Lifestyle
'I didn't want it to end.' Why director Todd Phillips came back with another 'Joker'
Joaquin Phoenix and Lady Gaga star in Joker: Folie à Deux.
Niko Tavernise/Warner Bros.
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Niko Tavernise/Warner Bros.
After his 2019 Oscar-winning film Joker, director Todd Phillips knew he wanted to do more with the character — and with Joaquin Phoenix, who played the title role. The film centers on Arthur Fleck, a troubled man with a history of mental health problems, who eventually becomes Batman’s archnemesis.
“Oftentimes … as much as we enjoy making a movie, you’re kind of at the end counting down the days for it to be done,” Phillips says. “But on the first Joker, Joaquin and I didn’t want it to end.”
One iconic scene from Joker features Phoenix dancing on stairs, and moving as if he has music in his head. Phillips considered following up the film with a Broadway musical or a cabaret act, but then he stumbled upon a new idea: Why not make the sequel a movie musical?
Joker: Folie à Deux picks up two years after the first film, with Phoenix’s character in prison awaiting trial for murder. Lady Gaga co-stars as Lee Quinzel, a version of the Joker’s occasional partner-in-crime, Harley Quinn. The film touches on issues relating to mental health disorders, the insanity defense, and how the media can turn killers into celebrities.
Phillips says corruption is a main throughline of the film: “Movies tend to hold a mirror in general. … The judicial system is corrupt, the media is corrupt in this movie. … It’s also about the corruption of entertainment.”
Phillips made a name for himself in Hollywood with comedies, including The Hangover films, Road Trip and Old School. After two dark Joker films, he’s ready to return to some lighter material.
“The end of this year’s probably going to be wild. And it does feel like everybody just needs to calm down and laugh again,” he says. “I am ready to make another comedy, I think. I think that’s what the world needs.”
Interview highlights
On working with Joaquin Phoenix
As a director, all you want to do is be around great actors. All you want to do is watch great actors. I feel so blessed that I’ve spent the last five years … staring at Joaquin Phoenix’s face, talking to Joaquin Phoenix, working with Joaquin Phoenix. I think he’s the best at what he does. I think he’s on Mt. Rushmore, for sure, of his generation of actors. So I just feel so lucky.
“As a director, all you want to do is be around great actors,” says Todd Phillips (right), of his work with Joaquin Phoenix.
Niko Tavernise/Warner Bros.
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Niko Tavernise/Warner Bros.
On Lady Gaga shedding her pop star persona for the film
What I was amazed with Gaga most was this idea of, could she be vulnerable? Obviously, she could sing. Obviously, she brought music with her and all that stuff. And I’ve seen her be great in movies. And I was one of the producers on A Star Is Born, so I knew her a little bit. I knew what she was capable of as an actor. But the big question was: Can she be vulnerable in the way that Lee has to be vulnerable in this film? And, you know, she just brought that instantly. …
Being a huge singer is different than being an actor. Think of the biggest actor and they probably couldn’t sell 50,000 tickets at a giant stadium. But a singer can. So they’re famous on a different level. … She kind of blew our minds with the ability to just strip it all away.
On how he shot the singing scenes to make it feel alive
Often in musicals, the actors want to sing live on set, and they do sing live on set, but they’re usually singing to a background track of the music. But because Joaquin wants it to feel really alive and of the moment, he didn’t really necessarily want to decide what that arrangement would be. So we actually had a pianist live on stage in a soundproof little booth playing, so the actors were able to lead the music, not the arrangement, if that makes sense. … So Gaga’s pianist is in her ear, but he’s following her melodies and her lead, if that makes sense. Which really I don’t know who’s ever done that before. It was difficult because then we would backwards engineer the arrangement later in editing and put the music to it.
On being flexible in his filmmaking style, even in dramatic movies
I started being a filmmaker through documentaries. And that’s all documentaries are, is, you set out to make a movie and then the movie that you end with is very different than what you set out to make because the movie ultimately tells you what it wants to be. And then I went to comedy where you would try to write a joke eight months before you film it, and all of a sudden you have Will Ferrell on set and saying that joke to Vince Vaughn and it doesn’t land the way you thought it would land, but Will Ferrell, who’s a comedic genius, suddenly goes, “Well, what if I do this?” So it’s this flexibility I’ve always had with story that I think is what made me transition to working with somebody like Joaquin so kind of seamlessly. … I jokingly always say filmmaking is not math. It’s jazz, meaning it’s a living, breathing organism that is constantly changing shape.
On starting out in documentaries because he didn’t have enough life experience to write his own films
What experience do you have at 18 years old outside of, my parents were divorced? I was raised with a single mom, but I don’t know that I had the life experience that you then put into movies later on when you start writing movies. So I always saw documentaries as a way to kind of live life on fast forward and to get experiences, to go on the road [for the film Hated] with GG Allin, the punk rock singer for a year and be surrounded by that mayhem. … Being around that definitely ends up in your work later on. I mean, I think you could trace every movie between Hated and Joker and see a very clear connection between those two films.
Ann Marie Baldonado and Susan Nyakundi produced and edited this interview for broadcast. Bridget Bentz, Molly Seavy-Nesper and Beth Novey adapted it for the web.
Students walk on the Stanford University campus on March 14, 2019, in Stanford, Calif.
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Ben Margot/AP
When Theo Baker arrived at Stanford University a few years ago, he joined the student newspaper, following the path of his journalist parents, Peter Baker, a White House correspondent for The New York Times, and Susan Glasser, a writer for The New Yorker.
Through his reporting as a student journalist, he eventually broke a story about manipulated data in Stanford President Marc Tessier-Lavigne’s neuroscience research that helped lead to the university president’s resignation.
Theo Baker’s book, How to Rule the World: An Education in Power at Stanford University was released May 19. In it, Baker describes Stanford as a place where proximity to Silicon Valley gives rise to a parallel system of influence, recruitment and money, with investors looking to identify promising students almost as soon as they arrive on campus.
He told Morning Edition host Steve Inskeep there was “a sort of Stanford inside Stanford,” where elite students are drawn into an “alternate reality” of excess and access to cut corners.
In the interview, he discusses how Stanford is not just a university but also a pipeline where status and power can matter as much as ideas.
We reached out to Stanford University for comment and have not heard back.
Listen to the interview by clicking play on the blue box above.
The scoreboard shows the results of the women’s singles final match between Iga Swiatek of Poland and Amanda Anisimova of the U.S. at the Wimbledon Tennis Championships in London, Saturday, July 12, 2025.
Kirsty Wigglesworth/AP
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Kirsty Wigglesworth/AP
Fifteen points in tennis? Nice. Thirty, 40 — even better. Advantage — that sounds good. “Love” — that also must be great, right? Well, not quite.
As the French Open rolls on and Serena Williams has announced her return to the sport, maybe you’ve been paying a little more attention to tennis. The sport’s scoring system is notably distinct, and can sometimes be hard to grasp for newcomers. But even tennis aficionados might not know why, or how, “love” became the unmistakable callout for zero points. For this installment of NPR’s Word of the Week, we’re exploring how a word that signifies trailing behind got such a sweet name.
“Love” comes from the heart — or an egg?
It’s hard to pinpoint when the first tennis ball went over the net. Tennis is a derivative of lots of other sports, such as “jeu de paume,” a handball game played in France, said JT Buzanga, the collections manager at the International Tennis Hall of Fame museum.
But tennis became a patented, official sport in 1874, said Steve Flink, a journalist whose tennis coverage got him inducted into the International Tennis Hall of Fame. It has retained its unique, mysterious scoring system ever since.
“By and large, the original system has held up almost entirely,” Flink said.
The use of “love” goes back to the late 18th century, said Jesse Sheidlower, a lexicographer. But it was used earlier than that in card games such as whist and bridge. Before the term made its way to tennis, the sport favored plain old “nothing,” or “nil,” he said.
Why love in the first place, though? Historians don’t really know for sure, but there are a few theories.
The French could have something to do with it. Some historians believe “love” derives from “l’oeuf,” which means “the egg” in French. Because eggs are shaped like zeros, terms such as “goose egg” and “duck’s egg” have been used in other contexts to mean zero, Sheidlower said.
It’s also possible English speakers mispronounced l’oeuf as “love.” But Sheidlower isn’t convinced that’s the answer.
“It’s the French equivalent of an English expression. But since that expression doesn’t appear in French, the French word wouldn’t have been used,” he said.
To be sure, France has had a lot of influence on tennis culture, Buzanga said. For example, “deuce” or a game tied at 40 points, comes from the French word for “two”: “deux.” But he prefers another prominent theory: that “love” comes from the idiom “for the love of the game.” Even if a player hasn’t scored, it doesn’t matter, because their heart is in it. It’s the theory Sheidlower said is the most plausible, because the idiom was used by the English before tennis was popularized.
Another variation of the “love of the game” theory is that the word could have come from the Dutch “lof,” or “honor” — or the Latin “amare,” meaning “to love,” Flink said.
But if tennis’ “love” doesn’t come from a French word, the theory at least has a French sensibility.
“I think the ‘for the love of the game’ is kind of romantic,” Buzanga said.
“Love” probably isn’t going anywhere
Tennis used to be a sport of leisure. The style of play has changed a lot over the years; players are more athletic and competitive, for instance, Flink said. But the rules of the sport are more steadfast, he said.
“There’s this incredible, enduring respect for tradition in tennis,” he said. “Changes are not made easily.”
There has been one major change in modern history: the tie-break. Matches can go on and on because players have to score two consecutive points to break a deuce, or by two games to break a tied set. But the onset of television meant matches would have to get shorter if the sport wanted to capture a larger audience, Flink said.
Change even came for “love.” An alternative sprouted up in the 1970s, and is still used today: “bagel,” named for its zero shape, Sheidlower said. Novices may say “zero,” and insiders will understand what they mean, but they “will needle them about it,” Flink said.
But “love” still prevails.
“People kind of like it,” Flink said. “It’s different. Why say zero when you can say love?”
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