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Trading placesActors sing, singers act in Johnny Cash biopic
Bill Muller
The Arizona Republic
Nov. 13, 2005 12:00 AM
HOLLYWOOD - Knowing her music history like any good Nashville girl, Reese Witherspoon understood the import of playing country singer June Carter in the Johnny Cash biopic, Walk the Line. But at least she wouldn't have to sing.
Or so she thought, until she was asked to meet with music producer T Bone Burnett.
"I said, 'Oh, that'll be really nice. I really like him, I wonder what he's going to do for the movie?' " she recalls. "And he said, 'Can you sing a song for us?' advertisement
"I was sitting in his living room. I said, 'What do you mean can I sing a song for you? I'm not singing in this movie.' He goes, 'We actually want you to try and sing the songs,' and I nearly hit the floor."
The actors in Walk the Line, which opens Friday, were faced with a doubly hard task. They had to portray such icons as Carter and Cash, who's played by Joaquin Phoenix, and learn how to sing and play as well. Conversely, the musicians playing Jerry Lee Lewis (Waylon Malloy Payne) and Elvis Presley (Tyler Hilton) took acting lessons on the job.
Cast members leaned on each other. When Hilton first met Witherspoon (Legally Blonde, Sweet Home Alabama), he was surprised when she confessed to being nervous.
"I was like, I just don't get what you're saying because I've never been in a movie before," Hilton says. "I'm freaking out that there's going to be a camera on me and I'm playing Elvis, and she's like, 'Well at least you all have sang and danced before.'
"Joaquin and her were so nervous about singing, and all us musicians were so nervous about acting . . . and we were all looking at each other like. 'You're so cool, I can't believe you can do that.' "
But the real weight of the movie rests on the shoulders of Phoenix, who also had to play the guitar for Walk the Line.
"There were many times where I felt, 'I just can't do this, I'm not up to it,' " Phoenix says. "In the rehearsal and the preparation process, it was so much to take on, and that was daunting."
Witherspoon said she was "definitely intimidated."
"Growing up in Nashville, I'm terrified of the country-music community seeing the film. Because I know they're going to say, 'Fraud!' " she says with a laugh, adding that she sang one song "maybe 467 times until it finally, finally came out of my mouth in some listenable form."
The moment of truth came when both Witherspoon and Phoenix had to sing before a crowd for a scene in the film.
"I kept going (to Phoenix), 'Not me, I'm not going first. You go first. There's 600 extras out there,' " Witherspoon says.
Starting from scratch
Phoenix (Gladiator, Signs) said starting with music from scratch "probably worked out well in some ways."
"John (Cash) had no formal training. . . . He just discovered his voice. And I think taking that journey was probably beneficial to me as opposed to going, 'I know what it is to sing and now I'm going to try to sing like John Cash.' There's something organic about the process."
The actor said director James Mangold didn't want a dead-on impersonation of Cash.
"If people want to hear Johnny Cash they can buy his records, they want to see him, there's documentaries about him," Phoenix says.
"(Mangold) didn't want to re-create historical events, which I think was (brave) because in some ways it's kind of easy when doing a biopic to just select these kind of famous moments from somebody's life that everyone can go, 'Oh, right.' "
Mangold (Cop Land, Girl, Interrupted) didn't use Cash's voice for Walk the Line, as was done with Ray Charles in Ray. For Walk the Line, which covers Cash's career in the '50s and '60s and the romance between him and his future wife Carter, the director wanted authentic performances from his actors.
"There are no tapes of John auditioning at Sun (Records)," Mangold says. "There are no tapes of John working out the lyrics of Folsom Prison (Blues). The things I put in the script that I wanted to see were these songs being born."
The director said it didn't make sense to sign Phoenix and not have him sing in critical scenes.
"The idea that I'd have someone as talented and honest and searing and volcanic as Joaquin . . . and then I'd go, 'Thanks, you stop here and now I find some guy to sing for you here,' it seemed to me I'd be actually shutting off my main source of energy and passion in the film."
Mangold said it wouldn't have been wise to treat Cash as a legend, because it would dehumanize the singer, who died in 2003.
It's like "I am Moses," Mangold says in his best booming voice. "I am Johnny Cash. I am Abraham Lincoln. . . . It stops becoming about people. They start becoming like the Hall of Presidents at Disneyland."
Born to play Lewis
Still, it's hard for some people to avoid throwing the word "legend" around. Payne, who's named for family friend Waylon Jennings, uses the term when referring to Jerry Lee Lewis, who crossed paths with Cash and Elvis in the early days. Given Lewis' colorful past, Payne had worries other than his acting.
"I kept looking over my shoulder waiting for him to shoot me," Payne says. "The other night when I met him . . . I was walking down the hall, and he looked at me like somebody I'd never seen look at me in my life. I didn't know whether I should stop in my tracks or run or just go ahead and go up there and hop in his lap. It was just nuts."
Of all the performers, it's almost as if Payne was born to play Lewis. Just consider his audition video, which featured him playing the piano in his living room.
"I started banging away and I started really getting into it, and about that time the stool slipped out from under me and I fell and I busted my ass," he says. "I jumped up and said 'Cut' and that was it, that's what we sent, and it got me the part."
He acknowledges he had trouble acting, especially during a longish speech made by Lewis during a car ride between gigs.
"If we had to drive that car down that road one more time and get stung by them mosquitoes one more time, I think Reese would have climbed through that seat and choked me," Payne says, "and finally Jim goes, 'Give it to me!' I did."
Wild about Elvis
Hilton had some wild experiences playing Elvis as well. He said he showed up at Graceland for a radio event and "and all these women - like the women that come to Graceland everyday - in like the black spandex pants and the pink shirts and the whole thing, they were like freaking out to meet me."
He says he was playing Elvis as a "19-year-old kid in Memphis, and once I started thinking about that, then you're looking at a whole different character."
He said his Elvis still had the innocence of youth, especially in one singing scene.
"When the girls are screaming for me, it's not like, 'Yeah, I'm sexy, call me Papa,' it's like, 'This is crazy, it's like I'm just going to keep doing it because they're loving it.' "
'Get their hearts right'
Mangold recognized the difficulty of re-creating such well-known figures, but he didn't worry too much about it.
"I think it's daunting. . . . I think it's tougher on the actors in a way. I have either the ego . . . or maybe I'm either dense or dim in some way that's very useful, that I really never felt it. What I did feel was a huge sense of mandate that I had to get their hearts right in the movie. They were such remarkably sweet and kind and loving people."
No matter how the movie does, Phoenix, after hearing from Cash's family and friends, already feels a sense of accomplishment.
"To have Kris Kristofferson come up and say, 'Thank you so much for doing this and you did John proud,' " Phoenix says, "That's all that I could ask for
