Which was good, because her co-star wasn’t sure what to call her. “Gaga was very …” Phoenix began, before checking her preferred nomenclature. “Stefani,” he corrected, “was like, ‘We’re gonna sing live.’”

Phoenix is the kind of actor’s actor not known for doing sequels. “We had joked about doing one all the time, but if we were really going to do it, it had to scare him the way the first one did,“ Phillips said. The answer came in a dream Phoenix had in which he was singing onstage as the character of Joker. “I called Todd, because I thought there might be something there,” he said. “And … there wasn’t.”

But that grew into the germ of an idea. Some of the character’s most iconic moments had come through dance: writhing in anguish after murdering three strangers, strutting down a staircase after embracing his inner villain. “He has music in him,” Phillips said. What if he sang?

Thus, a Joker musical, in which the man born as Arthur Fleck sings a selection of mid-century standards. “It was all meant to feel like music Arthur might have listened to with his mom when he was younger,” Phillips said. At first, Joker was supposed to perform in the manner of Frank Sinatra and Sammy Davis Jr. “I started trying to emulate that sound, until I realized: This is not who Arthur is,” Phoenix said. “That was when it clicked for me. We took those standards and decided to do our own interpretation.”

Gaga plays a new incarnation of Harley Quinn, in this telling a Joker superfan. (Six years after “L. Gaga,” her press-conference placard called her by her full stage name.) “For me, it was about unlearning technique,” she said. Her pop-star training went out the window. Now her task, she said, was “forgetting how to breathe and allowing the song to come completely out of the character.”

Ahead of the film’s premiere, rumors swirled that Folie à Deux would function as Phillips’s response to the firestorm of discourse sparked by the original, when multiple critics suggested the film held the potential to incite violence. At the press conference, the director waved off this suggestion. “I do think the last film was painted with an interesting brush,” he said to a questioner who’d called the backlash undeserved. “This movie was not in response to that in any way. Movies are way too hard to make [to function] as a statement in response to something.”

Phillips’s only goal for Folie à Deux, he said, was for it to feel “audacious, like we were swinging for the fences.” Having done so under a considerable spotlight, did he have any plans for how to raise the stakes again for a third Joker film?

“I don’t want to speak for Joaquin, but for me, the story of Arthur/Joker has been told,” Phillips said. “I can’t say yes or no, but it’s not necessarily my goal to stay in this space.”

In other words, with Folie à Deux, Phoenix’s Joker may have finally sung his 11 o’clock number. As they say in theater: Send in the clowns.