Joaquim Phoenix plays a troubled war veteran in The Master (2012).
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To conjure this casualty of the Greatest Generation, Phoenix studied Let There Be Light (1946), John Huston's documentary about traumatized World War II veterans, and Lionel Rogosin's semiscripted On the Bowery (1956), which depicted severe alcoholism on Manhattan's Skid Row. He found his most pivotal inspirations, however, in the animal kingdom. "A stray dog that's skin and bones and has a limp and is wandering the streets — that's Freddie," Phoenix says. "The key was thinking about him as an animal, just pure id."
This key is turned to spectacular effect when Freddie whips himself into a tornado of rage inside a jail cell. "If you've seen video of a deer or a bear that finds its way into suburbia and the cops have to tranquilize it, it seems as if the brain stops working. If they're cornered, they'll slam into walls, or one leg tries to go left while the other is going right," Phoenix says. "It's complete fear and chaos. They can't control themselves at all."
Channeling an injured animal for the cameras day in and day out is uniquely draining, as Phoenix's co-star Amy Adams, who plays Dodd's wholesome but waspish wife, observed. "I felt a lot of empathy for him, because Freddie is a lot to take home with you — that kind of longing and pain," she says. "Although he would laugh at me for saying that." Adams also appears with Phoenix in Spike Jonze's forthcoming Her, in which Phoenix falls in love with the voice on his computer's operating system. (Phoenix has also wrapped James Gray's Nightingale, an Ellis Island period piece co-starring Marion Cotillard and Jeremy Renner.) "We play best friends in Spike's movie, so the way Joaquin's process works, we sort of became best friends in life," Adams says. Phoenix, she adds, "wants everything to be real."
"With Joaq, it's 'Is that real or unreal or what is that?'" says James Mangold, director of the Johnny Cash biopic Walk the Line (2005), for which Phoenix received his second Oscar nomination. (His first was for the callow, sulfurous villain in 2000's Gladiator.) "The boundary between real life and acting is hard to find. Working with him day to day, you really feel for him, because he's either hitting it out of the park or struggling to find the ball. Another actor can be having a bad day, but he can reach into his bag of tricks and fake his way through. Joaq can never fake his way through."
Case in point: the Walk the Line scene in which Cash, ravaged by alcoholism and prescription-med addiction and rejected by June Carter, trashes his dressing room. Filming in a Memphis public school, Phoenix was asked to smash a guitar, pop a pill, drink a beer and sit down. "We start rolling," Mangold recalls, "and Joaq smashes the guitar to smithereens, grabs the sink in both hands and pulls it off the wall, water spraying everywhere, then pops his pill and drinks his beer and sits down. Camera operator and focus puller stayed with him the whole time. There's no question of doing another take — which was fine, this one was perfect — because he ripped the f---ing sink out of the wall. Not a movie sink. A real sink."