The Villain Returns to Venice as “Joker: Folie à Deux” Makes its World Premiere
Five years after winning the Golden Lion at the 2019 Venice Film Festival, DC’s most iconic villain is back on the Lido. Co-writer director Todd Phillips and stars Joaquin Phoenix and Lady Gaga walked onto the Lido on Wednesday to discuss their hotly-anticipated sequel, Joker: Folie à Deux, ahead of its world premiere at the fest.
Venice was the place where Phillips and Phoenix’s Joker burst onto the screen and set off in what would become an Oscar-laden, billion-dollar mega-hit. Winning the Golden Lion was almost a superhuman feat for a movie set in Gotham and starring the isolated, increasingly psychotic Batman villain, but it presaged Phoenix’s eventual Oscar win for Best Actor and the film’s box office domination.
Five years later, it made perfect sense for Joker: Folie à Deux to bow once again in Venice, the world’s oldest film festival, but Phillips admitted that the second time around was harder.
“It’s a lot easier to come into something as an insurgent than it is as the incumbent,” Phillips said at the packed press conference. “There’s definitely a sense of more nervousness with this second one.”
Phoenix and Phillips couldn’t have anticipated how big of a phenomenon their first film was, and the co-writer/director said that he and his star were committed to only coming back for a sequel if it felt bold enough and that they were “really swinging for the fences.” The question he and Phoenix asked themselves, he said, was, “Could we make something as unexpected as the first one even though it’s a sequel?”
One way they’ve achieved this is by making their film a jukebox musical and recruiting Lady Gaga for the role of another legendary DC character, Harley Quinn. Joker and Harley are the comics’ most iconically twisted romantic duo, and as the title Folie à Deux suggests, the film will explore their shared psychosis.
As Phillips explained in a recent featurette, the music in the film spills from the mind of Phoenix’s Arthur Fleck. The songs we’ll hear are ones that were played by his mother, Penny (played by Frances Conroy in Joker) when he was growing up. Phillips said the initial idea came from a dream Phoenix had, and although the actor was reluctant to go into detail, he later confirmed that he was playing the Joker singing songs in the dream.
The film’s official synopsis states that Folie à Deux “finds Arthur Fleck institutionalized at Arkham, awaiting trial for his crimes as the Joker. While grappling with his dual identity, Arthur not only stumbles upon true love but also discovers the music that has always been within him.”
The film is part of DC Studios’ Elseworlds brand, which are stories set outside of the newly unified universe being created by DC Studios heads James Gunn and Peter Safran. Matt Reeves’s upcoming The Batman Part II and HBO’s The Penguin series also fall under the Elseworlds banner.
“In 2018, when we first made Joker, we could never have imagined it would strike such a chord with audiences around the world,” Phillips wrote in his director’s statement for the Venice Film Festival. “Joaquin and I had discussed a sequel, but never seriously — until we witnessed the reaction to Arthur’s story. If we were going to do it, we knew we had to swing for the fences; we wanted to create something as crazy and fearless as Joker himself. So, Scott Silver and I wrote a script that delved further into the idea of identity. Who is Arthur Fleck? And where does the music inside him come from?”
For more on Joker: Folie à Deux, check out these stories:
New Joker: Folie à Deux” Teasers Unveil Gotham’s Killer New Crooners
The Second “Joker: Folie à Deux” Trailer Reveals Gotham’s Most Explosive New Couple
First “Joker: Folie à Deux” Trailer Unleashes a Twisted Duet
Featured image: LADY GAGA as Lee Quinzel and JOAQUIN PHOENIX as Arthur Fleck/Joker in Warner Bros. Pictures’ “JOKER: FOLIE À DEUX.” Courtesy Warner Bros.
