Last week, maybe, Casey Affleck came out and admitted that yes, I’m Still Here was a big fat “hoax”. It surprised no one. Sure, I guess I had a vague interest in knowing whether Joaquin Phoenix actually snorted coke, f-cked hookers and got crapped on for real, or whether it was all the magic of Hollywood. But my interest was more of a ten second “I wonder…” thought rather than a “That looks and sounds like an epic exploration of sanity and hipster inside jokes, I must see it!” Anyway, it’s all fake, down to the vintagey shots that are supposed to be of Joaquin as a kid – Casey Affleck (the director) just hired actors to play those parts. Which would have made a good movie actually – who do you cast as a young River Phoenix? Anyway, Casey just gave an interview to the Telegraph and he’s trying to play on our heartstrings. You see, this “art” film was financed by Casey, and he almost went broke doing it, so now we have to see it!

Casey Affleck has admitted that I’m Still Here, his hoax documentary about Joaquin Phoenix, was a “planned, staged and scripted work of fiction” that nearly bankrupted him.

The film charting Phoenix’s supposed mental breakdown – complete with drugs, prostitutes, a terrible beard and a bizarre appearance on the David Letterman Show – was revealed last week as a fake. Affleck said the project was an essay on celebrity culture.

“It was pretty much all within the realm of possibility: people use prostitutes, people use drugs, especially in Hollywood. We didn’t take it so far that it wasn’t believable,” he told The Daily Telegraph. “For me, the film was Dante’s Inferno. Here was a guy midway through his life – Joaquin’s 35 years old – and he just goes down farther and farther into this more and more hideous place until he gets as low as he can possibly go. But then he breaks through to the other side and has some sort of redemptive experience – that was the movie, that was my guiding light. Also, this was a movie about a man having a movie made about him.”

Affleck spent two years making the film. “Having something at stake is a great motivator and once this thing became public for me that was very helpful because there was no question: I had to see it through, no matter how long it took. I went broke. I hadn’t worked for more than a year, and I was pouring money into the movie. I had to stop for a month to do The Killer Inside Me. If I hadn’t, I wouldn’t have been able to finish the film – I was out of money. There was a lot at stake financially and, if we had left [the hoax] there, it would have been very damaging to Joaquin’s career.”

Unfortunately for Affleck, US audiences have not flocked to see the film. I’m Still Here took just $96,658 in its opening weekend. Meanwhile The Town, directed by his brother Ben and released in the same week, has topped the box office.

Asked why he had come clean about the hoax now, Affleck said: “Because I haven’t been able to talk about it for two years, and I wanted people to know this was a planned, staged and scripted work of fiction. I didn’t want to have anyone get the wrong idea about Joaquin or anybody else in the film. I wanted people to see the movie for what it really is. My intention was never to fool anybody. There’s a big difference between fooling someone and asking them to think.”

[From The Telegraph]

Douche. If you blow your savings on a film based on an inside “joke” that isn’t actually funny, then I do pity you and your stupidity, but I still won’t see your goddamn movie. It just seems like Casey and Joaquin made a film about how it sucks so hard to be movie stars and have everyone want to work with you and give you roles in movies and want you to promote your films and fulfill your contract. Woe is the rich, successful, entitled white man! He has the angst. Pity him. What makes it worse is that I actually believe that Joaquin is actually a f-cked up person with a lot of issues, and if he actually participated in a film where he spoke honestly and dealt directly with his drug/alcohol problems (I’m assuming), or the psychological ramifications of his brother’s death – right before his eyes – well, I would totally watch that. It’s a pity Casey didn’t make THAT movie.

Header: Casey on Sept. 6, 2010. Credit: WENN.