Order Of The Phoenix
Punch-ups. Dodging tanks. Running into flaming buildings. Destroying walls. It's all in a day's work for Buffalo Soldiers star Joaquin Phoenix....By Ceri Thomas
"Traditional male leads are just so fucking boring," drawls Joaquin Phoenix when Total Film quizzes him about a career that's bounced from porn-shop clerks and Roman emperors to New York spivs and repressed French priests. "Evereyone must like this person, everyone must think this person is gorgeous, everyone must want to love this person, everyone must want to be saved by this person. All that kind of shit, " contineus Phoenix, who, despite having having just rolled out of bed after yet another gruelling night shoot on firefighter drama Ladder 49, is in a relaxed, confident and very chatty mood.
"We're dealing with a medium where you have 95 minutes in which to tell a story, so generally they go, 'John Whatever is THE NICE GUY. And Tony Blah-Blah-Blah is THE BAD GUY. And this is his wife....' And I'm like, 'Well, can't the good guy yell at his kids and tell them to shut up? And can't the bad guy also be capable of great love?' They could have the hero driving and cursing at the person he's stuck behind because he's caught in traffic and pissed off, but they won't do that. The hero literally has to save everyone, including the cat; And that0's fucking ridiculous!"
His latest character, Buffalo Soldiers' Ray Elwood, couldn't be further from the Hollywood ideal that so riles him. A dark-hearted Sergeant Bilko, Elwood is the chief grifter, drug dealer and conman on a US army base in cold War West Germany. He's likeable, affable, funny.... And flogs heroin. "I like characters who have conflicted emotions," Phoenix insists."It's much more realistic and less limiting in terms of what you can do as an actor."
Problem was, Elwood proved a little too realistic for the post-9/11 political consensus, and Buffalo Soldiers was condemned ro release-date limbo for over two years. Perhaps unsurprisingly, Phoenix is unwilling to discussthe politics of Aussie director Gregor Jordan's black comedy, although he's more than happy to reminisce about the Germany-based shoot.
"We shot in Karlsruhe in an abandoned military base," he says, smiling. "I turned around and there was this huge tank rumbling down the street. So then I turn to the extras and I'm like, 'What the hell's that?' And these German extras are looking at me and going, 'What the fuck are you talking about? We've been seeing tanks our whole lives!' Americans aren't used to seeing one driving through the streets, though...."
It was while filming Buffalo Soldiers that Phoenix found out he'd been Oscar nominated for his searing performance as Emperor Commodus in Gladiator - something which, at the time, he felt oddly ambiguous about. "I look at movies I've finnished as being done and that I'm doing something else now. Then something like the Oscar nomination happens and you feel you should be doing all these interviews and talking to people. Don't get me wrong, it was amazing, but I didn't want to be doing all that right then."
The way he talks about the business, you'd be forgiven for thinking that Phoenix is far older than his relative fresh 28 years. But then he has been working in film and TV for the best part of two decades. Like his siblings River, Rain, Summer and Liberty, he was encouraged to go into acting by his parents and worked his way up through commercials and TV appearances to his debut movie Space Camp in 1986 (Joaquin is his given monicker, but he was billed then as "Leaf", a nickname he adopted to match his siblings' more organic sobriquets).
He followed it up with small-but-showy parts in Russkies and Parenthood and then suddenly turned his back on the whole movie world. "I was around 15 and I'd just finnished Parenthood, but I had the sense that they weren't really going to offer me anything fulfilling. I just knew that I wouldn't be satisfied by the very formulaic movies for that age group. So I just thought, 'Fuck it!' and went off to do other things."
He travelled to Mexico with his dad and spent time with River (he was there in 1993 when River died of an overdose - Joaquin made the 911 call for an ambulance), but gradually found himself drawn back to acting. At first the only things he was offered were "Dog-and-whale kids' movies", but then in 1995 along came Gus Van Sant with To Die For. "When I walked on set I realised, 'This is it! I really have missed you!'" he says. "And it all came flooding back."
Phoenix racked up an impressive list of small-scale movies over the next few years. The town bully in U-Turn, a hapless traveller facing life in an oriental jail in Return To Paradise, 8MM's porn-peddler and - his all-time favourite - a smalltime wheeler-dealer in The Yards, James Gray's gritty exploration of bribery and corruption in the New York transport system....
"It was one of those rare movies where everything turned out how I had imagined. The number of times you watch movies and you're like, 'That? That was the fucking scene? But I thought....!' On The Yards, though, you watch it and go, 'Yes! That was the scene. We totally did it!' James can see right through me. He has never let me get away with faking it. And any actor who says he hasn't ever faked a few moments in a movie is full of shit!"
One thing that certainly wasn't faked on The Yards was the centerpiece scrap between Phoenix and Mark Wahlberg, which starts halfway up a flight of stairs and continues out onto and along a deserted street. Legend has it that Wahlberg and Phoenix really went for it.
"If we really went for it, I'd be fucking dead!" laughs Phoenix, before explaining that it was originally scripted like a standard Hollywood fist fight. "We were like, 'That's bullshit - that's not how fights happen.' So me and Mark threw on some elbow pads, loosely rehearsed it and then went for it. We only did two takes and one of those we had to stop halfway through because Mark lifted me up and dropped me on my head. The next day our bodies were fucking black and blue, I swear to God. I wish I had pictures...."
The Yards wasn't the only movie that put Phoenix through the wringer. For Gladiator he not only had to do another highly dangerous stunt fight (the climatic duel with Russell Crowe) but he had to execute it while carrying some extra poundage. "I think I'm still stuck with the chin I developed for that movie," he grins. "I was after a general kind of bloat, really; for the louche emperor, but the funny thing is that I never discussed it with anyone. We shot the film kind of sequentially, doing the beginning where I kill my father first. I had two weeks off while they were in Morocco and then I showed up in Malta having gained some weight? We started shooting and Ridley Scott was like, 'Who's this fucking shaved hamster in my movie?"
Stuck in Europe for five months making Gladiator, then moving straight on to Quills (playing the clergyman taunted by Geoffrey Rush's Marquis De Sade) and Buffalo Soldiers left Phoenix feeling tired and homesick. But then M Night Shyamalan called with an offer he couldn't refuse: the part of Mel Gibson's brother in Signs.
"The actor originally cast (Mark Ruffalo) got injured and had to pull out. basically I got back into New York on a friday and then had to be in Philadelphia for the sunday, then we had a week of rehearsals before shooting. I normally like to have at least a month before anything - on Signs I was still learning and developing stuff weeks into the shoot." Signs also saw him fall victim to co-star Mel Gibson's 'hilarious' love of practical jokes. "Mel was supossed to come down and knock on the door of this closet I'm sitting in . So I'm sitting there and sitting there, figuring Mel's doing something new and spontaneous. But the time just drags on and on. Suddenly all the lights go out as everyone breaks for lunch, leaving me there for 20 minutes. They left the sound recording going though. Night has that tape somewhere - I say some pretty awfull things...."
He enjoyed the Signs shoot so much that Shyamalan is about to become the first director that Phoenix has worked with twice - he just signed on for the fright-master's latest project, The Woods. "I've talked with probably 95 percent of the directors about working with them again and Night's the only one who's turned around and said, 'Right! let's do it then!'" Before that, though, Phoenix has to finnish work on Ladder 49, the movie which is causing him sleepless nights at the moment. Still, Phoenix insists the shoot is nothing compared with the training he had to go through. This involved the actor joining real rookie firefighters on their first few assignments, doing 10-hour day shifts and 14-hour night shifts. "I remember the first time I stood in the doorway of a burning building. All this smoke is coming out and there are flames shooting up the stairs. I'm going, 'You's kidding me! We can't go in there! But they sandwiched me between two guys and we charged up the stairs with the hose and we nailed that fire. We tore the place apart, ripping down walls, knocking out windows and searching for victims. it's five minutes of total chaos. It's pitch black - you just can feel the heat and only see a dim orange glow. And then you slay the dragon, knock out the fire and you ventilate and the smoke clears. it's unbelievable."
That's Phoenix for you. A risk-taker, the kind of actor who'll hunt out the realism in a part regardless of the danger. The kind of actor who'll next appear.... As the voice of cartoon bear in Disney's latest animated release? "You know, I shouldn't even say this because it's just so fucking clichéd - I mean every actor says it - but honestly? I did Brother Bear because I really wanted my little nephews to see something I've done. They can't see a single one of my other movies...."
