Phoenix says that he loves the freedom that comes with knowing that a good director will be editing his performance. “I think lack of control for an actor is great,” he says. “If you’re working with a director you trust, then you trust that they’re going to find a great editor that’s going to understand the character and the tone, and if you explore something that doesn’t belong in the movie, they won’t put it in. The thing I always remembered about Gus is the feeling that somebody completely supports you. Nothing is considered a mistake, you just keep working at it. He just instills such confidence in you. Not confidence like, ‘I got this.’ I’ve never felt that, ever. It’s the confidence to make mistakes. The confidence to say ‘I’ve got nothing, I feel nothing—this is a fucking disaster.’ And then we go forward. It’s really important to make mistakes. I like exploring a lot of possibilities and different colors, and I just want to feel like I can do that. I want to work with directors who have a willingness to try the unexpected, to be open to making a discovery that we didn’t really know was part of the story of the character. And maybe that becomes the most important thing. There’s potential in every scene to reveal something more about the character and it might not be what we were thinking, and that’s good. Thinking you have everything all figured out is my least favorite way of working.”
Head Above Water: Phoenix hangs poolside outside Van Sant’s California home on May 11, 2018. Photograph by Amanda Demme
To that end, Phoenix experienced another fruitful collaboration this year with director Lynne Ramsay on You Were Never Really Here. “Lynne and I definitely had this conversation where we said, ‘No scene is just a scene. This isn’t just a scene passing information to the next scene. What else is here?’” Although the goal of a movie like Don’t Worry, He Won’t Get Far on Foot feels clearer than the more hallucinogenic You Were Never Really Here, Phoenix said his method of working doesn’t really change. “I don’t really know what my process is,” he admits. “I wish I had one and then I would feel good, like I could consistently work. But I’ve never figured out a way of working where I was like, ‘Oh, this is it. This made everything go as planned.’ And I think that’s good. I’ve actually started to realize that the more it doesn’t go as planned, the better it is for me.”
Phoenix pushed that way of thinking to an uncomfortable extreme with his 2010 experiment, I’m Still Here, a mockumentary in which he plays himself pretending to give up acting in favor of becoming a terrible hip-hop artist. In order for the ruse to work, Phoenix and his collaborators played it very close to the vest—so close that everyone believed he had truly lost his mind. “There was a period where I thought, ‘Oh, we’ve actually succeeded, and I have no career,’” he recalls.
For a while, Phoenix says the sense that his performance art might’ve permanently backfired overwhelmed him. “It was like, it’s over. I can’t go much lower than this,” he says, “and I had evidence for that, based on the things that I was being offered. There was a bit of a panic. I wanted to work, and I took meetings on things where I look back and think, ‘I can’t believe I even went to that meeting.’ I got really close to one thing and said no. I just couldn’t do it. I’d tasted this other thing and didn’t want to go back to the regular way of making movies and agents and the whole thing. Then I got really lucky when Paul Thomas Anderson reached out to me with The Master. The idea with I’m Still Here was to do something that you didn’t have complete control over because you couldn’t control the other people involved. And there were several moments where I felt like maybe I’d gone too far.”
The fallout from I’m Still Here was especially funny, Phoenix observes, “because the entire time we were making it, people were doubting that it was real, and then at the end, when we released it and finally said it wasn’t real, then everybody was saying, ‘It was real and they’re covering it up!’ That might have been the moment when I thought, ‘Oh fuck. We really went for it, I guess.’”
In a career that has frequently seen long gaps in between projects, Phoenix is now coming off of a period in which he’s made four movies back to back. “I think it’s probably better to not work that much. Who wants to see the same motherfucker? It’s just way too much of my face,” he laughs. Yet, the actor is undeniably energized by his recent collaborations with Ramsay, Van Sant and others. “When you work with filmmakers that you admire, the process feeds you and gives you so much inspiration. So I usually finish films really excited about doing something else.”
Over the course of their 20-plus year friendship, Phoenix says that not much has changed. Van Sant agrees: “The fun part is that our personal relationship has pretty much remained the same. Somehow, we understand each other. I don’t know how.” MM
This article appears in MovieMaker’s Summer 2018 issue. Don’t Worry, He Won’t Get Far on Foot opens in theaters July 13, 2018, courtesy of Amazon Studios. Featured image photograph by Amanda Demme.
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