On the Way with Joaquin

Behind the wheel of his beloved yellow Le Mans, Joaquin Phoenix bemoans his diet, laments the pressures of Hollywood, praises movies large and small, and remembers his brother.

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"Everyone's so fucking scared, because when you fail, you fucking fail in this business." Joaquin Phoenix, dressed in Antonioni Blowup-style clothes, smacks his slim guy slacks at about thigh high as he says this, then lays a lazy grip on the steering wheel of the first car he's ever owned. It's a '72 Le Mans, yellow as a canary with hepatitis. A piece of cheap carpet on the dash keeps the sun cracks away; the bench seats are made of cloth and have the worn nap of a homeless person's dirty blanket. The interior of the car is balmy at the moment with the aroma of the green protein health shake Joaquin just consumed. He's dieting like a supermodel for a role he's about to take on, and his blood sugar level is all over the place. You can feel eagerness, procrastination and hunger waging war for his soul.

"I mean, when you fail, they murder you. It's terrible. I hate to see it happen, even to people I don't think are good. It messes you up more. You're always thinking, What's the next move-the career, the money. And it's all bullshit because it doesn't have anything to do with why you're doing what you do. It's completely separate from why you want to be an actor. All that should be important is, Why does a particular role affect you the way it does?

Joaquin's upcoming role in Joseph Ruben's movie formerly known as Force Majeure is definitely affecting the way he's telling me about the actor's life. His notion that he should look emaciated to play an American detained in Malaysia after being accused of drug smuggling may have seemed like a good idea a while back, but Los Angeles on no calories is taking its toll.

"I mean, sure, you want your film to do good," Joaquin says, taking a hard right. "But I have to be honest, I don't give a shit what happens after the movie's out. I just love making it. The only reason why I would like to be accepted? Because if your movies don't do well, after a while you don't get to make any more movies. Simple, right? For me, anyway. But look at Tommy Lee Jones. He did The Fugitive, the lava movie, Men in Black. I didn't see these pictures, I don't know if it was great or fulfilling for him. But, BUT, I do know--or this is what I've heard and it might be untrue, but it's probably right--that he owns a theater company in Texas. I would like to think that that's very fulfilling for him. Bringing people, actors up--funding it. That's fucking admirable, I love that."

Suddenly Joaquin hikes up his shirt and slaps his belly. "How am I gonna lose this?" After boxing trainers, monster workouts and carrying his lunch around in powder form in a margarine container, he's gained three pounds ("I look down at the face of the scale and its like, YOU LIAR!").

Leaving the tourist prostitute/walk-of-fame flotsam of lowlands Hollywood, we take a road leading into the Hills. We're headed toward Joaquin's rented house, a place he can't seem to depart from even though he promised himself in earnest he'd leave for New York and begin "full contact" rehearsing more than two weeks ago. First there was Jane's Addiction with Flea on bass playing at the Roxy. "Couldn't miss that. Amazing, un-fucking-believable show that made me very happy," he explains. Then his mother and her boyfriend came to visit for a week. "Staying at my place. Very nice. My mother could solve most of the world's problems." And then there's the trumpet, which, after a dozen-year layoff, he's taken up again. "Trumpet is beautiful, even just one note of it. Thing is, I bitched to my teacher about just playing scales. I wanted to learn songs. But this friend of mine said, 'Hey, just get into the sound of it,' and I was, like, cured within a day."

But it was the purchase of the car, more than anything, that caused Joaquin to linger in L.A. "I stayed because I just wanted to drive it," Joaquin says. "And yeah, it's yellow, but you know how much a paint job costs? I don't care how many times I hear someone yell, 'TAXI!'" Here he is then, groping for some music to kick the mood up into the stratosphere, or at least beyond ground-chuck level. He smokes a cigarette--make that two, first a sissy, French-graphic-designer-by-way-of-Camus brown one, then Camel-issue white--and rejects one CD after another until we land on Miles Davis.

"You can take that 'I'm an artiste' stuff to the wrong extreme, too," says Joaquin, now on a roll again. "The guy who goes around saying, 'Look at me, I do small art films, I'm the cool guy, I'm Mister Indie Boy,' that's bullshit too. Because you want people to know what you are and you want them to see the damn movie. Whether you think a film will affect society or it's plain entertainment, it's all excellent, it's all noble, That's the great thing about film--there's so many genres and levels to what you can do. I mean, who doesn't want to get dressed up as a cowboy and ride around on horses? Fuck, yeah! Do you want to do a movie that makes people think and effects change? Hell, yeah! If a movie like _Seven Years in Tibet _awakens some people that were oblivious, then that's amazing. And if it takes Brad Pitt to make that movie, so be it. He's a good actor, and hopefully some good will come from it. But he can also go and make a movie that is just plain fun for him and make money. That's good, too. You're not obligated to make a socially relevant film to have an effect on people and you're not obligated not to, either. But what do I know? I'm only 23, for Chrissake. Oh, who knows about these things? People love people, so why shouldn't we?"

Left turn, deep sigh, then Albert King on the box, turning the lemon Le Mans into a blues cave. This car is Joaquin's throne, his life-groove, his vehicle, baby--he's lovin' it.

"Look, there's way too much analyzing about making films," he says, his voice picking up King's groove. "You get spoiled by good reviews and pretty soon you get in the mindset where you never want to do anything to jeopardize that response. That affects your decisions, so it becomes, Oh, God, this role is great, incredible, but I can't do this because it's another dumb character. It should be, Yeah! I want to do that guy, invest myself in that character."

Fair enough. Let's imagine, then, Joaquin Phoenix playing the lead in Jerry Maguire instead of Tom Cruise. The amount of nudity would double and the number of close-ups would be halved. That errant strand of hair adorably bifurcating Tom's forehead to signify crisis would be replaced by the shifting tectonic plate of a jaw that seems to be trying to give a wisdom tooth some working room. The big movie line comes out, "Uh, uh, um, um... show me the fucking money." There would be a real chemistry problem between the Joaquin-Jerry and the blond tyke with glasses. Like a good soldier Joaquin would tweak that precious pixie nose and outwardly buy into the Kids Say the Darndest Things routine, but inside he'd--be doing a slow burn, thinking, "I've played punks like you, you little shit," which, of course, he did, as an 11-year-old mop top in SpaceCamp.

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