Man On Fire
Esquire, September 2004
By Tim Lewis
The first time Joaquin Phoenix went to a fire station, he couldn't slide down the pole. He looked down, three stories up, and his legs turned to stone. He broke out in a full sweat and started to panic, a little at first then quite visibly. He had, after all, just signed on as the lead in Ladder 49, a tale of post-9/11 heroism and fearlessness set in the Baltimore Fire Department. He finished the day on a stepladder, a few feet off the ground, being inched up the pole by sympathetic firefighters. He walked away a nervous wreck, unsure of his ability to continue with the project.
Phoenix persevered and went through training. He started conquering his vertigo and the time came to face a controlled fire. He was suited up, fully prepared, but as the flames lashed around him, he was again paralysed by fear. He wanted to scream "Help!", but somehow it didn't sound technical enough. "MAYDAY!" he shouted at the top of his lungs. Through the smoke, he felt something crash down on the back of his skull. It was his instructor, who had never left his side, smacking him with his gloved hand in an effort to calm him down.
Dissolve to a few months down the line. Phoenix is stationed with Baltimore West Side Tenth and has gained the respect and admiration of his professional colleagues. He has attacked blazes side by side with them — as much as a world-famous Oscar-nominated act can — in situations serious enough that they carried away victims in bodybags. One Friday afternoon, he is in his uniform standing outside the station with another actor from Ladder 49, Balthazar Getty. He is smoking a cigarette when a police car comes screeching to a halt in front of them. "Are you on duty?" a cop yells from the passenger side. Phoenix and Getty look at each other, and reply, "Yeah, sure." "Get in the back," orders the cop. The pair dive into the car and take off.
Baltimore has a reputation as one of the most dangerous cities in the US, and they pull up at a tenement in an ungentrified neighbourhood. The building is already heaving with police. The cop barks, "Come with me," and they follow him up the stairs of the near-derelict high-rise, down to the end of a hallway. They reach the door of the last apartment and a senior officer takes them aside. "OK, someone called in a methamphetamine house, but we can't bust the door down. You can, because the fire call has come in. So break it down."
Phoenix and Getty nod their heads and, without thinking, charge at the door. They lower their shoulders and make a solid contact. Thud! They fly backwards but the door remains unmoved. Phoenix raises his boot and aims a kick at the lock. Thwock! Nothing. Now more frenzied, the pair besiege the door with kicks and shoulder charges. Thhuudd! Thhwwooocckk! The cops look on, a little bewildered. Their unspoken thought bubble reads: "These are the worst two firemen who ever lived."
Finally, Getty turns round, battered and chastened, and shrugs his shoulders, "I'm sorry, but we should tell you that we are just actors."
Fire is an obvious analogy for Joaquin Phoenix, whose dark, brooding look is often described as "smouldering." On set he is known as a combustible presence, and has a reputation for being impossible to control. It is said that he intimidates many people in Hollywood, and there's plenty of evidence to support his claim. When Jay Russell, the director of Ladder 49, canvassed opinion on his future star, the same words kept recurring: arrogant, obsessive, and problematic. It was only when he started shooting that he realized this was industry shorthand for a level of commitment that is almost extinct in modern film-making.
"There was a moment when we were making the film where there was an idea — I'll just say it was an idea that came down from the studio — to add a certain element into the script and story," says Russell. "And when that idea arrived in the form of script pages, Joaquin informed everyone, 'That's it. I'll be leaving this afternoon.' He didn't care. He didn't care if he didn't make a penny up until that point. He didn't care if he never worked again. He simply wasn't going to compromise in that way.
"It was an incredibly brave standpoint," Russell continues. "And I have to thank him every single day because I wouldn't have had the nerve to do that. I would have spent hours and hours trying to compromise, to make them feel like they had their say but not really do it. Joaquin boiled that down to a two-minute process which was, 'I'm not going to do it.'"
You can understand why studious might be wary of projects starring Phoenix (and, in consequence, why he is so often given supporting roles). He can be intransigent to the point of distraction. Then there are the little things. He will usually refuse to rehearse. While in many respects he is an actor's actor — you can even detect strains of luvvie affectation — there is much about his job and his co-workers that he detests: not least the pressure to be "gorgeous and fabulous", and the vanity that requires people on set "because you can't brush your own hair". He certainly hates sitting in rehearsal rooms trying to act like farmers. (Phoenix today sports a shambolic outfit of unlaced work boots, Levi's 505s and a shredded Oxford shirt. He looks terrible.)
The problems do not stop there. He will probably sulk if asked to provide commentary for the DVD, and he will certainly drag his heels about doing publicity. When we meet in Los Angeles — he lives, pointedly, in New York but is on the West Coast to prepare for Walk the Line, a biopic of Johnny Cash — he makes it clear right off the bat that he is doing this interview under sufferance. He is not rude; in fact, he is faultlessly polite from the moment he arrives, half an hour early, to his intensely delivered, intelligent answers about two films that do feature him in the leading role, Ladder 49 and M. Night Shyamalan's The Village. He proves to be an animated talker and, as he jumps around the Hollywood Hills garden where the interview takes place, you could almost be excused for thinking he was enjoying himself. But, on balance, you would be wrong.
Despite making his first film at age 10, Phoenix admits that he remains idealistic, not to mention a little naïve, about the industry. But in his mind, at least, it is clear: what right does a studio executive have to ruin a film by adding an ill-conceived new scene? Why is it not enough to give a superhuman commitment to your performance without having to do an interview with Esquire to support it? If it makes it easier to accept, his beliefs are uncompromising and do not tolerate exceptions. When, in 2001, he was nominated for an Academy Award for Gladiator, in which he played the terribly vexed Commodus, he mounted perhaps the most disinterested campaign in Oscar history. He was shooting in Germany, and there was some question as to whether he would even show up for the ceremony. (He did, cutting it fine and bringing his mother as his date.)
He picks up the story in typically unreconstructed fashion. "When Gladiator came down and all that fucking award bullshit, I was making Buffalo Soldiers and that was all I was thinking about and I didn't give a fuck about anything else. They said, 'You have to come here and do this and that,' and I said, 'The only reason I am supposed to be there is because of the way I work, so why should I change the way I work to show up to put on a suit to walk around and get a picture taken and sit around with these fucking people when I'm in the middle of working?'"
Armchair psychologists can have a lot of fun with Phoenix, but he saves you time by admitting that he is "unbelievably insecure." He has very little confidence in his ability as an actor, and is deadly serious when he tells you that he is becoming worse with every film. For days before taking on a new project, he is beset with nerves, sometimes so bad he is vomiting. "Every time it's like the first movie I ever did," he says.
Certainly Phoenix combines streaks of extraordinary extroversion and chronic introversion which, considering his upbringing in a fabulously gifted, nomadic family, is perhaps the least you could expect. Out of his comfort zone, he is amusingly inept at causal conversation, fading inconspicuously into the background when he finds himself in the company of strangers. This trait is particularly noticeable today when the photoshoot gets underway. Eventually, the photographer will wrap it up early "to put him out of his misery" and, as soon as this happens, Phoenix tugs down on his tie as though it has been throttling him. By the time he reaches the changing room, he is shedding his clothes so fast that he is practically naked. A few seconds later, changed back into the ramshackle outfit he arrived in, apologising for his rudeness, he is gone.
When asked to cite their influences, every young actor in Hollywood will reel off the same names and characteristics: Marlon Brando, for his pure and poetic talent; Robert De Niro, for his legendary discipline; and Al Pacino, for his volcanic intensity. Of course, less than a handful of modern American stars can actually claim any one of them — Sean Penn and Edward Norton are two other exceptions; intriguingly, all three have a reputation for social incompetence — and that, put simply, is why so many in Hollywood are prepared to put up with his bullshit.
Although he will never read this article ("Most actors just really like themselves and they like talking about themselves and they like pictures of themselves and they think they are really fantastic. I'm not that kind of person" gives it away), he might reluctantly enjoy that comparison. He talks at length about Seventies cinema, the privacy and mystery that surrounded stars in those days and how back then was when they started to realise that an actor's talent lay not just in the way he handled the material, but in the choice of project. Phoenix bemoans the fact that these lessons have been forgotten, that actors work too much and feel too much pressure to jump from one role to the next. He deserves credit in this respect: his films may not always be classics, but you can always guarantee the roles will not have been taken lightly, and the preparation ("Method or whatever the fuck that is", as he describes it himself) will have been exacting.
However you define it, the personal transformation Phoenix undergoes for each new role can be intense. When he was shooting The Yards, a noir thriller in which he plays the narcissistic Willie Gutierrez, he was told by friends that he was starting to scare them. On Gladiator, he was described by members of the crew as being "arrogant and horrible" — words that could never apply to Phoenix himself, but which are perfect descriptions of Commodus. Shyamalan, with whom he has made Signs and now The Village, would lighten the mood by accusing him of "DDLing" — a shorthand for Daniel Day Lewis. In every film there is inevitably a moment when he is so absorbed in his role that he is no longer himself. "He is the guy, whoever he is playing," explains Ladder 49's Russell. "He's not like the guy, he isn't a version of the guy, he is the guy."
"It's unavoidable," says Phoenix, when asked to explain the process. "My job is to think what it would be like to be this person and have these experiences, and to think about that every day for a few months starts having an impact on your life. That's true of great actors who put all their time into it, and it also goes for people that don't really know that's what they are fucking doing. Most actors I know, when they are working, they just don't talk to their friends. You form a different life, you have a new family, you make new friends and it's kinda where you put your energy towards.
"I guess I am trying to not make it a big thing," he continues. "You go to a foreign city, you start dressing different, you start combing your hair different, you start thinking about things you would never think of. It's going to have an impact on your life."
Phoenix has a singular skill of making method performance sound less pretentious than it has any right to be. I ask him for a concrete example and he drops his cigarette and springs to his feet. He had been watching Taxi Driver on TV a few weeks ago and there was one very simple scene that was "so uncomfortable I'm getting goosebumps just thinking about it." He jumped around the garden acting out each of the parts: De Niro just shot Harvey Keitel's pimp, and he backs off and sits down on some steps. He is not crying, he's not shaking, in fact he's probably doing the least remarkable thing he could have done under the circumstances. "It's that he doesn't know what he is doing," Phoenix concludes.
"You know, I want to be a fucking hedgehog on the fucking Discovery Channel and they have cameras in my burrow and home and that's that," he says. "That is what I am after. I don't want to perform. Those moments to me, those little moments, are often the most powerful or say the most about a character. Those are the things that I love."
It is easy to see why Phoenix went along with the police to the tenement in Baltimore. As unlikely as it seems, by that point he had actually convinced himself that he was a firefighter, that it was his job to break that door down. Not that the Baltimore Police were particularly sympathetic to that explanation, and the episode swiftly resulted in the actors being withdrawn from their work placements in the fire stations.
When we meet, Phoenix is starting to embed himself in preparations for Johnny Cash, and will shortly leave for Memphis to begin shooting. It is a significant undertaking — by some estimates, Cash recorded on 500 albums — but one for which he seems uniquely suited. His fingers are already heavily callused from guitar work and he has undergone vocal training to sing more from the back of his throat (so successfully, in fact, that it will be his voice on the recordings). The Man in Black even passed on his blessing before he died last year. "I met him once," says Phoenix. "Apparently, Johnny really liked Gladiator and had watched it, you know, a few times, so he invited me over for dinner. He started quoting lines that I had said in the movie, which was strange: [slipping into Johnny Cash Drawl] 'Your son squealed like a girl... and your wife was moaning like a whore.' So one of my cruellest bits of dialogue, one of the darkest, most sinister things a character could say and he was like, 'That's my favourite part. I really love that part.'"
Despite his best intentions, Phoenix is not as dark or hostile as the reputation that precedes him. The stories of his early misadventures with the Baltimore Fire Department are his own, and are delivered with wry self-deprecation. He has recently become obsessed with The Office from watching BBC America, and during every break in the photo shoot he would rush over just to deliver David Brent catchphrases. It's quite disarming for the most tortured man in Hollywood to say, in pitch-perfect Swindon, "You can't put a price on comedy."
Phoenix would not see any contradiction in this behaviour. During the interview, I asked him what it was that he found most fulfilling about acting. He explained that what he is searching for is a moment when he no longer has to think. He forgets about his anxiety and fear of failure. He doesn't have to think. A director can throw any situation at him and he will know immediately how to respond. "The absolute best feeling is when a character can act out of character," he explains. "An actor will say, 'My guy is a serious guy...' and I know a lot of serious guys who are fucking hilarious at times."
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