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Joaquin Phoenix’s performance for I’m Still Here is a hoax…of course it was! Let’s come up with the facts…Joaquin is a great actor…loved him in Gladiator and all of a sudden he has some sort of breakdown and wants to become a rapper…crazy! This movie is soo fake but Joaquin threw himself into this hilarious performance…Bravo, lol! At least he give sit his all!
But finally director (& actor) Casey Affleck admits that the entire movie was in fact…fake,
“It’s a terrific performance, it’s the performance of his career,†Mr. Affleck said. He was speaking of Mr. Phoenix’s two-year portrayal of himself — on screen and off — as a bearded, drug-addled aspiring rap star, who, as Mr. Affleck tells it, put his professional life on the line to star in a bit of “gonzo filmmaking†modeled on the reality-bending journalism of Hunter S. Thompson.
“The reviews were so angry,†said Mr. Affleck, who attributed much of the hostility to his own long silence about a film that left more than a few viewers wondering what was real — The drugs? The hookers? The childhood home-movie sequences in the beginning? — and what was not.
“I never intended to trick anybody,†said Mr. Affleck, an intense 35-year-old who spoke over a meat-free, cheese-free vegetable sandwich on Thursday. “The idea of a quote, hoax, unquote, never entered my mind.â€
Still, he acknowledged that Mr. Letterman was not in on the joke when Mr. Phoenix, on Feb. 11, 2009, seemed to implode his own career by showing up in character as a mumbling, aimless star gone wrong.
So he said little in interviews. “We wanted to create a space,†he said. “You believe what’s happening is real.â€
Photo from Magnolia Pictures
