Van Sant initially approached Phoenix by giving him the book and an early script, which the actor found intriguing but far from an obvious choice. “It was interesting, but I didn’t have a really emotional reaction to it,” Phoenix recalls. “Then he sent me another script and I said, ‘I don’t know what you did, but I feel this one a lot more.’ And that was it.”
In rewriting the piece, Van Sant favored adapting sections of the book that focus on Callahan’s alcoholism and recovery, rather than compressing his life story from beginning to end. “Having done a lot of biographies, like Drugstore Cowboy and Milk, I’ve learned that the success of it comes from figuring out what you’re going to leave out,” Van Sant offers. “Callahan’s book goes into a lot of different areas. There’s a whole chapter on being raised by nuns at a Catholic school, a chapter on working in a mental institution as a teenager. Then there’s his whole rise as a cartoonist. I pared them down and focused on the chapter about his alcoholism—which was sort of his main topic whenever he was writing seriously, and sometimes in his cartoons as well.”
In the early stages of the project, Van Sant had the benefit of meeting with Callahan while working on the script with Robin Williams and writer Patty Sullivan. “When she was writing, we hung out with him and videotaped him,” Van Sant remembers. This footage was a key resource for Phoenix, who immersed himself in research per his usual practice. “That documentary material was really good to get my hands on,” says Phoenix, who asserts that his reliance on such material is the one thing that distinguishes playing a real person like Callahan or Johnny Cash in Walk the Line, the role that garnered Phoenix his first Oscar nomination for Best Actor in 2006. “It alters your method in that you have a lot of source material,” he explains. “It’s not purely your imagination and the director’s imagination. In the case of Don’t Worry, He Won’t Get Far on Foot, the book was really beneficial, because John was really honest—you got a sense of his struggles and his humor.” Phoenix adds that while there’s a certain amount of pressure that comes with playing a real person, ultimately his goal is to disregard it. “Most of the job for me is trying to get away from the expectations, because at some point it has to be mine, and I can’t think about that anymore.”
Van Sant and Phoenix co-write notes on the set of Don’t Worry, He Won’t Get Far on Foot. Photograph by Scott Patrick Green, courtesy of Amazon Studios
A key part of Phoenix’s process was visiting Rancho Los Amigos, the rehabilitation hospital where Callahan had been admitted, and talking with the patients and therapists about his condition. “I was under the impression that if you had the same injury, your body reacted the same way, and that’s not true,” Phoenix says. “Some people’s fingers are flexed back. Some are frozen and gripped tight. Bodies move in different ways. Watching people and learning what muscles you use or don’t use, or how you get through a door, was really helpful.”
Initially Phoenix was concerned about whether or not the quadriplegics he met would see him as an interloper actor, but he quickly found that the straighter he was with them, the more open they were with him. “It’s more uncomfortable when somebody’s sitting there and dancing around the subject. I would say, ‘Hey, you don’t owe me anything. If there’s anything you don’t want to talk about, if you feel like I’m being intrusive, please let me know.’ And they were very forthright about all sorts of intimate details.”
Van Sant was impressed by Phoenix’s total commitment to the character, which was, if anything, even more intense on Don’t Worry, He Won’t Get Far on Foot than it had been on To Die For. “Working with Joaquin was different this time because he’s so much older, and has done a lot of fantastic roles, in the Paul Thomas Anderson movies and other things,” Van Sant notes. “He’s so much more experienced than when we did To Die For. Back then, he was less likely to question things.”
Phoenix’s thorough sense of preparation forced Van Sant to work more intimately with him in preproduction than he might have with another performer. “We went through the script page by page, which I had never done with any other actor,” Van Sant explains. “We would meet at five in the morning every day and go through the script line by line, stopping whenever there was something he wasn’t fully understanding. We’d go until around nine, getting in four hours before the day really started, and it took us four or five days.”
Phoenix stars as caustic cartoonist John Callahan in Don’t Worry, He Won’t Get Far on Foot. Photograph by Scott Patrick Green, courtesy of Amazon Studios
From Phoenix’s perspective, the process was about convincing himself that he could really take on the role. “It was kind of like an audition—only I was really auditioning myself,” he reveals. “It’s about trying to discover the boundaries for the character. There are so many ways to interpret something, so you’re basically just trying to get aligned with the director and get more confident about what you’re both thinking. Are you in agreement? Is that what this scene is about? And sometimes you play with stuff and say, ‘Well, what if it was this? What if we played it like this, does that make sense?’ It was just a really preliminary way of feeling each other out and asking, ‘Do we want to approach this in the same way?’”
Once Phoenix was on board, he was joined by a superb ensemble that includes Jonah Hill, Rooney Mara, and Jack Black; Hill gives a particularly beautiful performance as Callahan’s AA sponsor, and he worked closely with Phoenix in prep to forge a rapport. The two actors rehearsed with Van Sant, who was mildly concerned by the initial meetings. “Usually when I rehearse with people they try different things, and it gets quite animated,” he explains. “But with Joaquin and Jonah, for whatever reason, they just read the lines in this monotone way and didn’t do everything else. Then they would sort of laugh at me, so I never knew quite what was going on. In my head I was thinking, ‘Well, they’re really good actors, so I guess they’re just going to do it later.’” Phoenix laughs at the idea that he and Hill might have been messing with their director. “No, I think that was our own panic about ourselves,” he says. “We were probably laughing because we were so bad. You know, I’m an actor that likes to slowly get into the water. Some actors come into rehearsal really bombastic and confident, and that isn’t my way. I think Jonah and I had a lot of personal anxiety, and that’s what Gus was seeing. But he didn’t really say anything, even when we asked him to! He just said, ‘Oh yeah, OK, good.’ I think he had nothing to say because if he said what he felt it would have been ‘This is awful,’ and he knew he couldn’t do that.”
Port of Call: Van Sant’s native Portland, OR serves as the backdrop for Don’t Worry, He Won’t Get Far on Foot. Photograph by Amanda Demme
Ironically, given Van Sant’s reputation as a cinematic chronicler of Oregon, Don’t Worry’s Portland-centric story was shot entirely in and around Los Angeles—a decision the director made according to a number of aesthetic and practical considerations. “Half the story happened here—the party, the accident, Rancho De Los Amigos,” Van Sant explains, “and then Oregon itself had changed quite a bit. John’s old neighborhood was built up with new shops and things. We searched Pomona and found a cool area that looked like Northwest Portland. A lot of the movie is interiors of houses anyway, so why not shoot here where everybody lives? You can get better actors and better crews just because they get to stay near their homes.”
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