Joaquin Phoenix dropping out last-minute was “tough”, says director Todd Haynes, who has opened up about Phoenix’s departure from a film on which they were working together.
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The untitled movie – previously set to star the Joker actor and Top Gun: Maverick‘s Danny Ramirez – was to follow two men as they develop an intense romantic relationship and leave 1930s Los Angeles for Mexico, according to reports.
Haynes, who is best known for 1998’s Velvet Goldmine, was attached as director and co-writer. According to Deadline, Phoenix left the set of the movie shortly before it was set to begin production in Guadalajara, Mexico, and producers tried to put the project back together before it completely died.
Now, during a conversation at the Marrakech Film Festival on Friday (December 6), Haynes opened up about the project to Variety in a brief statement.
“What happened this summer was tough,” Haynes told the outlet. “But the film itself and the script itself may resurrect in a different form someday.”
Variety claim that sources close to the project say the actor got “cold feet” and made a last-minute decision to exit the film even as full sets had already been built.
Variety says Haynes neither confirmed nor denied those speculations during their conversation.
Phoenix was asked about his exit from the movie during the Joker: Folie à Deux press conference at the Venice Film Festival earlier this year, but he declined to answer.
He said: “If I do, I’d just be sharing my opinion from my perspective and the other creatives aren’t here to share their piece so I don’t think that would be helpful. So I won’t.”
“Pretty much what happened is what’s out there for you to read. I don’t know any more than that. I would gossip if I had anything to gossip about,” she said at the San Sebastian Film Festival.
Vachon continued: “Todd Haynes is 62. He’s not old but there’s a finite number of films that he will be able to do in his lifetime. I consider him one of the most extraordinary film artists of his generation. The idea that his time was wasted and a movie is not the result of all that time working with Joaquin is a tragedy to me.
“That I can’t get over. The idea that we as a cultural community lost an opportunity to have a new movie by Todd Haynes is a tragedy.”
Phoenix also reportedly threatened to drop out of Napoleon until Paul Thomas Anderson was drafted in to rewrite the script. The news was first reported by The Hollywood Reporter in August, and in November, the film’s director Ridley Scott appeared to confirm it in an interview with the New York Times.
“Tommy was doing Licorice Pizza, advising me how to do Napoleon,” Scott said, referring to Anderson, who had directed Phoenix in 2012’s The Master. “It turned into a lot of fun, actually. Three of us in this room screaming with laughter.”
James McAvoy also recently revealed that Phoenix also dropped out of M. Night Shyamalan’s Split “two weeks before they started shooting”, with McAvoy only being drafted in at the last minute.
Phoenix also reportedly threatened to abandon a Scott film in the past in the form of the original Gladiator in 2000, which caused Russell Crowe to label him as “unprofessional”.
Speaking about that experience, Scott recalled: “He was in his prince’s outfit saying, ‘I can’t do it.’ I said, ‘What?’ And Russell said, ‘This is terribly unprofessional.’” On that occasion, Phoenix did stick with the project, and went on to be nominated for an Oscar for his performance.
“I can act as a big brother or dad. But I’m quite a friend of Joaquin’s. Gladiator was a baptism of fire for both of us in the beginning,” Scott added.
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