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Newsday RR Joaquin Interview

Joaquin Phoenix travels down a dark road
BY JOSEPH V. AMODIO | Special to Newsday
October 11, 2007

The accident comes suddenly. A squeal of tires, flash of headlight, the crunch of bumper against body. The vehicle is soon just taillights disappearing round a bend. And we're left with a father running to the scene, shouting to his wife to stay back. It's something of a relief when even the camera seems to listen. From a distance, we watch as he bends down over his young son in the shadow of roadside shrubs. We don't want to see what he sees.

Joaquin Phoenix spent four days on a quiet road in Connecticut shooting that grueling hit-and-run scene for "Reservation Road," a drama directed by Terry George, opening Oct. 19.

It is the second of two films Phoenix will headline in theaters this month, a hefty return for the actor who earned an Academy Award nomination two years ago playing Johnny Cash in "Walk the Line."

In "We Own the Night" - opening tomorrow - Phoenix plays a man caught in a web of organized crime. But it's "Road" that may have audiences (and Oscar-handicappers) chattering once more.

The movies are the latest stops in a career that has built steam since his role as an angsty teen in "Parenthood" first caught critics' attention in 1989. He continued to turn out solid performances in a slew of interesting films - playing a murderous teen in "To Die For," a wrongfully arrested tourist in "Return to Paradise," a wicked priest in "Quills."

His stint as a violent emperor in "Gladiator" seems hard to imagine as he sits now in a modest crewneck sweater, lighting a cigarette in his room at Manhattan's Waldorf-Astoria Hotel. It's early. Yet despite his hippie roots, he is not, he notes, an up-with-the-sun person.

Much has been written about the Phoenix clan, with its globe-trotting parents and eco-named brood - River, Rain, Summer, Liberty. (Joaquin, born in Puerto Rico, changed his name to Leaf for a brief, botanical period.) Eldest brother River Phoenix was the first actor in the family, but his sudden death from a drug overdose in 1993 cut that career short at age 23.

Joaquin, who turns 33 this month, has reached a stage in his career that his brother never did: mature leading man, and for that matter, Dad. "Road" is not his first paternal role, but he's never had to delve into it so deeply.

Phoenix doesn't have children. But it's "a little easier to imagine what it is to be a father than a killer," he says, smiling.

Role reversal

In "Road," however, Phoenix must imagine what even most fathers cannot. He plays Ethan Learner, a mild-mannered college professor who witnesses his son's tragic death at the hands of a hit-and-run driver. While his wife (Jennifer Connelly) grieves, Ethan is torn between mourning and revenge. Dwight, the driver (played by Mark Ruffalo), wilts from guilt, yet never quite confesses, desperate to remain a hero in his own son's eyes. Living in the same suburban town, Ethan and Dwight eventually cross paths - and the resolve of one man shatters.

After reading the script, Phoenix sent it to Terry George, who assumed Phoenix would play Dwight.

"He said, 'No, it's Ethan I'm playing,'" George recalls. "In a funny way I was happier," the director admits. George thought the straightlaced Ethan's slow eruption would offer Phoenix a greater challenge. "He brings a truth and depth to his characters that's quite unique," says George. "With Johnny Cash it wasn't a mimic; he got in there."

Still, it wouldn't be an easy sell for audiences, both George and Phoenix knew.

Hit-and-run drivers are members of a select group: like pedophiles or al-Qaida fanatics, they elicit no sympathy. Few movies have tried to show their side of the story.

This film, based on the 1998 bestseller by John Burnham Schwartz, will likely resonate with both men and women, especially those in car-centric suburbs. Phoenix saw the faces behind such statistics, meeting with male and female members of Mothers Against Drunk Driving (MADD). One father made a particularly strong impression.

"It was the first time he'd really talked about what had happened ... and he thanked me," Phoenix recalls. "He said, 'I'm going to court to face my son's killer in a couple of months. I have to speak, and I don't want to be too emotional.' So it was helpful to him to have this opportunity."

Umbilical inspiration

So how does a single, childless actor connect with that kind of raw grief? Did he tap into his own emotions from losing a brother? He seems to stiffen, almost imperceptibly.

"It's so utterly ridiculous," Phoenix says. In film, he explains, he confronts emotion as the character would; he leaves his own memories out of it.

He remembers shooting a scene where Ethan sits outside, contemplating his son's death.

"I was sitting there going, 'I got nothing,'" Phoenix recalls. "I said, 'Terry, you gotta tell me about Josh's birth, give me a detailed story.'" It's something Phoenix says he loves to do - getting directors to talk through a character's experience, have them whispering in his ear even as cameras are rolling, seconds before he steps into view.

Phoenix caught his director off guard, with just 10 minutes or so to get the shot before the sun went down.
"Terry says, 'Uhhh, yeah, you had a son, and uh ...' And I said, 'OK, go and think about it.'" Phoenix recalls, laughing. George returned in a few minutes with details. "'The umbilical cord was wrapped around his neck and he was blue.' He went through this whole thing, and suddenly I had a visual - I could feel what Ethan was going through."

Phoenix doesn't know where or how George came up with the tale. "Terry's got a million stories," he says.

It was a tale of his own mother giving birth to a sibling, George says later, joking about "the curveballs" actors toss directors.

But the film, he adds, is not merely about parents and children, or life and death; it's about the process of revenge. It's about one man's need to demonize another to deal with rage and grief.

"That's a topic that's very important today," George says. "Here, post 9/11, a lot of the world has been motivated by revenge, by creating monsters."
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