An Interview with Joaquin Phoenix

A Hollywood star who doesn't care about money? It sounds too good to be true, but Joaquin's Phoenix's bohemian upbringing and family philosophy keep his feet firmly on the ground...

Joaquin Phoenix is one of five kids born to Children Of God missionaries. The family led a nomadic lifestyle, and the children were schooled at home, tapping into their creative talents. Joaquin's older brother River had a well-established acting career when he tragically died of a drug overdose in 1993. Joaquin was thrust into the limelight with his brilliant portrayal of the Roman emperor Commodus in Ridley Scott's blockbuster, Gladiator - his latest film is M Night Shyamalan's The Village, a tale of monsters in the night...

This is your second film with M Night Shyamalan. What do you like about his work?
He creates this very intense atmosphere and gets to the heart of a lot of human fears and weaknesses. There's always this sense of foreboding and paranoia at work, like when your worst feelings and suspicions get the better of you. He's really a master at manipulating our heads. The story put me on edge, I can say that much.

You've been known to get heavily involved with your characters while shooting a movie. Did this happen on the set of The Village?
No. I think if I had started acting like my character, everyone on the set would have run away screaming. There was enough tension to go around.

Did you bond with your fellow actors in the same way that there's a bond between the villagers?
We spent some time at this Girl Scout camp, where we ate together and lived in tents and things like that. We learned how to weave, make pottery, and get the feeling of a self-sustaining community. It was pretty interesting, although I kind of come from a background where living close to the earth was always the ideal. So it felt almost like going back to my family roots in some way.

Your family worked as missionaries and then as street musicians. Did that give you an outsider's way of looking at the world?
You never feel that way while you're living that kind of life, because it's the only thing you know. As a child, I knew that my family was trying to live differently from other people. They were trying to raise us with different kind of values - getting away from what they saw as a highly materialistic and corrupt culture. I grew up with a sense that you can live more openly and honestly than in the traditional sense. It was an incredible experience... Maybe I still see myself as being different from other people in the sense that I see the world from a more critical perspective. But I don't like to be judgemental.

In your work, you're often playing oddballs, villains or sociopaths. Are you drawn to those roles, or is that what you tend to be offered?
[Laughs.] I get a lot of scripts wanting to take advantage of the drooling psychopath side of me! I don't mind playing a villain, because often the bad guy is much more interesting to play than the hero. But I had a pretty interesting role as the good Priest in Quills, where Michael Caine was the drooling villain, and my character in Buffalo Soldiers was a pretty cool kind of anti-hero. I don't really have a fixed idea of what I want to do. I'm obviously not the standard leading-man type, so I'm always going to be playing characters who are against the mainstream. I also like having the kind of profile where I can play darker kinds of characters, because the emotional pitch to those roles is usually much higher. I'm happy with that. I'm not looking to become the next Harrison Ford or Clark Gable.

Your image is fairly controversial. Are you as much of an oddball as the media likes to portray you as being?
I don't do anything particular to foster any kind of perception of myself other than just being myself. I'm usually pretty nervous before I go on talk shows and so sometimes I think people might have thought, 'Hey, this Phoenix guy is kind of weird!' But I'm more relaxed now about giving interviews and I try not to make any sarcastic comments, which might be given the wrong interpretation unless you were sitting there talking to me. I have a kind of cynical sense of humour and so that's probably one thing about me people would notice and might throw some people off if they didn't know me that well.

Your family moved around a lot when you were growing up. Does the actor's lifestyle suit you in that sense?
I think there is a certain kind of nomadic behaviour that actors like myself enjoy indulging in. There's this tremendous euphoria about being on the road a lot, living out of hotel rooms, meeting a lot of different people in cities where you don't know anyone. I love that sensation of not being tied down anywhere and just being in the frame of mind where I feel like I'm constantly exploring the world. One of the great gifts my parents gave to me is the freedom to live and be who I want to be. Sometimes that freedom can be dangerous if you don't know who you are or what you want... but even then it's an interesting kind of freedom, because you're constantly speculating about what you want from life and who you think you should be and who, when you take a hard look at yourself, you really are. So there's this curious kind of tension in the way I live and being an actor definitely is as strange and unstable a way of living you can find.

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