Phoenix from the flames

Taciturn, moody, uncooperative – some of the more endearing terms typically attached to actor Joaquin Phoenix by those who have sought him out for interview.
Most recently he stormed out on Rolling Stone with a dismissive wave and the words ‘I quit’. But if he suffers fools badly, he’s keeping a lid on it today. And with me of all people.
“Maybe I just suck at this sort of thing,” he admits. “I have no beef with the press, not in any personal way. I just don’t like talking about myself or being a fucking salesman.”
There are, he says, actors and performers who love that opportunity, who love being in the spotlight. “But I didn’t become an actor for that. I hate that whole process. If I could act without ever doing interviews, without ever getting photographed that would be sweet. I mean, this is fine but I really don’t like that element who abuse the set up.”
Typically, he says, there are people who put on an act during interviews – Oh hi, Joaquin! – but the moment they raise something you’re not comfortable talking about and you’re honest with them about it, then you’re difficult. He shakes his head.
“Then you’re a bastard.”
Suffice to say, Joaquin Phoenix is not too crazy about people of my vocation. Fair enough. He surely understands though, that the habitually grubby enterprise of film promotion requires both journalist and star interviewee to perform some amusing trick. And such things are unavoidable for a high profile movie star such as he.
“Oh, absolutely. I understand that the press are accustomed to their interviewees offering intimate details. I don’t blame anybody for the way things are. It would be easier if I could. But the entire process is so far removed from what I want to do. I don’t like the expectation that I’m here to entertain or exploit my personal history in some way. But some members of the press think that’s okay – that it’s okay to ask questions that would get you a smack on the mouth at a dinner party or in a bar. I feel like I’m giving you my work as an actor. Isn’t that enough?”
Well at least it’s nothing personal.
When you think of Joaquin Phoenix you think of a very Serious Young Man indeed, and with some justification. A lifelong vegan and PETA (People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals) spokesperson, he’s serious about animal welfare. He refused leather shoes for a Prada campaign and once reportedly burst into tears when former fiancée Liv Tyler ordered lobster from a menu.
He’s serious about acting; cultivating chins for his petulant Emperor in Gladiator and training as a fire-fighter for his heroic dash in Ladder 49.
Perhaps though, we choose to see him this way – as a gloomy presence, one that’s overshadowed by the untimely death of brother River.
In person, though liable to strike a statue of David pose – all furrowed contemplation – before answering a question, he’s lively company, not remotely given to surliness.
Unable to locate anything utilitarian in the elaborately coordinated rooms of London’s Soho Hotel, he insists on making do with a glass for an ashtray rather than have the PR girl go fetch him one. He even looks faintly embarrassed that she would think to trouble herself on his account.
“Yeah,” he says pulling on a second cigarette (ethically rolled on a Native American reservation, of course). “I never recognise myself in those attempts to characterise me. Often I hear the phrase ‘intensely quiet’. By what standards? By the standards of someone on a reality show?”
Though far from a trivial sort, Joaquin seems passionately serious rather than glumly so, bubbling forth on movies he loves (Rocco And His Brothers and Raging Bull are particular favourites) and The Beatles, who he plainly adores. (“Greatest band ever. Nobody else evolved the way they did. Nobody else was so consistently fucking brilliant.”)
Besides, if Mr. Phoenix is, for want of a better phrase, “intensely private”, one can hardly blame him. In 1993, a recording of his sobbing pleas to 911, a call made as River lay dying from an overdose, became a mass entertainment, played on every TV station this side of Al Jazeera. It’s hardly something he wishes to prattle about or re-enact for every passing hack.
He is equally and understandably reticent about his childhood. His improbably named parents, John Bottom Amram and Arlyn Dunitz Jochebed, were wandering hippies and members of the religious cult Children Of God, a disquietingly helter skelter outfit which encouraged sexual relations between adults and children. (River Phoenix once claimed to have been deflowered at the age of four.)
With their father, John, a Children Of God bishop, the family (including Joaquin and siblings, River, Rain, Summer and Liberty) lived nomadically around Central America for years until moving back to Los Angeles.
Living in a one-bedroom apartment and struggling to survive, the Phoenix children would sing on the streets for money. Their mother, now called Heart, found work at NBC and one by one, the kids were pushed into auditions for commercials with varying degrees of success.
By the early ‘90s, Joaquin was coming into his own, receiving particularly positive notices for his role as a stroppy teen in 1989’s Parenthood. River’s death, however, prompted him to quit the spotlight and return to his rootless roots. Travelling around, sometimes with his dad, years would pass before director Gus Van Sant could coax the young actor back in front of the camera for the 1995 film To Die For.
Since then he’s worked steadily and to increasing acclaim. Though always impressive onscreen – even when the vehicle is some rubbish like 8MM – he’s never more magnetic than when essaying the repressed and quietly volatile. He simmers through Quills, Signs and The Village, quakes in Return To Paradise and Hotel Rwanda and simply erupts in The Yards and Gladiator.
Frequently, his efforts are compared to the classic idols of the ‘50s – Montgomery Clift, James Dean, insert your own Elizabeth Taylor beau here – and one can’t help but think he would have been happier in the Hollywood of old.
The studios could have reinvented his life-story and kept him cloistered away between projects. His capacity to suggest torrents of hidden emotion would surely have obliterated anything the Hayes Code might dictate.
Even the scar above his upper lip has an old-fashioned matinee quality about it. (Incidentally, though his mother claims the scar came about through a mysterious pain experienced while she was carrying Joaquin, up close it looks for all the world like a surgically repaired cleft palate.)
This minor defect – one much admired in female circles – takes centre stage in Walk The Line as a most effective double for Johnny Cash’s outlaw sneer. The film, from director James Mangold (Copland, Girl, Interrupted, Identity), plays out the Man In Black’s early biography as a hungry spiritual quest. Joaquin’s extraordinarily soulful performance as Cash is already hotly tipped for the coming awards season, though the 31 year-old admits it was the biggest ask of his career.
“Just saying those words”, he smiles. “Just saying ‘Hello, I’m Johnny Cash’. You can’t imagine how daunting that was.”
Walk The Line, drawn from autobiographies of Johnny Cash (The Man In Black and Cash; The Autobiography), has floated around Hollywood in one form or another for almost a decade. The script was completed and had received the official blessing of Cash and wife June Carter before their respective deaths in 2003.
Acceptable casting, however, was always going to be problematic. Even with Joaquin signed on to play Cash and Reese Witherspoon cast as June, four studios would pass on the project.
Their loss I suppose. Using shoe-lifts (at 5’8”, Joaquin is four inches shorter than Cash) and brown contact lenses, Phoenix looks absolutely credible. What’s more remarkable is that he sounds absolutely credible. Courageously, he and co-star Witherspoon, following four months of intensive rehearsals with music supervisor T-Bone Burnett, did all their own singing in the film. Did Joaquin know he was capable of an elemental baritone, which as G noted at Cash’s funeral, might be mistaken for the voice of God?
“No way. I can’t even do it anymore. It was really difficult. I can’t really sing. When I try to sing something for my friends they think it’s really funny. They stand around, scratching their heads going ‘What the hell is that?’ I can’t hold a tune and I can’t stay in key. So I had to learn to use parts of my voice that are (trips into bass) way down here. It was uncomfortable to the point of hurting. But I kept singing scales until I could do ‘I Walk The Line’ which takes you all the way from a high G to a low G. And doing his speaking voice was like extending the way he sang.”
Tracing Cash’s life until marriage to June in 1968, Mangold’s film gives an excellent account of its subject’s contradictory nature; that sense that he really had been everywhere, man, playing cowboy and Indian, patriot and rebel, sinner and saint.
“What’s difficult about researching any character is that you end up with a wealth of detail you’d love to get onscreen”, explains Phoenix. “I think Jim (Mangold) did any amazing job of condensing all that into a two-hour film. John was such a great and complex being, but if no script can do justice to the icon, Jim’s still nails the man.”
With considerable historical clout, Walk The Line opens with a thundering slow train comin’ hoedown bass. As Johnny Cash prepares to take the stage for his 1968 concert at Folsom Prison, the sight of a circular saw takes him back to his Big River Depression era childhood in Arkansas and the accidental death of his brother. June, the Carter family ingénue is already an angelic presence to be listened out for on the radio.
Slowly, the myth emerges. On an air force base in Germany, following a screening of 1951 B-picture Inside The Walls Of Folsom Prison, an unskilled Johnny Cash plucks and composes ‘Folsom Prison Blues’ on a new guitar, one note at a time. He dresses entirely in black for a first nervy performance before Sam Philips of Sun Records. He hits the road for a blitzkrieg Benzedrine rockabilly tour with Jerry Lee Lewis (played with outrageous flair by country artist Waylon Malloy Payne) and Elvis (a preening Tyler Hilton).
“I have a two-week tour sheet of John’s from that time and you wonder how they managed to get through it, even with amphetamines”, says Phoenix. “It was this crazy lifestyle. They were their own roadies and technicians. They’d drive 700 miles a day and play three shows. And then there were all these girls. As I understand it everybody made do with Elvis’ leftovers but there were so many amazing women after Elvis that everyone was kept busy. I think about John getting sober later in life and how fucked up he was and what he must have went through to get there. Clean living isn’t for the weak.”
Tellingly, Mr. Phoenix checked himself into rehab for after the shoot. Though media reports would speculate that playing Cash had driven the actor to heroin and madness, Joaquin was actually treated for alcohol addiction. Almost a year on, all is well.
Walk The Line is ultimately less concerned with Johnny’s booze hell than with his engulfing passion for June. Reese Witherspoon’s portrayal of the country firecracker in action – and she nearly always is in action – whip-cracks along. A consummate performer hailing from the grand Carter dynasty, her June belts out musical numbers and vaudevillian quips. Like Clementine at the end of the movie, she seems to be all that keeps the boys from degenerative chaos. Yet unlike most Western heroines, she harbours something self-destructive, a palpable darkness beneath her cute petticoats.
Though kept apart by bad calls and marriage to other people, mostly Cash and Carter seem intimidated by the magnitude of their feelings for one another.
“Going into the film, part of me was almost cynical about the Carter-Cash romance”, admits Joaquin. “I just couldn’t see how they could be that perfect. You just imagine that when people are that famous that there’s bound to be that element of bullshit. You know, people in film or music or entertainment have a demanding professional life and they’re moving around constantly and it’s hard to maintain love and a relationship in those circumstances. But they did. They made sure they were together all the time – touring together, recording together, living together. And John talked about that quite a bit, about the joy in sharing everything together.”
Happily, Joaquin had met the couple back in 2000, long before he was attached to the role of Johnny Cash. Attending a dinner in the Carter-Cash home, Mr, Phoenix was struck by Johnny’s deference to his wife.
“He was sitting with his guitar but he couldn’t start without her. He leaned over and said “I’m waiting for June To get my nerve up”. Now, it’s not like Johnny Cash didn’t have nerve. He played in front of prisoners for Chrissake. But I could see the place where he was coming from. I watched hours and days worth of footage before doing the film and he was a great performer on his own. There was never a boundary between the artist and the audience. He just busted right through that. But the joy in him when June walked onstage – he just became like a little boy. He could never contain his smile for her. And they just had so much fun.”
Though thrilled by the occasion, Phoenix admits that the meeting almost made the gargantuan role seem more imposing still.
“The reality was more daunting than the myth. They were very real people, very simple and unpretentious. I love that moment in the documentary The Man, His Words, His Music when he’s asked about his humble sharecropper, cotton picking origins and he smiles and says ‘I’ve adjusted to prosperity quite well’. But he’s out on tour, driving his own motor-home with June in the passenger seat. That can’t be most people’s idea of prosperity. But you have to think it’s a good plan.”
And Joaquin Phoenix smiles before remembering that he’s the serious type.