10 Crazy Tricks Directors Tried To Pull On Audiences
5. A Year Long Method - I'm Still Here
One of the biggest celebrity stories of a decade ago featured celebrated dramatic actor Joachin Phoenix and his sudden, inexplicable retirement from acting to pursue a career in hip hop.
At a charity event in 2008, Phoenix was reported to have told the assembled media of his new career - and over the next twelve months, he would write, rehearse and perform as though this was indeed the case. Growing a large, unsightly beard and appearing in public as a shuffling, mumbling shadow of his former self, the consensus that Phoenix was in the middle of a prolonged breakdown was crystallised by his February 2009 appearance on Letterman.
During that year, Phoenix had been followed by a film crew recording everything that he experienced during his break - from acting or from reality, take your pick. The result was I’m Still Here, a 2010 documentary directed by Phoenix’ friend Casey Affleck.
However, some time after the release of the movie it was revealed to have been a fiction: Phoenix had remained in character in public for a solid year to produce the movie itself, a mockumentary satirising celebrity culture and reality television, as Phoenix explained on his return appearance on Letterman in 2010.
Although Affleck later claimed that there was no intention to trick anyone, this is manifestly untrue: even home video footage in the film of Phoenix as a child with his family was faked, recorded by actors in Hawaii and treated to appear decades old.