Joaquin Phoenix “just started screaming” on the set of Ari Aster’s “Beau Is Afraid” before filming one of the nightmare comedy’s most intense scenes. During a podcast interview for A24, the Oscar winner and Aster remembered filming a scene in which the eponymous Beau is taking a bath. Aster wanted to shoot the scene in one take, which got Phoenix “spinning in a panic.” The actor said it was important he felt “free” enough while filming so the scene could “reveal itself however it does when it does.”
“I’m a little reluctant to say this, because it sounds so fucking stupid and just like actor shit, but I remember…what I did before was I did the scene, but I wasn’t really volatile. I was still nervous. I was still…In some way, I was controlling a little bit. I was controlling what people thought about me. I didn’t want to let people down. And it was like new crew were early on set. And I remember just realizing I had to do something that was fucking stupid, and I just so didn’t want to do it, but I just knew.”
Before it came time to shoot the scene again, Phoenix made his own scene on set.
“I just started screaming, just the most intense guttural pain scream that I could before we were shooting sitting there because I had to just fully humiliate myself,” Phoenix said. “And then just go like, okay, well once that’s happened, you can’t look any more stupid than you do now. And it just let go of everything, right? I don’t know why, but I just was overcome with this need to do that. And I think it probably made you uncomfortable. We weren’t in the same room. You were on the monitor, but I have a feeling that you got very uncomfortable.”
Aster said it did not make him feel uncomfortable, adding, “I remember knowing what you were doing. It felt to me like you were kind of trying to scream yourself out of the state you were in. It didn’t actually feel like even a take. It somehow felt like you were trying to break out of something.
“It was shocking in a way that was exciting, I think, because it did jar everybody,” Aster added. “And I felt like it was good because the energy in the room did suddenly become both alert and disturbed.”
In the nearly three-hour “Beau Is Afraid,” Phoenix plays an anxiety-ridden loner who sets out on a bizarre odyssey home to visit his mother. The supporting cast includes Nathan Lane, Parker Posey, Amy Ryan and Patti Lupone. The film grossed $320,396 on four screens in its opening weekend, which translated to the biggest screen average of the year with $80,099 per location. It was also the second-best per-screen-average for A24 after the Adam Sandler crime film “Uncut Gems.”
“Beau Is Afraid” opens in theaters nationwide April 21.