October 13, 1991 | River Phoenix is bleary-eyed and bedraggled, looking and sounding very much like someone who was rudely awakened just a few minutes ago.
The 21-year-old actor doesn’t have much time to talk — last night, someone called to tell him he’s been named Best Actor at the Venice Film Festival, and he has to catch an early-afternoon flight to Italy to pick up the prize. But at the moment, he’s trying to muddle through just a few more minutes of promotional chores at the Toronto Festival of Festivals, where his latest movie — My Own Private Idaho, which earned him the Venice honor — is stirring up an appreciative buzz.
Even if Phoenix weren’t half so good in the film, he would still be granted points for his sheer audacity in tackling it in the first place. As Mike Walters, an amiable, not conspicuously bright male hustler who wanders in and out of narcoleptic trances, Phoenix spends most of his time appearing even less glamorous than he does right now in his film festival hotel suite. Mike yearns for family ties, for a sense of belonging — and, yes, for the love of fellow hustler Scott Favor (Keanu Reeves), the black-sheep son of a well-connected Portland, Ore., family. For Scott, the street life is just a phase he’s going through. But for Mike — well, it’s all he has, and he knows it isn’t much.
Gus Van Sant, an openly gay filmmaker who scored an unexpected hit with his Drugstore Cowboy, doesn’t shy away from the squalor of street life in My Own Private Idaho, which opens Friday in Houston. But Van Sant doesn’t exploit his actors, and he doesn’t play for cheap, lurid thrills. What he does do is create a sort of surreal poetry, equal parts William Shakespeare (whole sections are drawn from the Henry IV plays), William Burroughs and John Cassavetes.
“’Most films that would be done on this,” Phoenix says, “people write from point A to point B. It’s like, what do you do now? It’s all very linear.
“And it’s all, like, God forbid that someone (urinates on camera). Or God forbid someone picks his nose. God forbid that someone walks around the corner, meets someone else that wasn’t even in the film, and they go off, and you never see them again.
“It’s very rare that there’s this kind of flow, the stream of consciousness just taking you away.”
Pressed on the subject, Phoenix admits that he had little trouble relating to the strains of restless yearning and vagabond journeying that inform so much of Van Sant’s script for My Own Private Idaho. Long before he made his movie debut in Explorers (1985) and earned an Oscar nomination for Running on Empty (1988), Phoenix and his family traveled throughout the Northwest as itinerant fruit pickers, then worked as missionaries in Central and South America for an organization called The Children of God. In the 1970s, Phoenix performed as a street musician with his father and siblings on Hollywood Boulevard — just down the street where a budding filmmaker named Gus Van Sant was working on a feature film that he never completed.
“Objectively,” Phoenix says, “when reading (Van Sant’s) script for the first time, or in watching the film after it was finished, it does speak to me. And it does have some life references that drew me into it.
“But I’m not allowing myself ever to draw on my own life to fill in a character’s blank. I need to simulate and construct from scratch that character’s references. So, I didn’t use any of my sentimental values in any way towards Mike. He had his own set of rules and plans. But I am very sympathetic to the traveling. And the searching, the wandering. Which I can enjoy and absorb later — after the fact, watching the film.”
Phoenix ranks My Own Private Idaho along with The Mosquito Coast and Running On Empty as the films that contain his best work as an actor. He is considerably less pleased by his performance in the forthcoming Dogfight, a romantic comedy-drama that has him cast as a Marine corporal who finds unexpected romance with a plain but sweet-spirited waitress (Lili Taylor).
To put it bluntly, he thought the completed film relied too heavily on “needless, exploitive, macro-close-ups” of his handsome young face.
Phoenix is much more at ease in discussing the grungy honesty of his appearance, and his performance, in My Own Private Idaho.
“I’m glad it looks so effortless, I really am,” Phoenix says. “In watching the film, I can say there’s something really natural and casual about it. I don’t see any hard work.
“’I was pretty sure, from the first time I read the script, that I wanted to do this film. And I knew that if I didn’t do it, someone else was going to do it, and fuck it up. So I kind of felt a responsibility. I really felt obligated to do it justice.”
