“Joker: Folie à Deux” filmmaker Todd Phillips is backpedaling on whether or not the supervillain sequel is a musical, admitting in a “Fresh Air” interview Monday that it is, in fact, “the very definition of a musical.”
“I’ve gotten a little bit in trouble in the past for, you know, kind of saying, ‘Well, the movie’s not really a musical.’ And I, for the record, probably should be correcting that,” the director and co-writer told Terry Gross after the journalist pressed him on if he was a fan of the genre.
“It is, in fact, you know, it’s a movie with music in it where people sing, sometimes what they’re feeling — it’s the very definition of a musical,” he relented.
But the Oscar nominee, previously known for comedies like “Old School” and the “Hangover” trilogy, took the opportunity to explain why he’s “always been a little reticent” to categorize the Joaquin Phoenix- and Lady Gaga-led film within the sub-genre it clearly is meant to be in.
“The musicals I tend to love, or musicals in general, when you walk out of them, you feel a lot better than you did when you walked into them. And oftentimes, you find yourself whistling the music from the musical that you just saw. And I, I guess I didn’t want to mislead people because I don’t know that you leave this movie feeling better than you did when you walked in,” Phillips explained. “So I always think the term ‘musical’ has a very, like, positive slant to it. So in some respects, that was my kind of reticence of using the term.”
The comments that got Phillips and his “Joker 2” team in “a little bit of trouble” came earlier this month at the Venice Film Festival, where he, Phoenix and Lady Gaga reflected on the film’s musical elements and its genre at large.
“I think the way we approach music in this film is very special and extremely nuanced. I wouldn’t necessarily say that this is a musical. In a lot of ways it’s very different,” Gaga said during a Venice press conference following the “Joker: Folie à Deux” world premiere screening. “The way the music is used is to give the characters a way to express what they need to say because the scene and dialogue is just not enough.”
Phillips echoed that in a follow-up feature with Variety, saying, “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.”
Phoenix perhaps explained the thought process a bit more succinctly, adding in that same story that “it was important to me that we never perform the songs as one typically does in a musical. We didn’t want vibrato and perfect notes.”
“Joker: Folie à Deux” hits theaters Oct. 4.
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