LOS ANGELES -- Joaquin Phoenix is "on" today.
The wiseguy retort, given his past rehab experience and bad-boy rep, would be "on what?" But it's only 10:30 a.m., and most of the assembled press agree he would have needed a head start to achieve this state of ebullience artificially.
And as Robert Duvall, his co-star in the cop movie We Own the Night, says -- scoffing at Phoenix's producer credit -- "Joaquin can't even get up in the morning," so it's unlikely he'd get an early start on anything.
No, this is just the mercurial actor in unabashed doofus mode -- as opposed to the moody apparition he can be (he walked out on some interviews at the Toronto International Film Festival five minutes in). Today, he stares at a table full of recording devices and declares, "I am Lord of the Gadgets!" He mugs in response to questions, and when one unobjective female reporter expresses her ardent admiration, he shouts out his room number.
In this state of mind, he is nothing but scabrously frank. For example, of his acting approach, he says, "the truth is, actors often lie and the press writes how they're really affected by their roles. To be honest, I've done a lot of scenes where I'm thinking 'What the f--- is for lunch? I can't wait to get out of here!' "
What movies would those be? That's easy to figure out (think Ladder 49) when you ask him why he's attracted to dark and tortured characters, like the coked-out nightclub manager he plays in We Own the Night, a "black sheep" from a family of cops, seeking to evade his destiny by embracing a dissolute lifestyle.
"Drama is conflict, you want conflict in a character," Phoenix says. "If not, I'm bored to f---ing death. I think, honestly, it just comes down to being bored or not. I've been on films where (I was playing) just kind of quote-unquote regular guys, and it was really f---ing tedious to me. I don't really enjoy acting enough to not want to experience something that's affecting. There's too much other stuff that goes into it, the makeup, the hair, the wardrobe and my taking pictures and doing press and all this s--t I don't really enjoy. It's not worth it to me without an experience that would be really intense."
Such intensity is sometimes hard for his co-stars to take. Mark Wahlberg, who plays his straight-arrow police-officer brother says, "I love Joaquin. We had this chemistry and familiarity. But he's intense, too. He was smoking a lot of cigarettes on this movie. And he wants to talk about every scene. You get in a room for two hours in the morning, he must smoke 12 or 15 cigarettes mumbling about how much he hates the scene and my part's great but his part's bad. We get in there and do it, that's when it all happens.
"I think he enjoys acting. But he also likes being kind of a dark, tormented artist. I just leave the room and go to my trailer and let him and James (director James Gray) figure it out."
Tightly wound is what the doctor ordered in We Own the Night (the title refers to the motto of the NYPD street crime unit). Set in 1988, the film stars Phoenix as Bobby Green, a nightclub manager estranged from his brother and his dad (Robert Duvall), the latter of whom happens to be the chief of police. But when his brother is shot and he discovers the shooter is a Russian mobster who frequents his club, he calls a truce and delivers the info to the chief, over the objections of his cronies and girlfriend (Eva Mendes).
He agrees to turn informant, a situation that squeezes father-and-son uncomfortably together in all their love-hate chemistry. Again, this apparently made for some abrasive off-screen chemistry.
"Interesting working with the guy," Duvall says. "He has his own method. He's always in your face, on and off camera, always messing around. He gets under your skin sometimes. I really got pissed off at him at one point, and he had to go to my wife and say, 'Look, when the movie's over, you'll see. I'm a very sweet person.' He was doing something for a reason, I guess. Good guy."
For Phoenix's part, researching the life of a club manager was apparently not the party one would expect. He is not a fan of such places (though the subject is not broached, one can't help but be reminded that he was there and called 911 the night his brother River died of an overdose at Johnny Depp's Viper Room in L.A.).
"It's not my scene, but I don't think I have a scene. I just think they're awful. It's unbearable to me. I don't like being in an enclosed place with really loud music and a lot of drunk people. But I went in and was talking to people that ran the (New York) clubs, going to the back rooms and offices and seeing how they did it. It's such a miserable life. Honestly, they're there 'til like five in the morning, back at noon."
As for his own "scene," he says, "no one ever believes me, but I do nothing. I have TV. I will say I do very much like the Discovery channel, which I just watch a lot. History, Discovery, National Geographic, I just flip through those." He keeps a New York apartment, reportedly in the same building as his sister Summer and her husband, actor Casey Affleck.
Although all such predictions are purely speculative this early on, Phoenix's performance is the kind of high-wire act the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences tends to notice. Phoenix has already been to the awards twice -- with a best supporting actor nom for Gladiator and best actor for Walk the Line.
In both cases, he says, "it was like, go around, do a lot of things, wearing the suit, hey hey. The first one, I didn't have to do as much, Russell (Crowe) did everything and I was working out of the country when Gladiator came out right up to the Oscars. For Walk the Line, I was here, so they had me."
As we spoke, he had no other films immediately lined up. So in the ensuing months, if you see Phoenix on your screen posing for pictures at some awards show, you can assume he'd rather be home watching the Discovery Channel -- or wondering what's for lunch.
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