River celebrated his 23rd birthday—on Aug. 23, 1993—and then
flew down to Costa Rica with all his siblings and his father. John was
opening a vegan restaurant, but his real agenda was to get his children,
especially River, to leave behind the corruption of the USAand live by
the Phoenix family values again. John explained, “The idea was for them
to spend more time here, helping with the cooking, making music,
writing, harvesting the organic fruit, and living off the land like we
used to.”
John implored River to get out of the movie business before it ate him
up. Eventually, River acceded, either because John had convinced him or
because he was tired of arguing about it. But he had to fulfill his
agreements, he told his father: He had signed contracts to appear in
Dark Blood and
Interview with the Vampire, and he had promised William Richert that he would be in his version of
The Man in the Iron Mask. After he made those three films, he could quit and move down to Costa Rica.
“As it turned out,” John said, “that was too many.”
ad turned out differently.
“Well, he did,” John said, “only he was in a box.”
George Sluizer, the director of
Dark Blood, had heard
rumors about River’s drug use, but he didn’t worry about them. “I knew
of his drug habit,” he said. “The actors in Hollywood, at the top level,
all are, I would say, drug addicts in some way or another. I worked
with Kiefer Sutherland: He was a whiskey addict, two botles a day. He
wanted to compete with me: ‘You drink one bottle, I drink one bottle,
let’s see if you’re drunk.’ I never on set noticed that he had drunk
anything—in the morning, he was sober.”
Sluizer asked River to come out to the film’s desert location five days
before everyone else. “I wanted him to breathe the Utah air, to
readjust, and let him remember the relationship we had to build for the
next seven weeks,” Sluizer said. Those five days also provided some time
for River to detox, but apparently he arrived clean and healthy.Actor
and director went hiking in the Utah mountains, bringing a few
sandwiches and spending all day tramping about: Breathing the fresh air,
they attuned themselves to the desert landscape. River was gradually
submerging himself in his character. More than ever, he liked shedding
the person he had become so he could transform into somebody else’s
invention.
“That’s the only time I have security, he said. “Myself is
bum! Myself is nothing!”The movie was centered on the house of Boy,
ramshackle but scenically located. Sluizer had found the location he
thought was ideal visually, but it was far from any vestiges of
civilization: “Maybe 20 miles from the nearest village,” Sluizer said.
“I’m not like Werner Herzog, saying, ‘There’s a nice tree, but it’s 30
miles away,’ when the same tree is 1 mile away. But the location was
important.”Sluizer had actually worked with Herzog, the famously uncompromising German director, on his 1982 movie
Fitzcarraldo,
about a European rubber baron attempting to bring a steamer ship across
land in the Peruvian jungle.
The movie was originally intended to star
Jason Robards and Mick Jagger, but Robards dropped out when he got
dysentery, and Jagger then had to depart for Rolling Stone commitments.
“All the Americans left,” Sluizer said dismissively. “That’s why they lost Vietnam.”Sluizer took pride in working on that movie, as he did in the documentary he made for National Geographic
in the ’60s that required him to spend five months in Siberia at
temperatures reaching 70 degrees below zero (Celsius). “Very difficult,
but I loved it,” he said. “There’s something that attracts me to extreme
circumstances, the opposite of the Hollywood people who are used to a
swimming pool and a shower.”So Sluizer scoffed at the relatively mild deprivations of Dark Blood:
The production booked a local motel and rented some nearby houses. The
theme of Hollywood people being unable to cope with the real world is a
major aspect of Dark Blood: A Hollywood couple drive their
Bentley into the desert on a second honeymoon, and get in big trouble
when it breaks down.
The couple, Harry and Buffy, were played by British
actor Jonathan Pryce and Australian Actress Judy Davis (Oscar-nominated
for her work in David Lean’s
A Passage to India and Woody Allen’s
Husbands and Wives) .
River played Boy, who takes them in, but develops an infatuation with Buffy, whom he recognizes from her days as a Playboy pinup,
and becomes hostile when Harry attempts to leave. It emerges that Boy
is mourning the death of his Native American wife (a motif overlapping
with Silent Tongue). She died from cancer, a result of the
fallout from the nuclear bombs the U.S. government had tested—and while
Boy may be a prophet of the desert, he is also unbalanced. The movie
ends in violence and fire: Harry kills Boy with an ax and Boy’s house
burns down.
River revered Pryce: He had starred in River’s favorite movie,
Brazil, the absurd urban dystopia directed by Terry Gilliam (formerly of
Monty Python’s Flying Circus) that River had seen 13 times. Things were tougher with Judy Davis, who was brilliant, but famously acerbic.
Dark Blood
producer Nik Powell said, “Since David Lean could not get Davis to do
what he wanted her to do in his film, it is no surprise that George
Sluizer had difficulties.”
We were not the best of friends, Judy and me,” Sluizer said. “She made
my life very tough, and I have never had to deal with a person making it
so difficult.” Having agreed to the script, he said, she started
demanding various changes; as Sluizer told it, some were to correct what
she saw as the screenplay’s antifeminism while others were to cater to
her vanity.
River, used to playing the peacemaker, tried to intercede between Davis
and Sluizer, only to find himself the object of her scorn: She nicknamed
him “Frat Boy.” When River, trying to be friendly, asked Davis when her
family would be visiting the set, she snapped, “What is this, Frat
Boy’s question time?” She also believed River was using drugs. “I
thought he was doing something when I first got there,” she said. “There
was one day when he came in so out of it. River said he’d had too much
sodium the night before. OK, I’ve never had a sodium overdose. Maybe
that’s exactly what they’re like.”
He did not use anything during the period we were in Utah,” Sluizer insisted. “I would put my hand in the fire and swear to it.”
River’s difficulty with the script derived from the quantity of Boy’s
monologues; he was having a hard time memorizing them accurately, and
would sometimes flip the word order. “He had difficulty with certain
lines,” Sluizer said. “He asked me a few times in rehearsal if he could
change the line—it’s too complicated or too long. I was strict. I said,
‘We’ve been thinking about the story and the character for two years
now—we’re not going to change it because you’re dyslexic.’ And that
might hurt a little bit—I’m saying, ‘I don’t care if you’re blind. You
have to see anyway.’ ” Ultimately, Sluizer said, he consented to the
modification of one line.
Davis’ version was that River was having problems with the character:
“In my opinion, that was made more difficult by the director constantly
telling him how he should play it. Whether he should be angrier,
loonier, whatever. It was a difficult part because it could so easily be
absurd. He had most of the dialogue in the film, huge speeches; he kept
trying to cut the lines down. Any change freaked the director out.
River said to me one day, ‘Maybe I should give up acting.’ ”
For the entirety of the shoot, River ate nothing but artichokes and
corn: He wanted to look as if he had been living in the desert and
eating insects to survive, like a modern John the Baptist. He wasn’t
alone in the wilderness, though; accompanying River to Utah were
Samantha Mathis and his personal assistant, Abby Rude.
River was delighted to discover that the area where they were filming
had a reputation as a hot spot for alien visitations. He would drop the
phrase “Thanks be to UFO Godmother” into casual conversation, and tried
to convince friends that he had levitated over his bed. Sometimes he
would lie down and shout, “Take me, I’m ready! What else is out there?”
Meanwhile the tension on the set grew. Davis refused to take direction from Sluizer. In scenes with River, she would act in ways that seemed designed to break his concentration,
like moving around erratically during his dialogue. “You’re in this
picture, so why do you have to make it so difficult for me?” River
implored her. He never yelled at her, but between takes he would retreat
to his trailer and play Fugazi, the hardcore band, at top volume.
“I had to sometimes say hey, a little less, because it’s loud,” Sluizer remembered.
“We were on this kind of inexorable journey to some disaster,” Pryce
said. “Every day there was some kind of difficulty.” After some
unreasonable rain, the remote location became muddy, with vehicles
careening on the dirt roads. Once, Sluizer’s director’s chair went over
the side of a cliff minutes after he had vacated it.
River told Pryce, “Somebody’s going to die on this film.”
The production moved briefly to New Mexico, and then headed to Los
Angeles for its final two weeks, to shoot interiors and close-ups in a
studio. River caught a cold and wasn’t needed for a night shoot in New
Mexico; Sluizer gave him permission to head back to LA a day early.
Bidding Sluizer farewell, River told him, “I’m going back to the bad,
bad town.”
River came to Los Angeles for the last time on Tuesday, Oct. 26, 1993.
He didn’t stay at his usual hotel, the St. James’s Club—the Dark Blood
production booked him a room at the elegant, Japanese-themed Hotel
Nikko. After two months of staying straight on a stressful movie, River
took the opportunity to cut loose and promptly started a drug binge.
Saturday, Oct. 30: River showed up on time for work, but looked
exhausted, as if he had pulled an all-nighter. He had taken a Valium to
bring himself down for work. “He was not 100 percent in control of his
body movements,” Sluizer said. “But there was no problem with his acting
and so there was no reason for me to interfere.”
The scenes that day were set in Boy’s underground fallout shelter, which
he had decorated like a religious shrine, with candles, used
paperbacks, and handcrafted wooden dolls. Boy gives his visitors a tour;
he and Buffy have both consumed datura (an herb with hallucinogenic
effects similar to peyote.) “Magic’s just a question of focusing the
will,” Boy tells her while Harry’s out of the room. “You don’t get what
you want because you’re lucky. You get it because you will it.” And they kiss by flickering candlelight.
In their second scene, Boy explains how he has created an archive of
human knowledge that can be passed down after a nuclear holocaust: “Took
a few thousand years just to invent the alphabet! All gonna be flushed
down the john. An entire civilization.”
When they finished the scene, Sluizer called “cut,” but cinematographer
Ed Lachman accidentally kept the camera running until the film ran out.
Power was cut to the klieg lights, but there was just enough
illumination from the candles that the final feet of film in the reel
captured River in silhouette.
“He came up to the camera and became total blackness, because he covered
up the lens,” Lachman said. “It was like he created an image of his
nonexistence.”
7 p.m.: River took a limousine back to the Hotel Nikko, where Rain (now
20) and Joaquin (who had turned 19 two days earlier) were waiting in his
room. They had flown into town so they could audition to play River’s
on-screen siblings in [Robert Allan Ackerman’s] Safe Passage.
Mathis was also there, soon joined by River’s assistant Abby Rude and
her husband, Dickie. They ordered room service, cranked up the music,
and started to party. Abby Rude went down the street to buy a bottle of
Moët Champagne. When a room-service waiter arrived with some vegetarian
snacks, the music was so loud, they almost didn’t hear him knocking. The
waiter wheeled in the food and saw a room in disarray. River was
dancing by himself, spinning in the middle of his room.
10 p.m.: After a long day, River was exhausted. River was ready to
collapse, but Joaquin and Rain had just arrived: They wanted to go out
and enjoy a Saturday night in Los Angeles.
Prince had recently opened an outpost of his Glam Slam nightclub in
downtown LA, while the Auditorium on Hollywood Boulevard was hosting a
“ska-lloween skankfest.” But Joaquin wanted to check out the Viper Room,
where Flea and Johnny Depp were going to be playing together in a
version of Depp’s band P. The club had been open for two and a half
months.
The hitch: Joaquin and Rain were underage, meaning they couldn’t get in
without an adult escort—ideally a celebrity, so that whoever was working
the door would turn a blind eye. Mathis agreed to take them, and they
called downstairs for a car. River would stay behind, as would the
Rudes.
While Mathis, Rain, and Joaquin were waiting at the elevator, River
changed his mind—either because he wanted to keep partying or because he
was falling into his usual paternal role, taking care of his younger
siblings. He ran down the hall, shouting, “I’m coming, I’m coming!”
River grabbed his guitar, planning to get onstage with his old friend
Flea, and they rode the elevator down.
As Mathis and the three Phoenixes left the Hotel Nikko, Sluizer was
arriving in his car. He saw them and called out to them, “Have a good
time,” but he didn’t think they heard him.
