Did You Know?
Joaquin Phoenix and Reese Witherspoon performed all of the songs themselves, without being dubbed. They also learned to play their instruments (guitar and auto-harp, respectively) from scratch.
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June Carter Cash died before production began. Reese Witherspoon's research included looking through Carter's closet for inspiration.
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Johnny Cash approved Joaquin Phoenix to play him in the film because he liked his performance in the movie Gladiator. June Carter Cash also approved Reese Witherspoon for her role in the film.
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While June Carter Cash was older than Johnny Cash, Reese Witherspoon is younger than Joaquin Phoenix.
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June Carter Cash and Johnny Cash's only son John Carter Cash plays an uncredited character in the film.
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Reese Witherspoon and Joaquin Phoenix had vocal training for six months with music producer T-Bone Burnett.
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Sony, Universal, Focus Features, Paramount, Columbia Pictures, and Warner Bros. all passed on the project.
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It took 4 years for the producers to secure the rights to the story from James Keach, who is a friend of Johnny Cash and his family. After Keach agreed, it took another 4 years to get the film made.
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Johnny gets fan mail from a Folsom Prison inmate named Glen Sherley. In real life, Sherley was an inmate at Folsom when Johnny recorded "At Folsom Prison." He also wrote "Greystone Chapel," which Johnny recorded during the show.
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According to director James Mangold, when Joaquin Phoenix was learning how to sing and play guitar like Johnny Cash, his voice was too high and the band learned how to play Cash's songs in a higher key. Just before filming started, Joaquin's voice dropped closer to John's level, and the band had to re-learn the songs in their original key.
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Waylon Payne has a few personal connections to the characters in the film. Marshall Grant, bassist for The Tennessee Three, discovered Sammi Smith, Payne's mother. Waylon Jennings, Johnny Cash's friend and collaborator, was his godfather.
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The scene in which Johnny Cash pulls the sink off the wall was not scripted; Joaquin Phoenix actually pulled it off the wall.
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When Johnny Cash calls his wife during his first show, a sign on the wall says "Ring in case of fire."
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When Johnny Cash wakes up on the tour bus, just after the Folsom Prison performance, he walks past guitarist Luther Perkins, who is passed-out with a lit cigarette in his mouth, and puts the cigarette out. Perkins died a few months after the 'At Folsom Prison' recording/performance. He fell asleep in his Tennessee home with a lit cigarette in his mouth, and died from injuries sustained in the resulting fire.
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Johnny Cash and June Carter Cash's actual home, in Hendersonville TN, appears in the movie. It burned to the ground on April 10, 2007 while under renovation by its new owner, Barry Gibb, of the Bee Gees.
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When The Tennessee Three play "Rock and Roll Ruby", a sign on the wall behind the audience says "CLASS OF 1955". This may be a reference to the group set up by Johnny Cash, Carl Perkins, Jerry Lee Lewis and Roy Orbison, called "Class of '55".
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When Johnny Cash first approaches the recording studio, a pair of young men are rhythmically polishing shoes; an homage to Johnny Cash's song "Get Rhythm," in which he sings about a shoeshine boy on the corner of the street.
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Waylon Payne originally auditioned for the role of Waylon Jennings. The director was so impressed by Payne's audition that he cast Payne as Jerry Lee Lewis. Interestingly enough, the actor who got the role of Waylon Jennings was Waylon's own son, Shooter Jennings.
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After visiting many of Johnny Cash's old homes, production designer David J. Bomba created 90 different sets for the film and tried to underline the contrast between Cash's two lives, one that was close to earth and nature in Arkansas and Tennessee, and the other set in the fast-moving world of rock music.
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Joaquin Phoenix wears 56 different costumes. All were designed by Arianne Phillips following meticulous research within the Cash family's archives and fans' private collections.
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Cinematographer Phedon Papamichael shot the concert scenes mainly with hand-held Super 35 cameras as he didn't want to give a false sense of glamor to the performances.
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The film was screened for the inmates of Folsom Prison, 38 years after Johnny Cash's landmark performance.
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Shelby Lynne grew up listening to Cash's music. She composed the song "Johnny Meet June" the day he died.
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Due to the similarities between his life and Johnny Cash's, Joaquin Phoenix was hospitalized after filming.
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Towards the end of the movie Johnny tells his Dad to tell the girls about the flood. This is a reference to a real incident in Johnny's childhood when the family farm flooded that he wrote and sang about in his famous song 'Five Feet High and Rising'.
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In the 1956 Sun Records recording of "I Walk the Line," Johnny Cash flubs the final low note ("because you're MINE"). Joaquin Phoenix flubs the same note, in the same manner, in the film, as he sings "I Walk the Line."
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Johnny Cash really proposed to June Carter onstage. It happened in February 1968, at the London Ice House, a hockey arena in London, Ontario, in the middle of a performance of "Jackson." She accepted, and they married a week later.
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