Getting to the heart of legends Johnny and June

Before production began on “Walk the Line,” the biographical drama about the early life and career of country legend Johnny Cash, director James Mangold told Joaquin Phoenix and Reese Witherspoon to concentrate on the internal research for their lead roles.

“I wanted to send my actors off on their journey to find their hearts and not the facts” of the characters, Mangold says. “I would make sure that the facts were together. I didn’t think it was the actors’ job to be worrying about the behavioral tic before they had found the beating heart.”

Mangold wanted the actors who play Cash and his wife, June Carter, to look for the human frailties of the megastars to keep the film grounded in reality.

“You can’t play a legend,” he insists. “No one can. At Disneyland, in the Hall of Presidents, that is what it looks like when someone plays a legend -- audio-animatronic robots.

“You can only play a man or a woman.”

Mangold (“Girl, Interrupted,” “Identity”) began contemplating doing a film on Cash nine years ago and spent some time with him and Carter before their deaths in 2003.

He was fascinated with how Cash’s music parallels the emotions the singer went through -- “his feelings about June, his feelings about his dad and his late brother and his own self-hatred about the spiral -- psychological and drug-induced -- that he was on that produced his own kind of prison. He did almost a decade behind psychological bars.”

A longtime fan of the Man in Black, Mangold wanted to avoid many of the problems endemic to biographical films, which often try to include too much information or have no particular point of view, he says.

“Walk the Line,” he says, has a unique perspective in “this really wonderful backstage experience of understanding what it’s like for two people to fall in love in front of a microphone and who can only be alone together when they are on stage in front of several thousands of people.

“There was something uniquely romantic and poignant to me of this special space that their relationship existed in for seven or eight years.”