It was all fake, says Casey

When I reviewed I'm Still Here in Venice, I wondered how much of it was actually faked. At the time, director Casey Affleck wasn't saying and denied it was a hoax.

Now, young Casey has come clean to the New York Times, claiming almost all of it was made up.

“It’s a terrific performance, it’s the performance of his career,” Casey told the NY Times' Michael Cieply. According to the piece: 

“The reviews were so angry,” said Mr. Affleck, who attributed much of the hostility to his own lo
ng silence about a film that left more than a few viewers wondering what was real — The drugs? The hookers? The childhood home-movie sequences in the beginning? — and what was not.

Virtually none of it was real. Not even the opening shots, supposedly of Mr. Phoenix and his siblings swimming in a water hole in Panama. That, Mr. Affleck said, was actually shot in Hawaii with actors, then run back and forth on top of an old videocassette recording of “Paris, Texas” to degrade the images.

“I never intended to trick anybody,” said Mr. Affleck, an intense 35-year-old who spoke over a meat-free, cheese-free vegetable sandwich on Thursday. “The idea of a quote, hoax, unquote, never entered my mind.”

Still, he acknowledged that Mr. Letterman was not in on the joke when Mr. Phoenix, on Feb. 11, 2009, seemed to implode his own career by showing up in character as a mumbling, aimless star gone wrong.

So now we know.