Walking the line with Joaquin
Joaquin Phoenix makes me nervous. Notoriously 'anti-press', he is rumoured to simply walk out on interviews that are not going to his liking. That he also happens to be pretty darned dishy means that pre-interview, I'm in a bit of a state.
Phoenix is in London to promote his latest film Walk The Line, which chronicles the turbulent rise to fame of guitar-slinger Johnny Cash (played by Phoenix). The film follows Cash from his early days as a sharecropper's son in Depression-era Arkansas to Sun Studios in Memphis, and the beginning of a musical and cultural revolution whose climax we now lovingly refer to as 'The Sixties'.
After hearing reports that Phoenix had struggled with alcoholism - enduring a brief stint in rehab - after finishing Walk The Line, I half expected him to be moody and uncommunicative. But when I met him at the Soho Hotel in London, I was surprised - and relieved - to find him charming and chatty, dressed casually in a loose shirt and jeans, smoking cigarettes through a big smile.
Playing the notorious 'Man in Black' was no mean feat as both Phoenix and Reese Witherspoon (who plays Cash's wife, June Carter) sing every word in the film, a process that involved more than six months preparation before filming began, and which Phoenix struggled with at the start. 'Singing and performing gave him so much joy and comfort, the opposite is true for me - it was such a source of frustration initially.'
Working with T Bone Burnett, a renowned roots-rock producer, writer and musician, Phoenix gradually grasped what it was to be Johnny Cash, and where his music came from, 'we started talking about the songs and what they meant, going through them in a kind of organic process,' he explained.
Phoenix then spent a few months working with a guitar tutor, before turning to a vocal coach to help strengthen his voice which he described as 'incredibly helpful, because there were songs that when I first started I just absolutely couldn't sing, I couldn't hit the notes!'
Developing Cash's complex character was a different story - and one that began months before he had even been approached for the part. 'John was a fan of Gladiator and so he just asked if I would like to come to dinner,' says Phoenix on meeting the man who was soon to consume his life. 'There was something so unpretentious about John and June and something that was so warm and welcoming - I thought about it often in the scenes that related to their love affair.'
Cash's enigmatic contradictions are best described by wife June's observation of his two distinct personalities; John, the loving vulnerable husband, and his self-destructive egotistical alter-ego, Cash.
The film Walk the Line, in turn, is a story in two parts. On the one side the audience is taken aboard the Cash train; from the death of his brother as a child in Arkansas, his troubled relationship with a God-fearing father, to the mid 50s and 60s when he began touring with the likes of Elvis Presley and Roy Orbison; a gruelling schedule that, in part, led to the breakdown of his first marriage to Vivian Liberto and into the clutches of alcohol, benzedrine, dexedrine and dexamyl.
Amid the self-destructive devastation of Cash's roller coaster rock trip, a gentler love story emerges in the form of long-term touring partner and friend, the spirited country singer June Carter. Against many odds, their relationship took more than ten years to develop from one of friendship into dependence and finally deep love and respect. 'Having seen them singing together and looking into each other's eyes, you got the sense that this is when they were happiest, they just really enjoyed sharing the experience, and singing together,' says Phoenix. 'There was a great transformation in John's demeanour when June would come on stage and he really enjoyed performing with her.'
So when it came to playing Cash, Phoenix went for it full throttle, devouring autobiographies, watching documentaries and relentlessly listening to every piece of Cash's music. It paid off. His final performance is a mesmerising and accurate tribute to the man who spent much of his life balancing precariously between two extremes. Little surprise therefore that Phoenix's Cash has already got Oscar-pundits' tails wagging.
But the cost of such commitment was high, and not long after the final scene was shot, Phoenix reportedly checked himself into rehab. 'What's difficult for me about acting, is constantly maintaining a whole myriad of emotions that you can access easily,' he explains. 'We would jump from shooting 1967 detoxing off amphetamines, to 1958 performing on stage playing a song - jumping back and forth like that can be very difficult.'
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Created: 24/01/2006 Updated: 27/01/2006
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