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Bine
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| Posted: Tue Dec 04, 2007 9:35 am Post subject: Living Scotsman Article |
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 living.scotsman.com
Walking the walk... and talking the talk
PAUL BROWNFIELD
IT SEEMS a good day to be Joaquin Phoenix - noon, a Tuesday, on the sun-dappled patio of the Chateau Marmont in West Hollywood. He enters holding a motorcycle helmet and sunglasses. He has two new movies out, We Own the Night and Reservation Road, two heavy-duty dramas which are his first films since his interpretation of Johnny Cash in 2005's Walk the Line earned him a best-actor Oscar nomination.
Walk the Line finally made Phoenix, now 32, a star. It was a role - a biopic of an icon, made the year after the icon's death - that could have been disastrous, but was instead remarkable for the way in which it interpreted Cash's look and sound without lapsing into impression.
Phoenix, however, hasn't seen it. The last time he watched himself in a movie, he says, was Ladder 49 in 2004, in which he played a firefighter. "Actors who are more technically trained, British guys, they don't mind watching themselves because they can check their technique," explains Jay Russell, director of that film. "Joaq comes from the opposite school."
Phoenix runs on intuition, his own native intelligence, fearful of becoming objective, self-aware. Whether this is actorly artifice or an extension of the honesty he leaves on screen, he firmly rejects the idea that - for him - watching his work would be instructive. "I am abhorrently selfish when it comes to making movies," he says. "I have to say that I can't recall when I did see a movie I was in, I can't recall it being a pleasurable experience. And it also was of no use to me."
Punctual, he has shambled on to the Marmont's patio through the back entrance, dressed in cords and a loose-fitting Diesel shirt. He mentions his girlfriend, though not by name. "Hi, beautiful," he says to a big white dog that comes wandering by the table. The waitress greets him with familiarity.
"I know this sounds insane, but he's quite shy," says James Gray, who directed Phoenix in The Yards and We Own the Night. Actually it didn't sound insane. Phoenix - loath to analyse a performance or discuss his personal life - comes off as engaging about his unwillingness to engage. "I enjoy the actual work, do you know?" he says. "I mean, I enjoy between 'Action' and 'Cut' and that's about all I enjoy on a movie. I don't enjoy trailer life. I don't sit in my trailer and watch TV or try to hang out and have friends come by."
So what does he do? "You basically sit and wait. It's like a... horse waiting in the race thing, just waiting for the gate to open." So he goes back into his trailer and broods? "It's amazing that if you're not watching Friends and, like, drinking Champagne with your friends, then you're brooding," he replies. "No, I mean, you look at your script, and you think about the scene coming up, and you work on them... Most of my rehearsals take place in my head and it's like, that's what that time is for. And sleep," he adds. "I will sleep."
That line - "I will sleep" - is said with a shy flourish. Sometimes Phoenix's expression resolves itself into the hormonally overloaded, tragically love-struck teenager in To Die For, the dark comedy in which his talent burst into view. Reservation Road, you sense, is another Oscar-radar performance - although in the film he's not a Roman emperor (Gladiator) or porn-shop clerk (8MM), he's a rumpled college professor with a beard.
Phoenix spends the whole film more or less in a state of obsession and anguish. Based on the novel by John Burnham Schwartz, Reservation Road is about a husband and father, Ethan Learner (Phoenix), undone by the hit-and-run death of his seven-year-old son. He abandons his family emotionally, avoiding his grief by channelling it into hunting down the perpetrator, another town resident played by Mark Ruffalo.
"He's both devoted to the craft of acting and intimidated by it - not intimidated, it's not the right word. I think the process is painful to him," says Reservation Road director Terry George, who also directed Phoenix in Hotel Rwanda. George ticks off the handful of contemporary actors who, like Phoenix, can burrow into the depths of character and moment - Sean Penn, Daniel Day Lewis, Javier Bardem. "They try to be truthful to the story and the character. And it becomes a really tough thing for them."
Other comparisons: Pacino and De Niro, in the 1970s. Phoenix mentions seeing Al Pacino in Dog Day Afternoon as an early influence ("There are five things going on in his head, and it's extraordinary to witness"). And Gray compares Phoenix's commitmentto Robert De Niro doing Rupert Pupkin in The King of Comedy.
"He wants to be considered one of those actors," Russell says. "Whether he would ever want to admit it or not, he's a professional."
Of all of Phoenix's conflicted feelings before "Action!" and after "Cut!", Russell says: "My personal wish for him is that he would stop torturing himself."
Next up for Phoenix is shooting Two Lovers in New York with Gwyneth Paltrow, a "tender little romance," funny and sad, according to writer-director Gray. It'll mark the third film he and Phoenix have done together. Their most recent, We Own the Night, is set in the New York of the late 1980s and features Phoenix as the black sheep in a family of cops from Queens - he is a nightclub manager caught between a professional alliance with a vicious Russian cocaine dealer and his family of law enforcement officers. Mark Wahlberg is the good brother, a cop; Robert Duvall is the police chief father. That's the archetypal Hollywood architecture, and the most stirring scenes are between Phoenix and Duvall - two intelligent actors, one young, the other legendary, conveying a tortured history without saying much.
Phoenix wanted to talk about that, how Bobby's relationship with his dad is more intimate for being troubled. Gray, he said, had told him of a childhood friend who came from an abusive family but felt left out because his older siblings were hit and he wasn't. "It's such a powerful idea, that somebody could feel left out and feel that their father hated them because he didn't take the time to smack them around. Those kinds of things to me are utterly fascinating."
Not unlike, in some ways, the difficult father-and-son story in Walk the Line. There is a touching scene at the end, a kind of reconciliation moment. "I don't know, I don't remember that," he says of the scene. "I just remember walking down some stairs and saying something. That's it."
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maya
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| Posted: Tue Dec 04, 2007 1:38 pm Post subject: |
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| Great articule Bine lovexxxx |
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hazeleyes
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| Posted: Tue Dec 04, 2007 3:15 pm Post subject: |
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Thanks Bine! I think I have seen this before. Hmmm..... 
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Karen
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| Posted: Wed Dec 05, 2007 11:04 pm Post subject: |
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Thanks Matey......
I think I have read that somewhere too? I don't know where though!!!Still, nice to read over and over .......
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