14 DAY TRIAL // For more than a year, questions about Joaquin Phoenix’s decision to quit acting and pursue a career in rap didn’t cease to make the rounds. Now that “I’m Still Here” is out, fans can rest assured: it was all just a hoax.
As must be common knowledge by now, Phoenix announced that he was done with the movie industry and would invest his time in recording a rap album and, of course, promoting it.
As luck would have it, all his endeavors in this sense were caught on camera by his brother in law, filmmaker Casey Affleck – and the result is “I’m Still Here,” now out in US theaters.
Though not marketed as a documentary, the film was neither described as a mockumentary, which, E! Online believes, made audiences wary of how to perceive it.
If there ever was any doubt as to whether Joaquin was in earnest in his pursuit of a different career, they can be put to rest: it was all just a hoax, an acting performance meant to illustrate a point, Affleck says.
“‘It’s a terrific performance, it’s the performance of his career,’ Affleck told the New York Times in a recent interview,” E! writes.
That is to say, if Affleck talks of Joaquin’s involvement in the project as of a “performance,” it means he was acting. Therefore, the film was a mockumentary, because not many of those who also appear in it were in on the joke.
“The reviews were so angry,” Affleck goes on to say. Indeed, while critics praised the film, audiences were not very happy about it – presumably because they didn’t know what to make of it.
“I never intended to trick anybody. The idea of a quote, hoax, unquote, never entered my mind,” the filmmaker further explains.
More details about this are bound to come from Mr. Rapper himself, Joaquin Phoenix, who’s scheduled to appear on David Letterman on September 22, a little over a year after he made a fool of himself.
In January 2009, a disheveled Joaquin appeared on Letterman was barely able to put 2 words together to make a sentence, which prompted a comment from Dave saying, “Joaquin, I’m sorry you couldn’t be here with us tonight.”