“It was one of the most remarkable things I've ever seen.” He said that Phoenix “inhabited this extraordinary place that's so conflicting, that's so sympathetic in some ways, and utterly repulsive in others. It took the idea of mental instability into a place where we have to accept some culpability when it gets out of control, and at the same time there's an element of wildness in that, where you're sort of saying, I don't know if anybody can contain what's been released now.”