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JOAQUIN PHOENIX INTERVIEW"It is easy for people to get led astray": Joaquin Phoenix returns with cult drama The Master
Joaquin Phoenix is back to his best, with rumours of another Oscar nomination in The Master
Rex
Joaquin Phoenix, 38, takes pleasure in not conforming to your standard Hollywood career.
He came to prominence in Gladiator in 2000 and won a Golden Globe and an Academy Award for his portrayal of Johnny Cash in Walk The Line five years later.
But his last film was the bizarre ‘mockumentary’, I’m Still Here, which charted his descent from famous actor to bearded, bumbling rapper.
However, he is back to his best, with rumours of another Oscar nomination, in The Master.
You took a while off between I’m Still Here and The Master. How did it feel to be back on set again?
I am always nervous when I am on set. It was funny and it didn’t really feel that different, and so it was pretty familiar.
Why did you decide to take time off and what did you do in that period?
Well first, I’ve done that a lot. It’s not the first time that I didn’t work for two years. I just felt like I needed to change something drastically, so I wasn’t bored.
I wanted to have the feeling that I had when I was young when it was like, ‘This is the most important thing to me, and I’m going to put everything that I have into this’.
When you make enough good movies, it’s impossible not to get lazy.
People are coming up and offering you coffees, and holding umbrellas for you, and it’s very easy to lose your humanity.
I’m not really a good actor in some ways, so I think I just had to get away for a bit and I had to do something different, something that turned me upside down, and made me scared again and made me want to work really hard.
Rex
How do you relate to this movie, which was partly inspired by L Ron Hubbard, and the origins of Scientology?
I know nothing of Scientology.
I know people talk about it, and some of their beliefs are ridiculous, but I don’t know how they sound any more absurd than Catholic or Christian beliefs – no offence to anyone who believes in those, but I’m sorry, it all seems equally fantastical to me.
And likely. I mean, I couldn’t say if they said that we were born out of aliens and volcanoes, but I would go, ‘Sure, all right, I’m good with that’.
It all seems about the same to me and I don’t see why Scientologists would get any more attention than any other kind of religion.
Why do you think people would be drawn to Scientology?
I think people start out with high ideals and they find a group of people that share those ideals, and there are other times they are really trying to truly achieve something.
They are all searching for something and that’s a noble pursuit.
The trouble is, one person gets power and becomes corrupt.
We are human and it is easy for people to get led astray.
And it’s very sad for innocent people that really do enter a group believing in something.
Do you think The Master captures this?
What’s great about The Master is that it seemed very authentic to me.
The leader of The Cause does believe in ways of doing it, but he also can’t see that his ego and his lust for power are guiding him.
And I think that’s a very human thing. It’s very hard to check yourself and go, ‘Am I being altruistic with what I am doing, or am I being self-serving?’
I think it’s easy for people to convince themselves that they are doing something altruistic and doing something with the group ultimately, and it is a selfish act.
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Why are you doing movies again?
Well, I just did three this year, so I won’t do anything for a while. Sometimes you can only plan so much.
I think you get scared – other people in the business, they scare you, they make you nervous about working.
There was definitely a period after I’m Still Here where there was a very discernible difference in the quality of the movies that I had been offered, prior to it and after.
And so there was a moment in which, well, frankly I was getting into a very dangerous place with my mortgage, and I didn’t know what to do when I was offered a movie with big money and I was offered a commercial with great money.
The commercial, I didn’t consider, but the movie, I did. I actually have to credit my girlfriend (model Heather Christie), because I said, ‘I’m considering doing this’ and she said, ‘If you didn’t like complication, you shouldn’t do that movie’.
And I didn’t do it. I was really nervous because I didn’t know what was going to happen and my accountant was very nervous.
I was turning things down and then, I don’t know, it was just pure luck that Paul (Thomas Anderson) came along with The Master four months later.
By Sian Edwards.
Amy Adams: interview on The Master
After losing out on an Oscar three times, Amy Adams seemed destined always to be the bridesmaid. Her controversial new film, The Master, might just change all that. She talks to Lucy Broadbent.
2:36PM GMT 01 Nov 2012
CommentsAmy Adams is talking about seasickness, and tucking into a bowl of tortilla soup at the same time. The subject doesn’t seem to be putting her off her food.
‘Oh, I’m too hungry to care,’ she says, demonstrating that roll-up-your-sleeves attitude for which she has a reputation in directors’ circles. ‘Besides, the whole crew took seasickness pills. And I think we only lost one to… you know what.’
Chatting in the Beverly Hills Polo Lounge, she seems too fun and vibrant, not to mention young, for the stiff atmosphere.
We’re on to the subject of filming at sea in her latest movie, The Master. From the enthusiasm with which her words spill out, you know that good humour is never far away.
‘Even when we were docked, they had a device to rock the boat,’ she says. ‘It took a while to get used to.’
This is a busy time for Adams. Since having her daughter, Aviana, two years ago, she’s made six films. Two remain unscheduled – Superman: Man of Steel, in which she plays Lois Lane, and a Spike Jonze movie, as yet untitled.
The Muppets and On the Road are already out. But The Master, with Joaquin Phoenix and Philip Seymour Hoffman, and Trouble with the Curve, with Clint Eastwood, are high-profile films due out this autumn, carefully timed for Oscar consideration.
She’s already had three Oscar nominations, but the coming season looks set to take her into the realm of greats.
Pundits are already predicting this will be her year to take home a statuette. Yet she’s not complacent. In fact, she feels she is still playing catch-up.
‘I call myself a work hoarder, because work was a lot harder to come by for such a long time,’ she says earnestly. ‘And I’ve sort of been too busy to spend a lot of time looking at where I’ve come. But I am appreciative. I’m so appreciative.’
At 38, Adams still looks as fresh as Princess Giselle, the character she played in Enchanted six years ago. The unmistakable red hair, now swept back into a ponytail, the cobalt-blue eyes and freckles are all as enchanting as ever.
But there’s a steely glint – quite unprincesslike – to the real Adams that explains why she was never in danger of being typecast.
From the feisty girlfriend in The Fighter to the innocent Sister James in Doubt, and the peppy Amelia Earhart in Night at the Museum 2, she’s always been able to transform, to disappear into the characters she’s playing.
She transforms again for The Master, cast as the wife of a Scientology-style guru (Seymour Hoffman) who takes a traumatised Second World War sailor (Phoenix) under his wing.
‘She’s a passionate and fierce believer in what her husband’s doing,’ she explains. ‘She’s fierce. I liked the role because I like fierce women.’ Is she fierce herself? ‘I can be,’ she says coyly, fighting back a smile.
Written and directed by Paul Thomas Anderson (known for Boogie Nights and There Will Be Blood), The Master has already won awards at the Venice Film Festival, and stirred up controversy with the suggestion that Hoffman’s character is based on the Scientologist leader L Ron Hubbard.
‘I think it’s misleading to say it’s a film about Scientology,’ says Adams. ‘The film is so much more, but that’s brought a lot of attention to it, and if it brings attention, I’m not going to argue.’
It was filmed over a year ago in Northern California, a time that Adams describes as strange.
‘My daughter was quite young so I wasn’t getting any sleep. She and our nanny came with me, but she wasn’t sleeping well. The process of making a film without any sleep was very dreamlike.’
Up close, Adams’s determination to succeed is almost tangible. She might be upbeat and cheery, but there’s an intensity and a single-mindedness about her, too.
‘I don’t have a lot of friends or social life,’ she confesses. And her non-stop schedule explains why she has been engaged to Darren Le Gallo, 38, whom she met at acting school in 2002, for over five years – but still no wedding.
‘I think I actually have time now. I haven’t another film until spring. So hopefully…’ She smiles enigmatically, fiddling with a giant diamond ring on her finger.
She’d like to get married, not least because it would solve the problem over what to call Le Gallo: ‘I think of him as my husband, but people get confused because we’re not married. “Fiancé” sounds weird as we’ve been engaged so long. There’s “partner”, “guy”… How about “Darren”?’
As she chats about her forthcoming films, it becomes clear just how far she has to push herself.
There’s the story of how Adams saved Justin Timberlake’s life while filming Trouble with the Curve. ‘I didn’t really save his life,’ she says with a laugh.
‘We had a kissing scene in a freezing lake, and his lips were turning blue. I was trying to give him warmth from my body because he looked hypothermic. Glamorous, huh?’
Then there’s ‘hotel depression’, a phrase she coined to describe the months away from home living in hotels while filming.
‘There’s a lot of bad food. It’s just so, so lonely,’ she says. ‘Then when I find company, I turn into a golden retriever – I’m so excited to see people, I become manic, and talk too much.’
But nothing was ever going to put Adams off acting. Not 10 years waiting tables, nor the year’s unemployment after playing Leonardo DiCaprio’s love interest in Catch Me If You Can in 2002, for which she’d had such high hopes.
Her breakthrough, champagne moment seemed relentlessly slow in coming. ‘There were lots of smaller champagne moments instead,’ she says.
Looking back, she believes that winning the 2005 Sundance Film Festival acting prize for Junebug – Phil Morrison’s offbeat comedy, for which Adams also received an Oscar nomination – changed things.
‘I remember walking with my fiancé through the snow after the ceremony and saying, “I feel like something really just happened.”’
Release date: 2 November 2012
Certificate: 15
Director: Paul Thomas Anderson
Starring: Joaquin Phoenix, Philip Seymour Hoffman, Amy Adams
Verdict: A cult hit.
New film: "The Master"
Not enough Cause
Nov 1st 2012, 16:02 by N.B.
PAUL THOMAS ANDERSON’S last film, “There Will Be Blood”, was one of the most highly acclaimed releases of the past decade, which means that its follow-up, “The Master”, has been one of the most anticipated. Appetites were whetted further when word got out that it would be a thinly veiled biopic of L. Ron Hubbard, the founder of Scientology. What would Tom Cruise think?
The surprising thing about “The Master”, a prize-winner at the Venice Film Festival, is that while Philip Seymour Hoffman’s character is undoubtedly inspired by Hubbard, he isn’t the film’s subject. That distinction goes to Joaquin Phoenix’s Freddie Quell (inspired by John Steinbeck), a young second world war veteran who leaves the navy in 1950 as a priapic, alcoholic wreck. In scenes that could have been lifted straight from “On the Road”, Freddie drifts from place to place until he stows away on a liner being used by a new, not un-Scientology-like organisation called the Cause. Its leader is Mr Hoffman’s Lancaster Dodd.
“The Master” is about a young man finding a substitute family. And like several of Mr Anderson’s films, it is about a father-son struggle between a powerful patriarch and a naive but ambitious acolyte. Keeping an eye on them both is Dodd’s wife Peggy, played by the terrific Amy Adams. Beneath her usual sweetness, there is a core of cold steel that would do Lady Macbeth proud. It’s quite something when you remember that she co-starred in “The Muppets” this year.
But “The Master” belongs to its two lead actors. Mr Hoffman gives us a phenomenally detailed portrait of an egomaniac, someone who can be either suave and professorial, or avuncular and silly, or explosively belligerent—just as long as he is the dead centre of attention. (He is perhaps a distant relative of the cult leader played in Mr Anderson’s “Magnolia” by, ironically, Tom Cruise.) As for Mr Phoenix, his stooping, mumbling, brutish Freddie evokes Robert De Niro and Marlon Brando. The film has its epic outdoor scenes, with the mythic vistas and virtuoso tracking shots that are Mr Anderson’s trademarks. But it is at its most electrifying when it puts Mr Phoenix and Mr Hoffman in a room together.
As in “There Will Be Blood”, even the most ordinary scenes are given a jittery charge by the clicking, syncopated score by Radiohead’s Jonny Greenwood. And in general, it is not a film that lets you relax. Serious and searing, it has a disjointed, elliptical structure, dropping in on Freddie and Dodd at several points during 1950, but leaving it to the viewer to work out what happened in-between. It tells the story of the two men’s relationship, but there is a huge amount about Dodd that it doesn’t tell us: how the Cause came to be, and what happened to it through the 1950s and beyond. For all its brilliance, you may find yourself wishing that Mr Anderson had made that thinly veiled biopic, after all. “The Master” runs for well over two hours, and no one could claim that the time flies by. But you come away from it frustrated that there’s not another hour or two about Lancaster Dodd himself.
“The Master” is in cinemas in America now. It opens in Britain and elsewhere on Nov 2nd
The Master review
Philip Seymour Hoffman plays the leader of a Scientology-like cult in the new movie from the director of Boogie Nights.
Rex
Release date: 2 November 2012
Certificate: 15
Director: Paul Thomas Anderson
Starring: Joaquin Phoenix, Philip Seymour Hoffman, Amy Adams
What's the story?
Shortly after World War II, a rootless ex-seaman (Phoenix) is welcomed into a quasi-religious sect by its charismatic leader Lancaster Dodd (Hoffman). His very presence, though, threatens to destroy it.
Shortly after World War II, a rootless ex-seaman (Phoenix) is welcomed into a quasi-religious sect by its charismatic leader Lancaster Dodd (Hoffman). His very presence, though, threatens to destroy it.
What did we think?
A work of beguiling, unsettling strangeness, Paul Thomas Anderson's latest feature is often as hard to comprehend as its title character's crackpot theories and his acolyte's moody mumbling. From a technical standpoint though it is a wonder to behold, as are Phoenix and Hoffman's wildly contrasting yet oddly complementary performances.
A work of beguiling, unsettling strangeness, Paul Thomas Anderson's latest feature is often as hard to comprehend as its title character's crackpot theories and his acolyte's moody mumbling. From a technical standpoint though it is a wonder to behold, as are Phoenix and Hoffman's wildly contrasting yet oddly complementary performances.
"I am a writer, a doctor, a nuclear physicist and a theoretical philosopher," states self-styled messiah Lancaster Dodd. "But above all, I am a man - a hopelessly inquisitive man." To this end he has created The Cause - a semi-scientific movement that claims to help its followers locate the source of their malaises in traumas locked in their past life or lives.
Clearly modelled on L Ron Hubbard, Lancaster is a charlatan who nonetheless exerts a powerful hold over his superstitious, needy disciples. One man, however, resists his influence - namely Freddie Quell, a disturbed veteran who's obsessed with sex, riven with rage and unable to function in affluent post-war America.
Scientologists have been understandably concerned over what could be read as a root-and-branch assault on their entire belief system. In common with Anderson's previous works, though, The Master is essentially a character study in which an impressionable youth comes into the orbit of a benign patriarch who appears to have all the answers.
Beautifully photographed, thrillingly acted and strikingly scored by Radiohead rocker Jonny Greenwood, The Master might lose its way as it enters its third hour. If you like cinema that challenges, questions and provokes, however, it's well nigh unmissable.
Verdict: A cult hit.
