While there’s been a lot of talk about whether Casey Affleck’s ‘documentary’, I’m Still Here – about Joaquin Phoenix’s transformation from actor to rapper – was real or not, many people have pretty much been expecting the announcement to come that it was all actually faked. Now it has, with the NY Times publishing quotes from an interview with director Affleck, where he comes clean.
Affleck admits, Its a terrific performance, its the performance of his career, adding that he’s indebted to Phoenix for putting his career on the line to indulge in a year long project that called for everyone to think the actor had gone mental and was falling off the edge of a cliff.
However there’s still the sense of Affleck being slightly disingeuous, as he says, I never intended to trick anybody. The idea of a quote, hoax, unquote, never entered my mind. That’s quite a statement, as it’s known several of the interviews he conducted in the movie centred on him quite agressively asking why people thought the whole thing wasn’t real. And if you watch the film, nearly all of which he’s admitted was faked (even the home movie video supposedly of Phoenix as a child), there does seem a very concerted effort to pull the wool over people’s eyes.
Talking of sequences where Phoenix appears to snort coke with hooker and hunt down an assistant who has betrayed him to the press, Affleck admits, There were multiple takes, these are performances,” adding that, “We wanted to create a space… You believe whats happening is real.
To be honest, the ‘is it real or not’ controversy has somewhat surprised me, simply because Affleck is Phoenix’s brother-in-law, and it’s highly unlikely he’d have been enough of an asshole to simply document his wife’s brother’s collapse without doing anything to help. So it is all made up, but that doesn’t present it being a somewhat interesting movie.
Incidentally, Affleck also says that during the infamous interview with David Letterman, where Affleck mumbled, seemed off his head and seemed to destroy his career in an instant, was indeed Joaquin in character, but the talk show host wasn’t in on what was going on.