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LOS ANGELES — Considering how well James Mangold knows Johnny Cash's life and habits, it's odd he's tentative about one crucial thing. When the two first met, he's unsure if the iconic Americana singer saluted him with his trademark, gravelly "Hello, I'm Johnny Cash."
It was back in 1999 in Cash's hometown of Hendersonville, Tenn. Mangold, the director/co-writer of Walk the Line, and his wife/producer Cathy Konrad were coming to talk about making a biopic on Cash and his wife, June Carter.
"I remember John picked us up at the Holiday Inn in his diesel Mercedes and came right on into the lobby in his Ugg boots and said hello," Mangold says. "My wife remembers it as, 'Hello, I'm Johnny Cash,' but I remember it as, 'You must be Cathy; you must be Jim.' "
As a result of that difference in recollections, Mangold now second-guesses himself on this. The dark-haired, trim-bearded director laughs about this confusion. He's in his W Hotel suite in Westwood, dressed in jeans and a red-striped, long-sleeve shirt, relaxing before his film opens the American Film Institute Film Festival later in the day.
He knows he should be sure about something so important to him — and to Cash. After all, his movie makes a point of showing how Cash's salutation derived from his pre-music days in mid-1950s Memphis as a door-to-door salesman.
"I'd ask him, 'John, what would you say when you came to people's doors?" ' Mangold explains. "He'd say, 'Hello, I'm John Cash, and I'm here to sell...' And I'd go, 'My God, you'd say, 'Hello, I'm John Cash a hundred times a day.' "
Mangold grew up in New York City and upstate New York as the son of internationally recognized abstract painter Robert Mangold. His world was an artistic and intellectual one, but it turns out Dad was also a Cash fan.
"I discovered Johnny Cash through my dad's record collection," he says. "My dad really didn't have that many records, but one was At Folsom Prison. I don't know how old I was, I could have been 6 or 10, but I remember being fascinated by the music and the image on that cover. As a kid, the idea of a man singing for a bunch of convicts and hearing them all cheering on record is really gripping."
As a director, he has slowly moved up from indies like Heavy to Hollywood thrillers like Identity. Along the way, he gained enough clout to begin negotiating for rights to his dream project about Cash, which Mangold based on the singer's two autobiographies. The film stars Joaquin Phoenix as Cash and Reese Witherspoon as Carter, and both use their own singing voices.
It also reveals the tortured and guilt-ridden (but mostly non-sexual) relationship between the already-married Cash and twice-divorced Carter from the late 1950s well into the 1960s. He already felt guilty about his brother's accidental death when he was a child; she had come from a successful musical family that stood for traditional values. It was easy for them to doubt themselves.
This long, anguished phase of their relationship finally ended when, after Carter helped Cash withdraw from drugs, he divorced his wife Vivian and married Carter in 1968. But well before that, Carter had become a featured performer on Cash's live shows. Their duet on "Jackson," in particular, seemed to imply a romantic connection with its sexy "We got married in a fever hotter than a pepper sprout" opening line.
Cash and Carter kept the painfully intimate aspects of their private lives secret, even in their autobiographies. As a result, parts of Walk the Line might be shocking for those who know the duo only as the American icons they became after their marriage.
"In that first meeting with John and June, I addressed it right off," Mangold says. "I said I thought they were going to have to go to some places they hadn't gone in their books."
They agreed, but it still was difficult to get them to confess all the details. "The breakthrough happened on a visit right before June passed, in March or April of that year," Mangold says. "It was a very wonderful conversation in that John and June both felt the script was missing some of the romance they felt was in their relationship. It was very easy for me to say it's hard to write a romance about people who don't admit there was one. It was very clear to them I had a point.
"It wasn't like I needed them to confess to some huge rendezvous. It was really just getting them to talk about an acknowledgment of a feeling that each was wrestling with, so I would not be fictionalizing things to be playing with that tension."
Finally, the couple told Mangold how their relationship became sexual during a Las Vegas stint in 1965. That becomes a key scene in the movie.
"They always intimated something had happened in Vegas — it wasn't like this was a bomb dropping," Mangold says. "But now it became very clear what happened. There was this physicality between them, and then June was not comfortable.
"Then John started not showing up for shows or came whacked out. In the end, June had to finish up their contract with Roger Miller headlining — her sister was going out with Roger Miller — because John was incapable of finishing. All this stemmed from this intimacy between them that she then realized was a mistake."
Throughout it all, Cash made it clear to Mangold that he didn't think anyone in the film deserved to look bad — except himself. "He didn't want to hurt anyone," Mangold says. "The simple way of him saying that was, 'If someone's going to look bad, make it me, because I was.' "
And he does look bad at times in Walk the Line. But, now that Cash is gone, Mangold believes he looks better than just about any Country or Pop troubadour of his era.
"I think John is one of the great storytellers of our time," he says. "I'm really honored to have known him." ©
