Producer Christine Vachon calls Joaquin Phoenix's abrupt film dropout a "nightmare"

Yesterday, we reported on murmurings that actor Joaquin Phoenix had dropped out of an upcoming film he’d launched with director Todd Haynes—very upcoming, in so far as the movie was five days away from the start of production, with sets already built down in Mexico, and international sales already set. That’s incredibly late to get “cold feet” on a project (as the Joker star reportedly did, per Variety), with huge amounts of money already on the line—and now, producer Christine Vachon has confirmed the news, as well as letting out some pretty clear anger about the entire situation.

Vachon, whose Killer Films is a prolific force in the indie filmmaking space, and who’s served as one of Haynes’ producers since his first film, Poison, in 1991, reportedly posted about Phoenix’s dropout on Facebook. (Per People.) Writing that “A version of this did happen,” in a post attached to a story about the project breaking down, Vachon added “It has been a nightmare.”

Vachon went on to defend Killer Films for working with the straight Phoenix in a film where he would have been playing a gay man, noting—as Haynes did, in a now cruelly optimistic interview back before the movie started breaking down—that the whole thing was the actor’s idea, from start to finish. “This was HIS project that he brought to US,” Vachon wrote, “And Killer’s record on working with LGBTQ actors/crew/directors speaks for itself.” It’s still not clear why Phoenix dropped out of the project, reportedly a 1930s-set romance where he would have played a detective, and which he reportedly pushed to be more hardcore with its depiction of the relationship, verging on NC-17 content. He reportedly left the film’s set down in Guadalajara back in July, leaving behind a situation where crew members have been left unpaid as the production has completely collapsed.