Joaquin Phoenix walks the line

Dave Calhoun discusses Johnny Cash biopic 'Walk the Line' with the 'Gladiator' star.

Oct  5 2005

Not long after Joaquin Phoenix finished filming 'Walk the Line', the new biopic in which he plays Johnny Cash during the most troubled period of the country singer's life, he checked himself into rehab. He was drinking too much. He was exhausted. He felt directionless.

Playing the Man in Black had drained Phoenix of every last bit of mental and physical energy he had left. For more than a year, he had learnt to play guitar like Cash; to sing like Cash; to walk like Cash; to talk like Cash. And then the film was over and he had nothing to do, nowhere to channel the months and months of method-like research that he had put into Cash's life and music.

'It was a weird thing,' 31-year-old Phoenix considers when I meet him in the garden of a Los Angeles hotel, where he's chain-smoking and drinking lemonade. He talks like he smokes – intensely. 'I felt abandoned when it was over, totally cut loose without a lifeline. This was the longest I'd ever worked on something. All I did every day was read about John or listen to John. Everything was John.'

And it shows on screen. Phoenix achieves much more than a good impression of Cash. Physically, he inhabits the singer; his arched lip, his sluggish walk, his unique way of hunching his shoulders and holding his guitar up-high when playing live.

Emotionally, too, he carries Cash's raw nerves, miming to great effect the singer's inability to feel truly comfortable unless performing. It's a wired, jagged performance that smacks of research, dedication and commitment.

'It's not a method, it's an act of desperation,' Phoenix shrugs, trying to explain the tunnel-vision that he chooses to adopt for each new gig. Only complete immersion works for him, he says, quite a task when playing a character as troubled as Cash in the 1960s. It's little wonder that Phoenix had problems when the shoot for 'Walk the Line' was over. The role had become his life.

'It was then that I became aware of my drinking,' Phoenix recalls. 'I wasn't an every day drinker but I didn't have anything else to do, anything to hold me down. I was leaning on alcohol to make me feel okay. That's really what it was.'

Cash's own abuse of alcohol and drugs is a key theme of 'Walk the Line'. The film sweeps us from his birth in rural Arkansas in 1932 at the height of the Depression to the first period of his career – the mid-'50s to late-'60s – when he was forever on tour and existing on a diet of booze, Benzedrine, Dexedrine and Dexamyl.

Success came quickly. In 1955, his first single 'Cry, Cry, Cry' sold well; the next year, 'I Walk the Line' stayed in the country charts for ten months. Cash was suddenly in demand as a live performer.

Unsurprisingly, his family life bore the brunt of endless touring: his marriage to Vivian Liberto – whom he married on his return from Air Force duty in Germany in 1954 – didn't formally end until 1967, but the film shows how the relationship was on the rocks for a long time before.

'I've never seen anything like his schedule,' says Phoenix. 'Play, pack, travel… Play, pack, travel… They didn't have roadies or anything like that. The man was hustling. Non-stop.'

In 1965, Cash was arrested at El Paso airport in Texas after customs officers found hundreds of pills stashed inside his guitar. His mugshot shows him looking gaunt and ill. At the time, friends believed Cash was heading for an early grave like his hard-living near-contemporary Hank Williams.

'A lot of the film is about Cash getting sober, and it made me think about sobriety. I always thought sober people were pussies, that you were a pussy if you couldn't handle your drink. Then I realised that to be sober is one of the most courageous and difficult things to do, because it’s life on life's terms and you don't get an easy fix.'

Too often, Hollywood biopics fall short of the mark when it comes to plausibility and accuracy. They employ simple themes and obvious arcs to mask the complexities and contradictions that define all lives.

In some ways, 'Walk the Line' is no different: it's essentially the pared-down story of Cash's affair with the singer June Carter (played here by Reese Witherspoon). It's a tale of redemption through love that ends with Cash's marriage to Carter, his touring partner and sometime lover, in 1968.

The film argues (and this is no revelation) that it was the marriage that finally prompted Cash to clean up and go straight (so straight, in fact, that by the early 1970s he had his own TV show and was an icon of born-again Christianity with a hotline to President Nixon).

Thankfully, though, writer-director James Mangold ('Girl, Interrupted', 'Cop Land') doesn't allow the Johnny 'n' June love story to swamp the reality of Cash's talent as a musician. He roots the film in performance and there's an unusual and thrilling authenticity to the film's live scenes – surely a result of Phoenix's decision to learn how to behave like Cash onstage.

He recorded a number of Cash's songs with the producer T-Bone Burnett before shooting began so that by the time the cameras rolled he was lip-synching to his own versions.

A highlight of 'Walk the Line' is a live scene that opens and closes the movie: Cash's 1968 gig at California's Folsom Prison, which was recorded for the now-legendary live album, 'Johnny Cash at Folsom Prison'.

'That was pretty amazing,' Phoenix says. 'That's really what brought John back. At some point he lost sight of what he wanted. Addiction was a big part of that. Then he realised that his music was reaching people that society had forgotten about and was having a profound impact on prisoners. He was getting this fan mail from prisons and it really changed him.'

The scenes at Folsom Prison were shot in a huge warehouse in Memphis. Several hundred tattooed heavies looked on as Phoenix, dressed in a black suit, black shoes and white shirt, appeared on a makeshift stage and drawled, 'Hello, I'm Johnny Cash,' before announcing slyly, 'This show is being recorded for an album release on Columbia Records so you can't say 'hell' or 'shit' or anything like that.' Phoenix then kicked into a live version of 'I Walk the Line', sending the crowd of extras wild.

'We shot that scene with multiple cameras so we could play the whole song through. There was a real charge in the room. If you hear the album, John really taunts the guards and I did the same thing with the crew. At one point, one of the speakers caught fire. Everyone went nuts and we just started playing 'Ring of Fire'. That was one of the most fun segments to film. We were actually in the moment, feeding off the energy of those guys, it was really natural.'

About six months before Cash died in September 2003, Phoenix went for dinner at the singer's Nashville home. Back then, 'Walk the Line' was still in the planning stages and Phoenix was yet to be approached to play the singer.

In retrospect, though, Cash was probably sizing him up for the role. At dinner, Cash was open in his admiration for Phoenix. He explained how he loved him as the sadistic and conspiratorial Emperor Commodus in 'Gladiator', following the compliment by reciting entire chunks of Phoenix's lines from the film back to him.

'He relished every word and gave a better performance than I ever did. It was really a beautiful time at dinner, everybody prayed. He was very religious and felt a strong connection to God, yet he recited lines from my character from 'Gladiator', the most sadistic, evil mind that an actor could play. He recited them, relishing every word. That was John. Those two things equally – that darkness and that light. A complete person, not denying one or the other.'

'Walk the Line' screens at the London Film Festival on October 27 and 30, and goes on general release next January.

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