For an actor, it’s all about keeping things real. Not in the rapper sense of staying in touch with your roots, mind you, but in the ways that every good thespian seeks to take a fictional character and pump reality into it until it speaks to the experiences of the audience. For the cast of the firefighting drama Ladder 49, this desire manifested itself in three distinct ways: laughter, fear, and triumph.
Boys will be boys, and since the film portrays a firehouse full of courageous males who bond with each other through their shared laughter, the actors claim that it was their own joking around that allowed them to create a camaraderie that could shine through on screen. In the film, John Travolta’s Captain Kennedy has a regular gag in which he welcomes new recruits by pretending to be an incompetent drunk. In real life, however, the joke was on him.
“He pulled the best prank,” Travolta recently told FilmStew while playfully rubbing co-star Joaquin Phoenix’s shoulders. “Because I don’t like practical jokes. No wait a minute – Ashton, what’s his name? – Punk’d, I don’t like that dude, it’s too much. But when it’s filled with art and craftsmanship like they do, then I like it.”
“[Director] Jay [Russell] is a good actor in his own right,” Travolta continues. “He came at me with this sentient look on his face, filled with anger and tears, telling me that Joaquin showed up and he is just off the money – he’s talking to himself, he’s imaging sunsets. He’s doing this weird sh*t, and Jay doesn’t know what to do.”
Phoenix interjects with a smile: “This is the very first day [of shooting].”
“First day of shooting,” Travolta agrees, shaking his head from side to side. “So Joaquin walks in like this [approximates a glazed-over, stoned look in his eyes]…’Hey, John’…So he sits down and we start doing this scene. He looks at me, and then he looks off out the window and goes, ‘Oh, look at the sun!”
Phoenix starts laughing and explains he’s never seen so much fear in a co-star’s eyes as he did that day, before Travolta finishes: “I am dying, I’m dying, thinking that nobody told me he does this, that I have four months ahead of me dealing with this… Then after ten minutes, he just started to laugh. It was awesome.”
Determined to make the film as true to life as possible, Russell says he encouraged this kind of misbehavior on the set, but not without asking each actor to balance it out with a rigorous firefighter training schedule, one that included time at an academy and riding along with the real-life Baltimore Fire Department.
“I really boiled it down to those actors who I felt would give that extra commitment,” says the 44-year-old helmer of My Dog Skip and Tuck Everlasting. “One of the first questions I asked them when they came in the room was, ‘How do you feel about spending a month in a Baltimore Fire Academy?’ And if I even saw a glimmer of hesitation in their eyes, they were off the list.”
While some of the actors may have made it past Russell’s initial interrogation, that hesitation often crept in when they were confronted with “The Maze”, a complicated series of small compartments in a darkened room that firefighters must crawl through before going out into the field. “That was a terrible thing,” recalls Travolta. “The maze is a series of boxes, they are so rough. You wear your full firefighting equipment, and it’s like a death thing.”
“You can’t help but think that you’re dying in there,” he continues. “It’s simulated, right, but they pump smoke into it, you can’t breathe, you can’t move and you have to find the next hole to get through even though you can’t see. There are seven of them. It was the most mind-altering experience I’ve ever had in my life as far as not knowing what to make of it.”
“Do I appreciate my life? Did it give me an insight into what one feels like when they die? What is this? There was just weird phenomena there.”
Supporting actors including Morris Chestnut, Balthazar Getty and Billy Burke kept track of the best times through the maze, and claim that they were among the record holders. But Robert Patrick, who plays crusty veteran Lenny Richter in the film, says that nobody got through it smoothly. “There are those that talk and there are those that do,” he laughs.
“No, the rest of the guys were so much better than me,” Patrick concedes. “I got lost several times, I panicked several times, and I do remember coming out of there, just like the other actors, with my eyes opened wide, scared to death.”
Phoenix claims that he performed decently in the maze, but that what seems like the most harmless firefighting activity brought out a fear in him that exceeded that of his colleagues. Deathly afraid of heights, the young actor had been elated to take on the film – until he realized he had to slide down the fire station pole.
“He totally froze,” Russell recollects. “I was with him. It was the very first day he and I went from New York down to Baltimore to visit the firehouse. I’d already been there and I was giving him the tour, showing him the upstairs, the living quarters, and one of the guys said, ‘Joaquin, why don’t you go down the pole?’ He went over and looked down and he broke out into this sweat and was like, ‘I can’t do it’.”
“I said, ‘What do you mean you can’t do it?’” adds the director, remembering the fear that his movie would star a fireman who couldn’t capture the profession’s most iconic pose. “And Joaquin said, ‘No, I don’t think I can do this movie. I can’t even go down this pole I’m so terrified of heights.’”
This time, it wasn’t a joke. “I couldn’t go down the pole when I first arrived in Baltimore,” Phoenix remembers. “And you should have seen Jay’s face – who did I cast here?”
Fortunately, the real-life heroes were able to come to the rescue yet again. “The firefighters, without blinking, took him downstairs and set up a little stepladder. First Joaquin went up about three feet and slid down, then he went up to six feet and slid down, and so on,” explains Russell. “They told him that guys freaked out all the time, guys who were on their force. They just calmly took him through it.”
For Phoenix, that was the first step towards overcoming a fear that had gripped him since childhood. “By the end of the movie,” Russell asserts, “he’s hanging off the side of a twenty-story building by a rope. I mean, he really overcame a huge personal fear.”
Phoenix concurs: “I eventually got to the point where I went over the side of a twenty-story building, and I still don’t know how. It’s the training I guess, just having confidence in the equipment.”
Perhaps the actor had a bit too much confidence in his equipment, leaving him open for one particularly cruel joke himself: “Aaah, the old muscle rub in the helmet,” laughs Patrick.
“Did you hear about that?” Patrick asks, dying to tell his story. “Jay Russell took BenGay and coated the inside of Joaquin’s turnout gear, which is the stuff you throw on under your uniform. They covered the inside of his mask, his helmet, and then called ‘action!”
Patrick’s face lights up with a wide, sinister grin. He can barely get the rest of his story out. “Joaquin suddenly came alive inside! It was a pretty good joke. That’s an old joke that goes way back to high school. That will make your balls tingle in a way you ain’t never felt before.”
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