We’re two weeks out from Joker: Folie à Deux premiering at the Venice Film Festival. Given the billion-dollar, Oscar-winning success of the first film, the expectations are high for Folie à Deux. There’s really no reason to expect the sequel won’t deliver, I think Folie à Deux will be one of the biggest films of the year.
Ahead of the film’s splashy Venice debut, director and co-writer Todd Phillips is profiled in Variety, and I find large chunks of this interview to be disingenuous and massively annoying. Let’s start here:
“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?”
This is Phillips speaking to the rumors that Folie à Deux cost $200 million to make. (Joker cost $60 million, and the sequel undoubtedly cost more, especially given that star Joaquin Phoenix got $20 million for it, and Lady Gaga got $12 million. That’s half Joker’s budget right there.) He’s talking about the sportification of all culture, which has turned box office reporting into a weekly horse race (rather than a measuring stick for the health of the film industry). But let’s focus on this line: “and we used it to go hire a bunch of crew people who can then feed their families?”
You know who else got money to hire crew who could then feed their families? Todd Haynes. You know, the director Joaquin Phoenix left high and dry after bailing on his film—which was Phoenix’s own idea—at the literal last minute, leaving at least a hundred crew members UNPAID. Yeah, it’s great you got to employ a bunch of people for months. Sure would have been nice if Todd Haynes got to employ his people, too. Todd Phillips has explicitly framed making this movie as benefiting others via employment, someone please take the opening to ask Phoenix about the crew members left without pay on Todd Haynes’ film.
Much of the interview, conducted by Brent Lang, frames Phillips as some kind of raucous, rebellious outsider. Dude makes big-budget movies for mainstream studios, he could not BE more inside. Yes, Phillips broke into the industry on the strength of his own work as an indie documentary filmmaker in the 90s, he isn’t a nepo baby. But his career is defined by making mainstream studio fare. Stop acting like making a movie featuring one of the most iconic villains in pop culture backed by a mainstream studio is punk rock. He cribbed Martin Scorsese’s homework and remade The King of Comedy with a clown.
They also touch on the moral panic that surrounded Joker before its release in 2019 (not so much after, because the movie isn’t nearly as dangerous as it thinks it is). While yes, some people did go off the deep end about What It All Means, most of us were just asking why we keep promoting the perspective of the “Nice Guy” who might kill us if we don’t constantly bend the world to make him comfortable. No one gets a bigger platform in pop culture than that guy. Also, I continue to find it incredibly disingenuous that no one attached to Joker considered the mass violence issue that would come up in relation to the film, given that a mass shooter chose a Batman movie during which to commit his act of violence.
And then there’s the whole musical of it all. Yes, Folie à Deux is a musical (and yes, it sounds like a lot of the singing and dancing is happening in Arthur’s head). But Phillips apparently “struggles” to call the film a musical, even though Phillips himself says, “Most of the music in the movie is really just dialogue. It’s just Arthur not having the words to say what he wants to say, so he sings them instead.”
My guy, you have described a musical. By definition a musical is a visual story that uses music to express dialogue, inner monologue, and/or character emotions. You just don’t want to call it a musical because that sounds lame (to you). Phillips also says this: “I just don’t want people to think that it’s like ‘In the Heights’. […] No disrespect, because I loved ‘In the Heights.’”
I mean, it sounds like a little disrespect. In the Heights is bright and colorful and upbeat, I can see why you don’t want anyone confusing it with the murder clown musical. But as they both feature characters expressing themselves through song, Folie à Deux is, indeed, a musical like In the Heights, and I’m pretty sure audiences are smart enough not to get confused.
I’m dreading this press tour, not least because no one is going to call Joaquin Phoenix on his bullsh-t treatment of Todd Haynes and everyone involved with that film, which again, includes unpaid crew members. But also, because Todd Phillips drives me crazy. He’s not a stupid person, he’s just never going to commit to having a deeper conversation than “people like Trump because he says whatever he wants”. Yeah man, a million people have said that since 2015. And that’s my problem with Joker.
Like Phillips, that movie doesn’t say anything fresh or interesting, but we have to act like it’s a revolution to make a serious superhero movie (two years after Logan did it, too). And now with this new movie, we have to hail Phillips as a conquering hero who “beat the house” because he turned a movie featuring one of the most recognizable and popular characters in pop culture into a billion-dollar hit, and now he’s made a sequel that’s a musical about how “everything is entertainment”. Which again, is some old sh-t people have been saying for decades.
