If Joaquin Phoenix is telling the truth and his hip hop career isn't a bizarre stunt, then Two Lovers will be his last film. Two Lovers finds Phoenix reuniting with James Gray who directed the now-retired actor in The Yards and We Own the Night. This romantic drama - written, directed and produced by Gray - follows Phoenix as Leonard, a jilted 30ish New Yorker who's hot for his party-girl neighbor (played by Gwyneth Paltrow) who in turn is hot for a married man. And to complicate matters, Leonard's also interested in Sandra (Vinessa Shaw), a nice, quiet girl his parents would be ecstatic if he settled down with.
At the Los Angeles press day for Two Lovers, Phoenix – sporting long hair and a beard - admitted he'll be happy when he's finished promoting films. "Today I was getting dressed here for hours prepping and I just was really satisfied that I wasn't going to have to do this again."
If in fact it does turn out that Two Lovers is Phoenix's final film performance, it wasn't something he thought about going in. "It certainly wasn't a plan," said Phoenix. "It certainly wasn't like, 'Oh, well, let's go out on this one.' Although when I was doing the play in San Francisco, I was talking to Danny DeVito's stand-in, and I told the dude, I told him I was retiring. And he was like, 'This is really the last thing?' I said yeah. He said, 'Don't go out on this.' It was the first time I thought about that. It hadn't even occurred to me, like oh, it's a thing. 'It's going to be your last movie.' Terry George called me and said, 'You couldn't retire after Reservation Road? We could've gotten maybe some more tickets…' But I don't think so."
Asked if he was burned out at the end of Two Lovers and if that's how he ultimately came to the decision to leave acting behind, Phoenix replied, "Well, I think that I've threatened myself with quitting after every movie but I think everybody does that, right? And I just kind of, I mean, it's something that I've thought of for a long time. I've been working on my music and doing all sorts of different kinds of music and stuff. I don't know. In some ways I felt like I needed to make a statement for myself in terms of quitting. In some ways I kind of regret - I didn't realize it was going to be such a big deal. I thought nobody would give a f--k, really, to be frank and I was pretty surprised. I guess no one does. There's maybe like a couple people that are blogging, whatever. But I felt that I had to do that and I had to do something extreme to get out of it because it's like really hard for me to go into music because the first thing anyone says is Johnny Cash. Do you know what I mean? So I really had to do something extreme to get away from that."
Phoenix sort of provides a preview of his hip hop moves in Two Lovers when his character, Leonard, does some freestyling. Phoenix explained how that scene came about: "We were talking, we're sitting in the car, prepping for that scene, rehearsing saying we need to, 'Something has to happen here, right? We can't just cut to the car and everyone's hanging out, whatever. What is it?' We talked about things. We're saying, 'Well, what do these dudes do? What do the dudes that grew up in Brooklyn, this age, they all loved hip hop.' And James [Gray] told me that he had a hip hop group and I was like, 'That's just too genius.' I couldn't f--king imagine. So I said, 'Okay, okay, let me try to do something.' So I just had like a few different ideas I jotted down. Then I said, 'So should I do this one or this one?' And then we just ended up doing all of them and I don't know which one he used for the movie."
Speaking of coming up with ideas for scenes, Phoenix says he didn't bounce ideas off his talented co-stars, Paltrow and Shaw. "No, I don't really do that. I don't like to know what other actors are thinking and I don't want them to know what I'm thinking necessarily, unless it's important for a scene," revealed Phoenix. "I think there are certain scenes and moments where it's important that you understand what the other person's doing, and in those moments you might talk about it. But typically for me, the director is the only person that I talk to about choices and my intention for the scene, and I don't really want to know."
"But it was great," added Phoenix. "I mean, I was genuinely surprised by how Gwyneth interpreted the character and what she did. Her first day, I'd been working for like two weeks so I was comfortable by then. You get comfortable with the crew and everything, and she came in and I thought she was going to be nervous for a couple days. She just smoked me. Right away - I couldn't believe it. It was terrifying. She was really, really amazing. She just arrived and she had the character down because you know, it seems like, at least my experience is, the first couple days, everyone's kind of moving around like this and they're bumping into furniture. You're trying to go, like, 'How do I walk and what do I do? What's natural? How the f--k do I just say good morning to somebody and it sounds normal?' Right? Because you look at it on a piece of paper and you suddenly start analyzing and you're like, 'Goood MORning.' You've got this weird thing and with both her and Vinessa, neither of them ever skipped a beat. It was just bang, they were right into it."
