Warner Bros Pictures
You won’t need to endure years of an extended hoax to prepare yourselves for Joaquin Phoenix and Casey Affleck’s next film. According to The Hollywood Reporter, the two actors are reteaming for the western Far Bright Star, after first coming together for the 2010 faux-documentary I’m Still Here. Affleck will be occupying the director chair again, while Phoenix fills the lead role of a cavalryman left stranded in the desert in after his group is attacked.
Affleck is no stranger to westerns, having acted in the critically praised but sadly publicly ignored The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford, so this 1916-set story, which sees Phoenix and his men hunting for Pancho Villa before most of them are left for dead in the attack, shouldn’t be too much of a stretch for him. The film will be the first release from Affleck’s new production company, The Affleck/Middleton Project. Affleck will produce the film with John Powers Middleton and the screenplay will be written by Damien Ober.
Phoenix, who may be new to westerns, is no stranger to playing lost characters, although these characters, like the one he played in The Master and Her, are usually lost in their own minds rather than in the literal sense.
Affleck and Phoenix have proven that they work well together before with their elaborate prank of a documentary I’m Not There, which saw Phoenix as a scraggly-haired hip-hop artist. With their turn to narrative fiction in Far Bright Star, Phoenix’s method acting can be put to better use than in an elaborate prank on the media.
Source: The Hollywood Reporter
