Gaga Teases 'Music,' 'Dance,' 'Audacity and Complexity' in 'Joker 2'

Lady Gaga hailed filmmaker Todd Phillips' upcoming "Joker: Folie à Deux" for its ambitious storytelling, saying that the writer-director would "rather be creative than just tell a traditional story of love," UK newspaper the Independent reported.

"Todd took a very big swing with this whole concept and with the script, giving the sequel to 'Joker' this audacity and complexity," Gaga told entertainment outlet Variety, the Independent relayed.

"There's music, there's dance," Gaga went on to add, saying that the upcoming movie is "a drama, it's also a courtroom drama, it's a comedy, it's happy, it's sad."

The sequel, due to hit theaters on Oct. 4, sees Joaquin Phoenix return to the role of Arthur Fleck, an aspiring standup comedian driven to desperate lengths who ends up adopting the Joker moniker, along with the character's trademark makeup and garish wardrobe.

"Phoenix and Gaga will perform song-and-dance routines while singing classic tunes like 'Get Happy,' 'For Once in My Life' and 'That's Life,'" the Independent noted, "but the director says he wouldn't strictly classify the film as a musical."

Said Phillips: "I just don't want people to think that it's like 'In the Heights,' where the lady in the bodega starts to sing and they take it out onto the street, and the police are dancing."

Added the director: "No disrespect, because I loved 'In the Heights.'"

Still, the film resembles the traditional musical in that "It's just Arthur not having the words to say what he wants to say," Phillips explained, "so he sings them instead."

Gaga had spoken before about how she changed her singing style to depict her character, Harley Quinn. Referring to her character as "Lee," Gaga, in remarks made to Empire Magazine for a cover feature on the film, said that she "worked a lot on the way that I sang to come from Lee and to not come from me as a performer."

Part of that, she added, was a matter of making the movie's musical passages "an extension of the dialogue, as opposed to breaking into song for no conceivable reason" – a comment that may shed some light on just how "musical" the new movie is going to be.

Trailers released thus far have shown snippets of what look like big dance numbers.

"We asked ourselves what would need to be true for two people to just break into song in the middle of a conversation?" Gaga told Variety in her new remarks about the film. "Where does the music come from when no one can hear it but the characters?"

"Neither Arthur nor Lee are professional singers, and they shouldn't sound like they are," the "Poker Face" pop icon added.

"I'm a trained singer, right?" the "Bad Romance" songstress told Empire. "So even my breathing was different when I sang as Lee."

Watch the latest trailer below.