Actor Joaquin Phoenix, who played Johnny Cash on the big screen, is cutting an album with Charlatans frontman Tim Burgess, Billboard.com has learned. But whether the set will be released remains unclear.

According to U.K.-born Burgess, who has lived in Los Angeles for several years, the album came about after Phoenix learned to play guitar in preparation for his role in the 2005 film “Walk the Line,” for which he received an Academy Award nomination.

“Once he learned guitar, he found that he had quite a lot of demons inside himself that he wanted to expel through music,” says Burgess, who has been mixing the record alongside Alan McGee, the Charlatans’ manager and former head of U.K. independent label Creation Records.

But it seems that the perfectionism that has brought Phoenix acclaim as an actor could prevent the record from ever seeing the light of day.

“All the tracks that me and Alan worked with him on were brilliant,” says Burgess. “But I think he just keeps scrapping everything or redoing everything. I’m sad to say that I think it’s one of those records that may never come out, to be honest with you.”

“It’s an ongoing thing,” he continues. “I’m trying to get Alan to force him to put it out at the moment, but I don’t know whether it will (get released).”

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Here’s Joaquin Phoenix on the cover of Nylon magazine’s winter 2008 issue. He’s sexy, what do you think?

Since his 1994 debut, Little Odessa, filmmaker James Gray has been sparse with output. It took six years for him to deliver his follow-up, The Yards, and another seven years to give us We Own the Night, which premiered earlier this year at Cannes and opens in theaters on October 12. However, there won’t be such a long wait for Gray’s fourth film; titled Two Lovers, the film begins shooting in November with Gray regular Joaquin Phoenix and Gwyneth Paltrow. Two Lovers marks a third collaboration with Phoenix, who starred in both The Yards and We Own the Night. If there’s a part somewhere for Mark Wahlberg, it could be a perfect reunion.

According to Variety, Two Lovers will star Phoenix as a Brooklyn man torn between two women. There’s the family friend who his parents are trying to set him up with, and then there’s the beautiful new neighbor who he prefers and with whom he falls in love. I’m going to go ahead and guess that Paltrow is being cast as the neighbor.

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Joaquin Phoenix has considered making pornographic movies based on his own films. The Oscar-nominated actor already has some perfect porn titles ready to use if his idea ever comes to fruition.

He says, “For some time, I was hoping to do porn versions of movies I’ve been in. That could have been good, like ‘Glad He Ate Her’ for Gladiator. 8MM you might want to remake as 8 Inches. I have a friend who can rattle off porn titles for every movie I’ve been in. its f**king genius.”

Actor JOAQUIN PHOENIX dreads to think what the media frenzy would be like if his older brother RIVER had died in today’s celebrity-obsessed age of fast communications.

Joaquin famously phoned the emergency services as River lay dying of a drugs overdose outside Johnny Depp’s Los Angeles nightclub The Viper Room in 1993.

And the Walk The Line actor is thankful that the news of River’s death wasn’t discussed all over the world online as it would be now.

He says, “When my brother passed it was toward the end of an era. If it had happened much later, it would have been on a lot of fucking blogs. The amount of information flying back and forth now has just gone beyond comprehension… In some ways it’s hard to swallow. It makes you feel sick about yourself and about human beings. You look at yourself and say, ‘When have I exploited others and been voyeuristic?’ The thing we should be discussing in the news, what the media should be going after in a heartless way, isn’t the family of somebody who has passed away, but instead – oh, I don’t know – how about a president who’s lying? That’s not to say my brother’s life didn’t have value, but it certainly did not deserve to be covered more than world politics and other important issues, particularly when death happens every day to millions of people all over the world and we don’t seem to give a fuck about that.”

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Joaquin Phoenix is bristling at Eva Mendes‘ wisecrack that doing “We Own the Night” with him was “kind of like working with a puppy dog or a 2-year-old.” Phoenix rants to the December Playboy: “Had I known I was supposed to be a puppy dog, I would have been much more cute and more consistently attentive. My apologies, Eva, but I had a few other scenes that you weren’t in. This puppy dog had a lot of work to do.”

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Jennifer Connelly was so affected by her latest role as a mother mourning the death of her child, she started stressing out on set. Connelly tried to avoid thinking about her two sons as she made Reservation Road, but she couldn’t avoid the obvious – her 10-year-old son Kai is the same age as the boy who dies in the film.

She says,

“I tried my hardest to really separate it (filming) from my personal life. I didn’t let myself think about my own family and my own kids. It feels too exploitative… but I was having nightmares and having a hard time sleeping. Then my jaw kept locking up, and I couldn’t eat. I got a week into it and thought, ‘What have I done to myself?’”

As a mother – I have a hard time even watching ER lately.  I can’t watch any TV or movie that deals with a childs death.  I know it’s not real…it’s just tv.  But still – I can’t let my mind go there.  So, with all this said, I can’t imagine what it’s like to try and portray a mother whose lost her child.

Pictures of Jennifer, Joaquin Pheonix and Mira Sorvino at the Reservation Road premiere.