Tuesday, May 16, 2006
Interview 2Entertainment Weekly
by Chris Willman
November 18, 2005
Telling the story of Johnny and June Carter Cash -- In ''Walk the Line,'' Joaquin Phoenix and Reese Witherspoon revive the harmony of the songbird legends On a sweltering summer day in Mississippi, the cast and crew of Walk the Line are on location inside one of the Tunica area's large-scale barge casinos, tricked out to resemble the Mint in Las Vegas in the 1960s. It's a performance scene in which Joaquin Phoenix is playing Johnny Cash the way America loves and remembers him best: as a pill-popping, flop-sweating, emaciated, unhinged rock & roll wreck.
Well, maybe it's only a small cadre of rockabilly cultists who prefer to think of him as the hopped-up maniac who'd knock down doors and kick out Opry footlights. More fans will hold to comforting memories of Cash as a genial father figure, stoic balladeer, champion of the American Indian, defender of the flag, even frequent Billy Graham Crusade guest. But most of that came after the hell-raising years, and it wasn't from nothing that June Carter saved him.''He'll be out any second, folks!'' Reese Witherspoon, as Carter, chirps at an audience of extras. The band marks time: boom-chicka-boom. Eventually, Phoenix runs limping onto the stage, launching into ''I Got Stripes'' like a man with a train full of amphetamines to catch. Witherspoon looks alarmed, and she isn't necessarily pretending: In take after take, Phoenix has insisted on bumping his leg on an amplifier as he trots on stage, to appear all the more believably stoned. He's injured his leg badly enough that earlier I glimpsed him backstage pressing an ice pack to his knee. On top of that, each take has him falling unconscious midverse, and Phoenix isn't the kind of actor to pass out gingerly.
''I got chains, chains around my feet...'' he sings, ''and them chains, them chains, they're about to drag me down....'' And he is down — oof! — this time falling onto the acoustic guitar strapped Cash-style to his back. Curtains close and a voice comes over the PA saying that it is now a ''closed set.'' Meaning that if Phoenix is going to impale himself on a guitar or develop a fatal clot in his leg today, someone figures it'd be better to not have any note-taking witnesses.
You might figure that someone is Phoenix. Word is that he only wants to be called ''J.R.'' (Cash's actual given legal name) on set, so maybe it follows that he doesn't want anyone in nonperiod clothes in his sight lines while he bangs his body to kingdom come. But on the drive back up to Memphis, the cell phone rings. ''Joaquin just wants you to know that he enjoyed having you on the set,'' a publicist relays, ''and didn't have any problem with you being there.''
There's something positively Cashlike in Phoenix's commitment to living — or at least performing — on the edge. (The actor recently completed a stint in rehab for alcohol abuse.) But like Cash, he's also mortified that this intensity might put anyone out or make him seem like a diva. ''Ah, geez,'' he moans, 15 months later, when the issues of getting into character come up. As for being called ''J.R.,'' ''I'm embarrassed about it now. But when I heard 'Joaquin,' it just didn't feel right. It's not a brilliant method. It's simply that I don't know what I'm doing, and I use all the help I can get. It's an act of desperation.''
Phoenix winces at the memory of a photo shoot he did in Memphis, in character, with a photographer who'd often shot the real J.R. back in the day. ''And he was shooting me outside Sun Studio, and these people drove by and yelled out, 'Hey, Mr. Cash!' And this photographer was like: Oh, Jesus, this f---ing idiot, this acting punk, being called Mr. Cash... He wanted to kill me.'' A pause. ''I understood.''
Think about it: in the 20th Century, there was arguably no other performing duo so publicly in love — for so long — as Johnny and June, who wed in 1968 after a decade of yearning and forestalling, and were inseparable until their deaths just four months apart 35 years later. You'd assume Walk the Line would have been a movie studio's dream — particularly with a director, Girl, Interrupted's James Mangold, who'd overseen Oscar-caliber performances; a tight $28 million budget; and the commitment of Phoenix and Witherspoon, who'd signed on for a fraction of their usual fees. Yet ''the studios viewed it as nostalgia,'' says producer Cathy Konrad, recalling the reaction when she and Mangold first made the rounds. ''A lot of people in Hollywood view John as 'country,' and then ask, 'Does country sell?''' In other words, great idea for a Cracker Barrel DVD exclusive, but we'll pass.
Mangold tried to play down the country and instead ''pitch the movie to studios as 'the birth of rock & roll.' Then you realize they don't know what the f--- that means,'' he says, ''because to them, [early] rock & roll is Aerosmith.'' Mangold also tried to explain what he saw as parallels to East of Eden, which ''helped us visualize how young the movie would be: not [latter-day] John Cash, the strapping, barrel-chested priest in black, but a young guy with James Dean's energy.'' Which went over as well as that ''birth of rock'' angle.
Getting Walk the Line made had been an obsession for Mangold and Konrad — who are husband and wife — ever since they first worked together on Cop Land, when the director got geeky and lent his bride-to-be Cash's voluminous Bear Family boxed sets. They envisioned something that was less about musical ambition and more a love story, full of father-son shame and romantic redemption. But producer James Keach owned the movie rights to Cash's life story — having befriended the family after the singer appeared on Dr. Quinn with Keach's wife, Jane Seymour — and had spent years trying to get his own film made. In 1999, the two parties effected a merger, and Sony bought into their idea — only to opt out, Konrad speculates, after Michael Mann's high-profile 2001 biopic, Ali, failed to live up to hyped expectations.
Fox finally took it on in 2003, though it remained a low-budget picture that Konrad calls ''the little engine that could.'' Elizabeth Gabler, the head of Fox 2000, doesn't gloat too much at having seen what the other majors missed. ''I can only assume they thought a country music icon might give the picture a domestic profile, as opposed to an international one. They may not have realized that people love Johnny Cash all over the world.''
The delays gave the filmmakers a few extra years to befriend Cash and Carter and prod them for previously unchronicled personal details they could use in the script, down to the first time they slept together. Son (and exec producer) John Carter Cash admits there's stuff in the screenplay he hadn't heard. ''My parents never told me that my mother threw beer bottles at my father and his friends one morning,'' he says, surmising, ''If my mother threw beer bottles, she had a pretty good reason.''
It's a fluke of timing that suddenly musical biopics are back in: Last year, of course, everybody loved Ray. Walk the Line bears many structural similarities (both subjects suffer lasting guilt over a brother's childhood death; both movies climax with detox scenes in the late '60s). But while brother Ray loved his women, Johnny was deeply in love with a woman, and some think that romantic arc is why Cash's story might have even broader cinematic appeal. Also, where the capable Jamie Foxx lip-synched to Charles' classic tracks, the actors in Walk the Line did their own singing, blending prerecordings and live-on-set vocals. ''Otherwise,'' says Mangold, ''we'd be making this kind of effects movie, where any time a musical thing is about to happen, 19 buttons and wheels and pulleys have to be pulled. That seemed antithetical to everything John and June were.'' Mangold and Konrad enlisted music producer T Bone Burnett (a Grammy winner for O Brother, Where Art Thou?) to lead Phoenix and Witherspoon through three and a half months of daily lessons, rehearsals, and recording.
''I took this project on defensively,'' Burnett explains, ''because Johnny Cash is such a pure, Walt Whitmanesque American figure that to have a cleaned-up or slick movie representation of him out there for all time was a horrible thought.'' (Burnett has worked on some messy movies himself, like the Jerry Lee Lewis story Great Balls of Fire!, ''a horrible experience'' from which he had his name removed.)
Mangold and Konrad had long imagined Phoenix (for his James Dean appeal) and Witherspoon (the Southern connection) in these roles. But there was a certain degree of bluffing going on with the studios, since they'd never screen-tested or, more important, soundbooth-tested their leads. ''Jim and I played a good game, because we didn't know if Reese and Joaquin could sing,'' says Konrad. ''The studio asked us, and we said, 'Yeah, they're great!' Because they had to be.
'' Hello, I'm not Johnny Cash. Phoenix walks into the Chateau Marmont absent the ramrod posture he carried back on the set. The baritone is history too. His speech has always been a bit nasal — it wouldn't have been nearly as amusing if his Gladiator villain had used a deeper, more confident voice to express his ''vexed''-ness — but today his chops are really up in his head and not down in his chest. ''Sorry, I shouldn't shake,'' he explains, keeping his hands to himself. ''I've got a cold.'' Needless to say, there's no trusty Martin strapped across his back. Fifteen months ago, Phoenix said, ''I almost feel more comfortable now with a guitar than not.'' Today? ''It's like everything that I do,'' he says. ''When I did Gladiator, I thought that I would carry a sword with me everywhere. When I did Ladder 49, I didn't want to let go of my turnout gear, and I didn't believe that I could go through life without smelling smoke. With this, I played the guitar all the time, and then left it. I picked it up a couple weeks ago and realized I'd forgotten how to make an A-minor.''
Same with Witherspoon's autoharp? ''Oh yes, honey, it's been collectin' dust for about 18 months,'' she says. Nor does she desire to keep crooning, even though ''people have started calling, apparently, from Nashville, about do I want to do [a record]? But I'd be embarrassed to do that to people.'' (Hey, if Sissy Spacek could cut a well-regarded country album a few years after getting her Coal Miner's Daughter Oscar, maybe Witherspoon shouldn't rule it out.) Witherspoon at least had a slight musical leg up on her costar: While Phoenix knew little about Cash prior to getting the script, she'd played Mother Maybelle Carter in her fourth-grade play and, as an ex-Nashvillian, knew her country music. Then again, she had some trauma to overcome. ''My only other singing experience was in summer camp. They told me how awful I was, and that I should never try to sing but just be an actor. I'd really taken that to heart,'' she says. ''Jim said, 'Just try, and we'll see where it goes from there.' And I'm such a sucker for 'just give it a try,' because I'm a mom. I make my kids try everything.'' Still, she says, ''we did this for four months, trying to look natural doing what they did for 40 years. We'd just go backstage after a [concert] scene and shake.'' Witherspoon describes her offscreen dialogue with Phoenix going like this: '''I'm nervous.' 'I'm more nervous.' 'No, I'm more nervous.' 'Shut up, I'm nervous.''
Rehearsing to the point that the musicianship felt second nature was key, because nearly all the stage scenes are also pivotal dramatic sequences, ripe with telling looks. Says Mangold, ''I wanted viewers to feel what it was like to be on stage, as opposed to out in the audience. For the 10 years that these two really couldn't be together'' — because one or both were married to others at the time, and then because of his addictions — ''the only place they were together was in front of thousands of people. Being a stage duo gave them permission to have their greatest intimacy there. People imagined they were a real couple for a long time before they were.''
Walk the Line toes the line between being a singular biopic and a true two-character piece. The filmmakers admit that zeroing in on the romance provided narrative focus for Cash when, otherwise, they would have had too sprawling a personality to contend with — a persona that seemed to have managed to be all things to all people, beloved by conservatives and liberals, secularists and saints, hicks and slickers. Says Burnett, ''Johnny Cash really became his own version of America, full of all the things America's full of: destructive...violent...drug-addicted...kind...generous...stupid...brilliant.'' He laughs. ''If you use that, maybe leave off stupid.''
The famously candid Cash, who inducted himself into the ''Fool's Hall of Fame'' in an early song, probably wouldn't object. And these risk-taking actors can relate to his audacity. ''When you don't have control of your voice,'' says Witherspoon, ''anything can come out. You can really make a fool of yourself.'' Or, as she and Phoenix prove, you may just manage to walk the line.
5:18 PM
I will never be with you.
