Joaquin Phoenix And Todd Phillips Joked About Placing Joker In Rosemary’s Child, The Godfather – And House

As if Todd Phillips and Joaquin Phoenix’s tackle the Joker wasn’t already intriguing sufficient, the filmmaker and star are taking a substantial artistic swing with sequel Joker: Folie À Deux – stuffing their follow-up movie with song-and-dance numbers as Phoenix’s Arthur Fleck varieties a romantic reference to Girl Gaga’s Harley ‘Lee’ Quinzel. However as uncommon a mix as it’d seen, it got here out of a playfulness that the pair established whereas making the primary Joker – feeling out the tone and the character, and imagining what would possibly come subsequent.

As Phillips tells Empire, conversations about how Arthur Fleck would possibly fare in different eventualities had been rife on Joker. “Joaquin and I talked about one other one the entire time whereas we had been making the primary film, simply because we love the character,” he says. “We had been obsessive about Arthur. We’d virtually joke about it: ‘Oh, we should always take Arthur and we should always do that.’” And as Phoenix tells it, the concepts had been at all times deliberately bonkers. “I had a curiosity about going additional with the character,” he laughs. “It felt like you can put him into virtually any state of affairs, and I might have an interest to see how he would navigate it. I mocked up all of those posters of movies which have already been made, like Rosemary’s Child and Godfather, and I put Joker in them and I gave them to Todd.” There have been even intergalactic gags. “There was a working joke of, ‘What about Joker in house?’,” he says. “However yeah, I used to be fascinated by the place he would find yourself.”

As irreverent as these conversations may need been, that type of freewheeling artistic power has led to the type of follow-up movie that no one noticed coming. “This isn’t a lay-up sequel,” says Phillips, to make use of a basketball metaphor for a protected, straightforward rating. “And that makes it actually thrilling for us.” Subsequent cease: the moon.

Learn Empire’s world-exclusive cowl characteristic on Joker: Folie À Deux – talking to Joaquin Phoenix, Girl Gaga, Todd Phillips and extra in regards to the making of their rule-breaking sequel – within the September 2024 situation, on sale Thursday 1 August. Pre-order a duplicate on-line right here. Joker: Folie À Deux involves UK cinemas on 4 October.