Honest Explanation Or Early Marketing? Casey Affleck Says Joaquin Phoenix Documentary Is No Joke

Even after screening to potential buyers, it still remains to be seen whether Joaquin Phoenix was being himself or playing a character in the upcoming chronicling of his rapping adventures, “I’m Still Here: The Missing Year Of Joaquin Phoenix.”

Speaking with ABC though, the documentary’s director Casey Affleck has come out on the offensive in an attempt to rule out the common belief that his brother-in-law was simply playing a character in what will be mockumentary of sorts.

“I wanted to explore what I thought would be an interesting period in his life,” Affleck told ABC News. “He said he didn’t want to act anymore, he wanted to try doing music, and that, right there, says something’s going to happen … I had no idea what exactly was going to happen and all that would unfold and every day I spent with him on this journey.”

“It ended up being more and more fascinating, more and more things happened that were both in the public spectacle and a very private internal implosion that I got to witness. It made for this unbelievable, one-of-a-kind movie.”

A “private internal implosion”? Sure, we can believe that but for a guy of Phoenix’s respected and reputed stature to spiral into something that includes “snorting cocaine, ordering call girls, having oral sex with a publicist, treating his assistants abusively and rapping badly” seems far-fetched and too over-the-top. Furthermore, let’s not forget that reports from the marketing screening noted “more male frontal nudity than you’d find in some gay porn films and a stomach-turning sequence in which someone feuding with Phoenix defecates on the actor while he’s asleep.”

Affleck also took the opportunity to address Phoenix’s infamous appearance on David Letterman’s ‘Late Show.’ “I understand there were all these different reactions to what happened on the Letterman show,” the actor-turned-director noted. “Millions of people saw it on YouTube and wrote about it and talked about it all over the place but most of them were wrong. [Phoenix’s motive] was nothing that anybody ever guessed.”

“You’ll find out [in the film] what was happening in his life in that period — what was going on before he went on, what was going on afterwards.” Now, if that’s not marketing, we don’t know what is. A short clip of the interview with Affleck — which will feature on this week’s episode of “Popcorn with Peter Travers” — shows him explaining everything with a straight face and in serious manner but, come on, he’s an actor and a great one at that. He puts on convincing performances like this for a living.

The documentary is seemingly still out on the hunt for a distributor but surely won’t stay that way for long. The popularity and notoriety of Phoenix’s “breakdown” on Letterman was sky high with all the subsequent media surrounding that event and the documentary already making for a marketer’s dream. Hopefully, someone has a mind to pick it up and release it sooner rather than later.