Entertainment

Joaquin Phoenix spent countless hours getting the sound just right

05:27 PM CST on Thursday, November 17, 2005

By CHRIS VOGNAR / The Dallas Morning News

TORONTO – Joaquin Phoenix tried to play guitar as a child. By his own account, he failed miserably. "I just couldn't do it," he says. "And it's supposed to be easier when you're younger."

So he was a bit intimidated when faced with the prospect of singing and playing the music of Johnny Cash for the new film Walk the Line. "I had to sit down and learn to play very slowly, because it was completely foreign to me," he explains at the Toronto International Film Festival, where Walk the Line premiered in September. "It was frustrating."It may have been a challenge, but the results say it was worth the effort. Both Mr. Phoenix and his co-star, Reese Witherspoon (a dynamo as June Carter), played their instruments and sang their songs. They may not sound perfect, but they contribute a great deal to the film's realism.

"John was such a creature of authenticity," says director James Mangold, who spent countless hours with the late Johnny and June in preparing for the movie. "His musicality, and June's as well, was so much about their life. They could sing at breakfast. The idea of taking that opportunity away from Joaquin ... seemed to me robbing him of the ability to be John."

Mr. Phoenix had an ideal tutor in T-Bone Burnett, a country and roots music veteran who wrote the film's original music. About four months before shooting started, Mr. Phoenix sat down with Mr. Burnett in Los Angeles and began his own private Cash boot camp.

"I remember sitting there with T-Bone, and he started playing, and there was my cue, and I didn't know what to do," says Mr. Phoenix, laughing and puffing on a cigarette. "It was like when someone gives you your first bike, and you've seen other people ride, and your brain says, 'I need to push those legs.' But to actually do it is different."

But he slowly got the hang of things, even if there were a few setbacks. After working long and hard on emulating Cash's strumming style, he returned home one night to look at tapes of the country legend and was horrified to notice a detail he had overlooked: Cash played with his arm around the back of his guitar.

Back to the old drawing board.

Mr. Phoenix, 31, didn't have to struggle to appreciate the power and pathos of Cash's songs. "He conveys such depth with the simplest lyrics. It's amazing how he can sum up feelings in just a couple of lines."

Speaking just a couple of weeks after Hurricane Katrina, Mr. Phoenix chokes up a little when the subject turns to the flood song "Five Feet High and Rising." He slowly repeats the lyrics: "We can make it to the road in a homemade boat/It's the only thing we have left that will float/It's already over all the wheat and the oats/Two feet high and rising.

"What's happening in the South right now is something John would have been really affected by and written about," says Mr. Phoenix.

That kind of empathy is one reason Mr. Mangold cast Mr. Phoenix, despite the actor's lack of musical experience.

"John never valued pitch over earnestness, and I felt that no one is more earnest and truthful than Joaquin," says the director. "I knew Joaquin would always find a way to mean it that would trump any gulf in musical ability."

E-mail cvognar@dallasnews.com