Tuesday, May 16, 2006
Interview 4Newsday.com
By John AndersonNovember 18, 2005
Joaquin Phoenix sings, plays and acts his way into a career-making role.
LOS ANGELES -- 'The most uncomfortable person in his own skin I'd ever seen," is how one former studio employee recalls Joaquin Phoenix, from the days of the "Gladiator" publicity campaign. But why should that be a surprise? What better reason to become an actor? What more compelling motivation to inhabit another's persona - most recently, for Phoenix, spending six months burying himself in a role for which even he admits he was physically unsuited?
Along the way, he learns his subject's music. His mannerisms. He sings all the numbers in a movie about a musical icon and even writes his own songs, just to learn what it was like. That he's now comfortable in the skin of a man he never met doesn't seem so odd.
A legend's trademark"There was a point during the filming," said Reese Witherspoon, who plays June Carter Cash to Phoenix's Johnny Cash in the upcoming biopic "Walk the Line," "when Joaquin said, "Hello ... I'm Johnny Cash...'" It was the country legend's trademark intro. "It spooked me out," she said.
Right now, the economy-size Phoenix, in a hooded red sweatshirt and baggy jeans, is walking around a Beverly Hills hotel room in Johnny Cash's imaginary shoes."It was difficult, the way that John walked," he said, standing up now to better impersonate Cash, "because he was so big he didn't bend his legs, like he just moved around."
Phoenix pivots on his heels, sort of teetering, stiff-legged, to demonstrate. "And there was something to the way he held the guitar, something commanding about it. And that's so foreign to me. It really gets down to the way he held the guitar, this commanding thing - which I don't feel naturally. But you find out what that process is. And get comfortable with it."
Phoenix, who has never before held such a dominating role in a major motion picture - his filmography includes "To Die For," "Gladiator," "Quills" and "The Village" - certainly isn't comfortable with all the non-acting duties that accompany starring in a Hollywood movie.
Oscar talk
But if he was feeling any pressure preparing to play Johnny Cash (he admits he was "downright terrified") with the film opening, the attention will likely intensify. His performance has already been talked about as one of the best of the year. The Oscar chatter is widespread and noisy. And it's a role rife with pitfalls - of both the actorly and audience-related variety. The movie industry used to ask, "How will it play in Peoria?" Now it wants to know, "How will it play in Nashville?"
Pretty well, so far: John Carter Cash, the son of the couple at the heart of the picture - and the movie's executive producer - has thanked Phoenix for his portrayal. But fears about how the movie will be received are well founded: Cash was a towering figure, a rustic, visionary giant who straddled musical genres; he is one of only five performers inducted into both the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame and Country Music Hall of Fame. (The others are Elvis Presley, Brenda Lee, Chet Atkins and Hank Williams). His 1968 "Johnny Cash at Folsom Prison" album was bought by everyone from George Wallace rednecks to Abbie Hoffman hippie freaks. So bringing him to the screen?
Impossible.
Maybe. "The thing is, John means something different to everybody," Phoenix explained. "So in some ways there's comfort in that, because he wasn't just one thing - even now, I couldn't tell you who John was in a sentence.
"Reese told me something," he said. "I was saying that John didn't really speak in metaphors and was really straightforward about his approach to music and how he wrote songs. In some sense that's true, but not really: Folsom Prison was a metaphor, Reese said, and the point is every time I say something about John I say, 'You know what? I don't know if that's right.' He was a really complex person."
And Phoenix says he found that liberating, "because I wasn't after one thing."
Director James Mangold said he first talked to producer Cathy Konrad about doing a Cash bio-pic back in 1996. The film they ended up with carries echoes of "Ray" (a brother dies young, and it haunts Cash forever) and, inevitably, "Coal Miner's Daughter." But it also has two performances that eclipse the flaws in the structure, performances that meet the criteria for greatness: When it's over, you can't imagine anyone else in the roles.
Hold the guitar right
When Mangold met Cash, the singer's "biggest concern was that whoever played him didn't hold his guitar like it was a baby." It was Konrad who put Phoenix's picture in front of Mangold, who was looking for a "modern James Dean." The film, he said, was modeled in a way after "East of Eden" - a story of brothers, one seemingly perfect, one not; a girl whom the lesser of the brothers thinks is too good for him. At the same time, Mangold said, "It's really a happy story. "But how do you make a movie about a guy whose trademark is authenticity, and then dub it?"
So Phoenix and Witherspoon both rehearsed for six months - an unheard of amount of time - before shooting started, taking voice lessons, learning the music and preparing to record it all themselves (The real Johnny and June are heard over the end credits. Otherwise, it's all Phoenix and Witherspoon). "He's more of a natural musician than I am," Witherspoon said. "He was playing, he was writing songs - which was great, because it brought something out in him that was there. "But I only had to take on a fraction of what Joaquin had to do," she said. "Twenty-six songs, and step into a legend's shoes?"
Phoenix had one encounter with Cash, or so he's told. "My mom actually told me that when I was very young we went to a Johnny Cash concert," he said, "and I don't remember it at all. But his songs are the kind that, as I started listening to his music, it was 'Oh right! I know that song.' And I remember hearing, when I was young, from my uncle and my father about 'old JC' - 'Remember when we were at the JC show?' They referenced him as JC, like it was someone that you know."
But that was kind of the effect Cash had on people, Phoenix said. "People who didn't know him felt like they did," he said. "It's amazing, because even when he was very successful, he was playing on the back of flatbed trucks at county fairs. Unheard of now. The amount of connection he had with the audience inspired and sustained him; I think when he suffered" - Cash had well-documented problems with drink and pills - "it was when he grew disconnected from that and I think through the prison, Folsom Prison, he reconnected in away with an audience and remembered his voice and where he came from. Because it's easy to lose track of what initially inspires your artistic endeavors."
Phoenix is a thoughtful man, whose enthusiasm for Cash seems to suppress a natural reticence. Ordinarily, he says, "When a movie's over, I want it be -- over." But "Walk The Line" is following him around.
"I don't think John became a songwriter for fame and fortune," he said. "Nowadays, kids who want to make it big want to make a video - they want to be on a video surrounded by good girls. John, he wanted to be the voice that had provided him such comfort growing up, the voice coming out of the [radio] speaker that sat on his Mom's table. I think that was what was most appealing to him. I don't think he thought about touring; I don't think he thought about live performances. When he was young, he was fascinated by this thing that had taken him away."
7:37 PM
I will never be with you.