Todd Phillips Open To A Sequel To Joker

In an interview with Deadline, Joker director Todd Phillips said that he is open to a sequel to the film, which drew both critical praise and commercial success. Here are highlights:

On if the fact that it was about the Joker drew people to it: “I think it was more than that. I mean, I think there are themes in the movie that really resonated with people. None of us thought an R-rated movie could do over $1 billion across the world. But I think the themes in it really resonated. The thing Scott Silver and I set out to do when we wrote the movie together was to make something meaningful in that comic book space, but also something really that addressed what was going on in 2016, when we started writing. It’s pretty obvious what was happening in our country in 2017 while we were writing it, and really wanted to use Joker to make a movie about the loss of compassion and the lack of decorum in the world. I’ve been around the world with the movie and, speaking to the audiences, some people see it as an indictment of America and other people see it as a mirror for what’s going on in their country, both with the lack of compassion and with the wealth and equality issues.”

On Joaquin Phoenix: “Working with him, for me, was the greatest experience I’ve had in terms of director and actor. I mean part of it was because it’s a character study with one person. I’ve never worked that closely with just one, singular person for 60 days shooting, and for four months leading up to it. He likes to talk about things a lot before we go to set. Meaning, in those four months of prep, we spent a lot of time talking about Arthur, talking about Joker, talking about the transformation, auditioning the laugh, auditioning the voice—all those things that you do. But he goes hard, and we went deep. He likes to just discuss it all.”

On a possible sequel: “When a movie does $1 billion and cost $60 million to make, of course it comes up. But Joaquin and I haven’t really decided on it. We’re open. I mean, I’d love to work with him on anything, quite frankly. So who knows? But it would have to have a real thematic resonance the way this one did, ultimately being about childhood trauma and the lack of love, and the loss of empathy. All those things are really what made this movie work for us, so we’d have to have something that had an equal thematic resonance.”