End of the road for Joaquin Phoenix?

Or does he have a Joker up his sleeve?

First let me just start off by saying that Joaquin Phoenix is an incredible actor, one of the greatest both for his generation and all time. If you were to ask a person who is the best actor born in the 70’s there is really only three valid options to answer, either Joaquin Phoenix, Leonardo DiCaprio, or the guy who would be my own personal choice Christian Bale. Three guys who are all immensely talented, very committed actors to their craft, method actors if you will (different article for a different day). While that sort of commitment to their craft can be awe inspiring to watch on the big screen, it can also be a result of some quirky and erratic behavior at times. And while even though he rarely works, Leo has always been a pretty professional guy. Christian Bale had his ups and downs with the intense commitment over the years, culminating in the low point of his career on the set of Terminator Salvation as he ripped the D.P (cinematographer) to shreds was made available to the public. But even so, since then he has since stayed out of the limelight when it comes to poor on set behavior and it seems as if everyone has been complimentary of his on set behavior since.

Meanwhile Joaquin Phoenix is someone who just seems to be stuck in his own ways. Not ready to or possibly even willing to evolve into someone who can be this committed actor while also not being a pain in the ass to people on sets. And once again, as an actor I really love Joaquin Phoenix, the one-two punch of The Master and Her performances in back to back years is some all-time great level stuff. But at the end of this week, he pulled a Joaquin Phoenix move, and just abandoned a movie that was set to start filming I believe Monday August 12th. The movie which was an idea that Phoenix himself came up with was about two gay cops in the 1930’s, and that Phoenix was pushing the director/writers/producers to make the movie edgier and edgier. It was set to probably be an NC-17 film and be directed by indie darling Todd Haynes. So now just five days before everyone was set to start up on this journey together and make something they found meaningful, the entire movie is scrapped and will not move forward. That means that there is a lot of people in the crew who possibly have already done work who now might not get paid, and a lot of people who had a big job lined up who now are unemployed.

I’m not here to try and guess why or what happened that caused Phoenix at the last second to bail on the project. Not there on set or in pre-production meetings so it would just be speculation. But what I am here to look at is the cruel world of independent filmmaking and how this incident could cause Phoenix to struggle to find work for the foreseeable future. Even if you look at some of the biggest movies of the 21st century, stuff like Iron Man or Mission Impossible, those movies can be incredibly hard to insure. With Iron Man, that movie was almost unable to happen as we saw it, because no one was willing to insure the production with Robert Downey Jr. and at the time his erratic, bad boy image that had been created. Mission Impossible similarly because Tom Cruise is like free diving off a mountain and risking his life to put me on the edge of my seat in the theater. And every other studio movie as well, there are a lot of moving parts, and the studios are investing a lot of money. So god forbid something happen to someone crucial to the completion of the movie they can cover themselves and not screw over the entire studio with just a huge loss.

Independent films are even harder to get insurance on, because those productions are so different from the studio system with big backers that it can be much harder to get and sometimes I imagine just not acquired. So I do imagine that the Joaquin Phoenix movie had some type of insurance, because he is a pretty big name that brings a certain attention to any project he joins and finishes. But going forward I find it really hard to imagine companies willing to insure Joaquin Phoenix productions as just the erratic behavior that he has displayed over the years would make it too risky to put up that kind of money. Which raises the question of who will next take a chance and work with Phoenix again?

I read a James Gray quote where he said that I think he has made 3 different movies with Joaquin and he has to talk Joaquin into following through and making the movie. Similar stories have been shared by Todd Phillips for Joker and a few other directors. He just seems from the outside looking in like a person who views himself as a true artist and probably has some anxiety about letting down productions. Which I can’t say wouldn’t be true for me as well, and no one has to follow through with something if their heart isn’t in it. But just tough look to literally be the cause of many, many people essentially getting fired because you for whatever reason no longer felt like following through with it. At the very least one can hope that Joaquin with that Joker money will make things right and pay some of these people who are suddenly out of work. He does currently have two movies in the can with Joker 2 and Eddington, and with the 24 hours new cycle we live in now, things could flip with those two movies and he could be back and better than ever in the eyes of Hollywood.

This doesn't mark the first time in Phoenix’s career that he has become a pariah amongst his peers. Back in the late 2000’s, unbeknownst to everyone Phoenix made a mockumentary that blurred what was real and what was fake in a way that would make even Nathan Fielder proud. And I do believe that after that incident which was culminated in a pretty weird and awkward David Letterman interview, it took three years before he was next seen in any sort of project. And it took a master of cinema like Paul Thomas Anderson to grab Phoenix and push him back into the mainstream in a big way with his incredible performance in The Master. So that might be what it takes again, someone of PTA’s caliber to give him a lifeline and rescue him from the mess he made for himself. Todd Haynes does mark someone though who is held in very high regard amongst the various people in Hollywood (executives, actors, writers, directors, etc….) so I doubt they soon forget what happened. And it is all just a bummer, because Joaquin is such a great actor, and this seemed like such a unique project compared to the rest of his filmography. But I think the two most important things for this article would be that hopefully the newly out of work people won’t be for long and THANK YOU for reading!