Joaquin Apart
Sunday Times Magazine, September 1, 2002
By Chrissy Iley
With starring roles in Gladiator, Quills and To Die For, he has long surpassed his late brother River's fame. So why does Joaquin Phoenix joke that he's a pretentious and dim-witted actor?
Joaquin Phoenix hates to be pinned down. Everything about his body language tells you that. He's spiralling, twisting, contorting, a corkscrew in his chair, yet still managing to be languid and laid-back; not showing any of the tension that he obviously feels about a situation he hates — being interviewed. The scar helps, just about the lip. It makes him look wounded but strong. He's heartbreakingly sexy. A rumpled shirt, golden skin, and when he does eye contact, the very core of him seems to pierce you.
On screen, he's usually wounded and mesmeric. Any meanness is uniquely riddled with vulnerability. There's the mullet-headed teen in To Die For who is seduced by Nicole Kidman into murdering her husband; the weird, creepy, blue-rinsed porn-video seller in 8mm; the tortured, sexually thwarted abbé in Quills; and, most luminously, his Oscar-nominated role of the Emperor Commodus in Gladiator. Phoenix managed to create something that was touching as well as oily, a rejected son who turns maniacal in his struggle for love and respect.
On screen, he's hypnotic. He has no problem filling the screen with his brooding charisma. Sometimes you meet an actor and they're much slighter, not just in build, but in the energy they give off. The reverse is true here. Be with him and you understand the camera's infatuation. He does something almost magical. He makes you feel you know him, that you are completely intimate, yet he doesn't actually answer anything directly about himself. There is something about him that is beyond a force of nature.
He is here in this New York hotel room to talk about the new M Night Shyamalan movie, Signs, in which he stars with Mel Gibson. They are brothers, incredibly sparky, believable ones at that. Shyamalan has been hailed as Hollywood's hottest storyteller, the next Spielberg. Like his other words, The Sixth Sense and Unbreakable, Signs is about both the psychic realm and family life. It suits Phoenix, who is otherwordly, yet deeply rooted to his family. They remain super-close despite an unconventional, peripatetic free-spirited upbringing. It's what he knew as normal, and was not necessarily as emotionally unstable as people seem to judge it to be. More of that later.
"You have two tape recorders. You came in real proud. Great. Like one's not bad enough." I explain it's in case one of them breaks. Mechanical things have a way of not functioning if I get tense. He tells me that I'm being narcissistic if I think I'm personally going to affect how the tape is working.
The room is filled with the sweet smoke of Camel Lights. He reaches for another. The lighter doesn't work. "You're willing this not to work. My lighter worked fine until you came in." He tries it again, and no, it really doesn't work. We're giggling now. He's forgotten to be tense.
His performance as Merrill, Gibson's younger brother, is what he describes as one of his more "for want of a better word, normal roles. I hate it when people say that about characters because I then say, 'But what is normal?' But you can understand what I mean." The somewhat lost character is given a level of intensity by his performance.
Signs is all about the family dynamic, with acute performances from Rory Culkin and Abigail Breslin as Gibson's motherless children. And there's the bigger-picture story line. When I came out of the screening, the audience was silent, frightened; a kind of communal jaw-drop. It's scary because it's not so much about the supernatural, but the super-real. It explores crop circles and what they could really mean. It breaks down everything, then it restores faith, and the whole time it's basically just this family on screen. They filmed it in sequence, which helped them bond.
He finds it torturous to watch his own movies. "The theatre's full, so you're uncomfortable because your grill [mouth] is 40ft long and you're going, 'Did they laugh, did they think it was good?' It's rare if I enjoy it. Night know that about me, but he insisted I go to the test screening. I sat behind him and thought, 'Oh no. I'm going to have such a miserable time.' But the movie started and the audience were just drawn into it, so I was able to not think about myself. I just watched it. You have a lot of confidence with him, in that his last two films were really good, so it's not as much of a risk as it might have been with other directors, but you never know. How many times have you seen a movie with a great director and amazing actors and a good script and the movie's horrible?"
Despite being Oscar-nominated, Joaquin takes nothing for granted. "The odds against succeeding are so great because there's so many actors. You go to LA and all the clichés are true. Everybody's an actor. I'm just one of them. So when I met with Night and he gave me the script and said, 'I want you to do it and it will be okay,' I really liked that. I think I need that kind of confidence in a director, that they feel, after seeing my work, they can get the right performance out of me."
Before I saw the film, I couldn't conceive of the 27-year-old Phoenix and 46-year-old Gibson as brothers. Did you bond? "I did. We got on very well. We share a similar sense of humour. We hit it off right away, but I've had personal relationships with people that have been really good, but on screen there's nothing. And vice versa. It's the strangest thing. Then the screenplay captured a real family dynamic. And then, doing the shots in sequence helped. My mind's going blank," he says, somewhat startled. "It's you. Get out of my head."
He does this, drifts off, not because he's trying to avoid a line of questioning, not because he's inarticulate; he's sometimes just overwhelmed by his own fidgeting. He's ripping up the cigarette packet into tiny pieces. His energy is uncontainable. Perhaps that's why he so readily and cleverly transforms himself into characters.
For Return to Paradise, he lost so much weight he was wizened. And Gladiator he wanted a decadent, imperial pot belly. "I can't stand it when actors talk about their preparation, though. Like, 'Yeah, I'll put on 20lb, let my teeth go, get a tattoo.' I'm so reluctant to go into my process for fear of sounding pretentious. I already have that going for me." Pretentiousness? "Yeah. I'm already rockin' the pretension thing." What do you think is the most pretentious thing you do? "My interviews. I'm just a pretentious, dim-witted actor."
On the publicity tour for To Die For, he actually did interviews in teenage mullet-head character. "That was actually [the director] Gus Van Sant's fault. I said, 'I don't want to do these interviews,' and he said, 'Just do it in character,' and I thought, 'Oh, that's not a bad idea.' It was a bad idea. It was a total disaster."
Perhaps the most pretentious thing you do in interviews is recall things from when you were three. How can you really remember them? "Clearly and vividly. It's weird. I can remember even before three because I was on a boat coming from Venezuela and it was my birthday. I remember the flying fish, the jumbo iguana. I remember watching them and standing on the railing."
He wasn't born in Venezuela. He was born in Puerto Rico. His parents met in California in the late 1960s. His mother, Arlyn Sharon Dunetz, had a boring marriage and a boring job in New York City. She left with a friend and a backpack to pursue some California dreaming. Once on the trail, they were picked up by John Bottom in a battered Volkswagen bus. Arlyn and he talked all night, felt the soul connection and fell in love.
John Bottom had been a carpenter and a landscaper, but neither of them felt comfortable in the material world, and agreed that the journey is the destination. Along the way, after River and their daughter Rain was born, they became interested in the religious leader David Berg's teachings. He sent the family to South America as kind of missionaries for Children of God, which was famous for its celebration of sexuality, but the free-love idea began to concern them when they realised their guru was going mad and becoming materialistic. Berg seemed to twist biblical metaphors and ended up rich and exploitative, and trying to attract new disciples through sex.
The family stowed away on a freighter ship to Florida, where they landed with only the clothes they stood up in. Joaquin Phoenix doesn't have a memory of this as a hardship. The only thing he remembers vividly are the flying fish being slapped to death by the fishermen. He recalls the crew, who had been so kind to them, pulling in nets and flopping the fish down hard in order to kill them. He thought it was barbaric. The whole family was screaming. "And we said to our parents, 'How come you never told us this?'" That was the start of the family's vegan cuisine.
Soon after, Joaquin, in a fit of pretension, decided to be called Leaf. "That was a lame moment, you're right. I was obviously blessed with the gift of pretension. I was probably around five and I saw my dad was raking leaves. I'm told that's why I decided on the name, but I have difficulty in believing that. It was more to do with the fact that no one could pronounce my name. My little nephew [Rio], who's four, feels that it's a big deal to pronounce things right, and I know that as a kid I was bothered that people couldn't pronounce my name. I'd have to say it a few times and that was an annoyance. 'No, it's not "walkin" or "walking".'"
Why change it back? "Well, when I was 15 I went to Mexico, so I had the opposite problem because Leaf would not work in Spanish. Leaf in Spanish is oja and then ajo is garlic and ojo is eye. So I would always get them confused and introduce myself either as garlic or eye, and then I would be known as el estupido.
"By the time I was doing To Die For, I had switched to Joaquin and remember Gus saying, 'So you're going for the big shift. Now you're Joaquin.' But I hadn't seen it that way. To be honest, I think I just really like my name."
I wonder if he felt left out, having a Spanish name while all his siblings were named after forces of nature, or seasons. His parents changed their name to Phoenix when they felt they were reborn. Also, River Bottom wouldn't have looked good.
From the outside looking in, it certainly seems that these parents were strange people. So, I ask, what kind of effect did it have on you, with such an unconventional childhood, all these different places with hippie parents?
"First of all," he says, his eyes zoning into mine, "what's a hippie? I never thought of my parents as hippies. I suppose in comparison to George and Barbara Bush they might have been. I think they were alternative." Sometimes if you're got unconventional parents, the children rebel and become mini George Bushes. "Yes, but I think my parents were really well balanced and none of the kids rebelled in that way." Didn't they take a lot of psychedelic drugs? "No. No. Absolutely not."
He's now in a tailspin. "And do you know what else is shocking? I would never ask you a personal question like that." What might have been nervous and vulnerable is now articulate and angry. Instead of me saying, "I'm interviewing you, I get to ask all of the questions," I say sorry. "You're not really. That's absolutely not true. I don't know where that even came from." Instead of saying, "Well, I read that your mother had praised LSD," I say nothing and let him continue.
I wasn't sorry that I'd asked him, but I was sorry that I'd upset him. His family are everything to him. He has an apartment with his sister Summer, also an actress. He cut the umbilical cord when his sister Liberty gave birth to Rio, and apart from a two-year relationship with the actress Liv Tyler in 1997, his family have always been the significant others in his life. He recalls one audition he went on as a teenager with Summer. They both got call-backs, but ultimately she got the part. "I remember my mom coming to talk to me. You know when parents approach in a certain way? It was a bit like, 'Oh, I didn't get the job,' but I remember genuinely feeling I was so happy that Summer had. I never noticed any rivalry among us."
Summer is now being touted as an up-an-coming, rising Phoenix. She's often referred to as "sister of Joaquin". Once, he got that "brother of River" thing. It's probably some time since one would describe Joaquin as "brother of River", because he's now superseded his older brother's fame. He says he has no problem being referred to as "younger brother of". It's the "in parentheses" stuff he objects to. I promise him I won't describe him with any parentheses, but part of his story is of course that his equally talented and vulnerable brother took a lethal drug cocktail and collapsed and died outside the Viper Room on Sunset Boulevard, and Joaquin's then-teenage voice was tackily transmitted on every news bulletin making the desperate emergency call. For Joaquin, it's something that he can probably never get over. Does it bother you to talk about it? "I don't want to talk about it," he says, with a resolution that is dauntingly final and tangibly pained. One can't imagine what it felt like for such a close-knit family to lose part of its life force.
After Florida, they came to Hollywood. After a stint of singing Beatles songs one Christmas for nickels and dimes, his mother hit upon the idea that her brood could go into show business. She transformed from earth mother to shrewd business-woman, running the family business, Phoenix in Flight Productions. What had once been laid-back was now turbo-charged ambition. But if you're living, it didn't seem extreme.
He's torn up more paper. We still don't have a light for the cigarette, and he softens. "I think it's all about your personal experience. When you grow up, your life is normal. It's what's normal to you. So I never felt like was missing out on anything. The press has blown the travelling out of proportion." And romanticised it? "Yes. From when I was five until I was 13, we were in LA. We lived in the Valley, and although we didn't have much money, my dad always seemed to find us a really cheap house to rent that would be next to acres of government land, so you essentially had a back yard that was hundreds of acres. It was more stable than you think. I travel lots more now." And, he says, he's not really a fan of it. In London to film Gladiator, "I locked myself in a hotel room for six weeks. I walked as far as two blocks from my hotel to get cigarettes and I can really say that I hate that street that the hotel was on. I did it on purpose, that sense of isolation. I realise that now."
Even though he hates the idea of isolating himself, he's as shy and bashful as he is charismatic, which perhaps explains why there's only been one long-term girlfriend. For as much as he's reaching out, he's pushing away. Perhaps it's not easy to bond with other people when growing up. You were all the time Team Phoenix, I suggest.
"Team Phoenix? Really? I said that? There was certainly a sense of closeness and unity. We were seven people that went everywhere together. And yes, my siblings are my best friends. I don't know about Team Phoenix, but the chance is I did say that.
"In interviews I could say virtually anything. Some of it's true, but I don't care. I like some of the lies that are out there. Some of them are horrible and damaging, but I probably feel more comfort in people believing lies than knowing the truth. I know my truth and that's all that really matters to me. Why worry what others think?"
By now, we're having a serious-need-of-a-cigarette moment and he definitely doesn't care what I think as he prowls the room, opening drawers, banging them shut, looking for hotel matches. He flicks at his lighter — a Statue of Liberty lighter — and bangs it down on the table.
"You killed it. Do you have any matches in your bag?" He seems really desperate, so I give him my bag to search through, thinking the person who really has the need will find it, but he stops fidgeting entirely. "I can't look in that." What is it that men don't like to look into women's handbags, even when offered? "Probably because the few times you do it when you're younger you get reprimanded, so you learn. We don't go there. Anyway, it wasn't a real offer." Oh yes, it was. He can go through my bag any time he wants.
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