Here’s the setting: Joaquin Phoenix was leaning back in a hotel suite comfy chair. He was wearing an untucked, open-buttoned white Oxford shirt and blue jeans. He was smoking and resting the cigarette in a hissing machine that someone had given him to suck down the smoke for the comfort of his guests.
He’s known as a reluctant interview, though that may be simply because he doesn’t go out of his way to woo the media like so many other celebrities, including his co-star John Travolta, perhaps the most professionally charming man alive. It also may be because he’s not a sound-bite kind of guy.
So instead of trying to condense the 29-year-old Phoenix into easily digested nuggets, let’s just let him talk — and explain what makes him tick. The question: “What was the first movie that made you think you wanted to be an actor?”
The answer:
“I started so young before I was even really aware of movies. It was actually in the work that I felt that I wanted to be an actor E “I was guest-starring on a series that my brother [River] did called ‘Seven Brides for Seven Brothers,’ and this episode my younger sister Liberty was in it as well with me, and there was one scene in which our friend, an old guy, gets into a fight with this other guy, and I remember them doing this scene, and they started fighting and how real it felt and how me and my sister just immediately started emoting.
“And the feeling that it felt in my body . . . I know that it was OK, that it wasn’t real, but it made me feel alive. I remember my legs were shaking, and my adrenaline was pumping. And then shortly after, I went and I did a guest spot on `Hill Street Blues,’ and it was the same kind of thing where I remember doing the take and just feeling in my body, I don’t know how to articulate it, just such a feeling of empowerment in a way and just feeling that I was aware of every cell in my body.
`Connected to everything’
“That feeling is what has made me go back to it time and time again. There’s a moment where you feel so connected to something, and I guess it’s similar to how an athlete will talk about `the zone,’ like when they’re in the zone and they can’t miss and the hoop looks like it’s 40 feet wide, and they just feel that they have complete control over their body. I think it’s similar to that. There’s just a point where you feel so utterly connected to everything, and it’s an amazing feeling, and I’ve never reproduced that feeling. Nothing else has ever given me that feeling but acting.”
As you may have noticed, Phoenix gives a great deal of thought to what he does. (Most actors probably would have offered an answer along the lines of “Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory.”)
Which brings us to “Ladder 49,” Disney’s flame-filled, post-9/11 tribute to firefighters, specifically designed to inspire appreciation and awe of these brave men (the women are at home, worrying) who run into buildings that everyone else is fleeing.
Most of Phoenix’s previous parts have been character roles, into which he disappears. You’ll rarely catch him acting; you somehow believe that he is that guy, whether he’s being a cruel Roman emperor (“Gladiator”), a cynical Army wheeler-dealer (“Buffalo Soldiers”), a humane doctor in a dungeon of sadism (“Quills”) or a 19th Century fellow venturing into some spooky woods (“The Village”).
“Ladder 49” marks the first time he’s taken a traditional movie-star role: the hero who rescues people from collapsing infernos. The movie is the opposite sensibility of the corrosive “Buffalo Soldiers,” meaning that the 12 people who saw that film probably will avoid this one. An inspirational firefighter movie just sounds like an odd match for Phoenix — and he initially thought so, too, though he liked the idea of playing a firefighter.
“I know that when I first heard about it, I went, `This is going to be crap. There’s no way this can be any good,'” Phoenix said. “But once I read the script and talked to [director] Jay [Russell], I realized that there was the potential for this to be something different and not be the typical Hollywood firefighter movie.”
Phoenix, Travolta and Russell, who also were in town, talked about how hard they worked to take the cornball out of Lewis Colick’s script.
“When I read this script, I really was a bit the greatest firefighter in the world,” Phoenix said. “I came out of every fire with two people on my shoulder, and I was the best father, the best husband, and I felt like because there is a sense of heroism inherent in what [firefighters] do, then can’t we explore some of the more flawed sides of the character as well? I always try to create balanced characters because that’s what I see in the world.”
Waiting for audience
Filmmaker Harold Ramis once said, “Every movie is three movies: the movie you set out to make, the movie you think you’re making and the movie you find out you made.” Phoenix said he was “pretty ecstatic” when he first saw “Ladder 49,” but the real answer will come when audiences — who haven’t worked on the movie for two years and aren’t responsible for promoting it — get to weigh in. No one is going to confuse “Ladder 49” for a gritty character drama or a big-screen version of Denis Leary’s prickly “Rescue Me” cable series.
At the same time, Phoenix doesn’t see himself on the movie-star track. “I see what happens to movie stars, the expectations that people have, and suddenly outside forces start dictating what it is they should do, as opposed to what they feel themselves,” he said. “I’ve never wanted anything else to make choices for me. So I’ve never wanted to be a movie star.
“Also I see these guys that are 40 years old, 45 years old, and I see them out there at a restaurant or a party, and they need for people to come and say, `You’re great,’ or else they can’t go home, they’ll be depressed. I never ever want to be like that. It’s just my greatest fear.
“That’s why I never read anything, I never read my own press, and I don’t watch dailies and I don’t want people talking to me. I don’t want to think about how audiences perceive me or how studios perceive me or how agents perceive me. I just think it’s a danger to be thinking about that. I believe it starts affecting you — and to me not in a good way.”
