This show contains mature content and adult themes. It may not be suitable for young audiences.
And he's gone on, just go on.
Like that.
It's so fast.
Never ever saw somebody move so quickly from playful drug.
Use to death.
From Variety and iHeart Podcasts, this is Variety Confidential, the Life and Legend of River Phoenix. I'm Tacchiana Siegel, Executive editor of Film and.
Media at Variety.
In episode one, we explored River's unconventional childhood and his swift rise to fame. Today, we delve into pivotal moments in rivers life, including his time filming Dogfight and my own private Idaho.
It's wonderful having a new name every six months. Why aren't we supposed to question authority? You've taught me that she turned ourselves in. It's dangerous for you, and it's standers for him. I don't apologey Eda, and I came all the way back here to take you out to dinner and try to make things up to you.
This is some part of your Dog Fight, I'll kill you.
We begin with Dogfight director Nancy Sivoka, who worked with River from May nineteen ninety through July nineteen ninety. She shares the lessons she learned from their time together and the potential she saw in him as an aspiring director. Nancy, thank you for joining us before we discuss your time with River in the early nineties and his death just a few years later in nineteen ninety three. I want to remind listeners how big of a star he was.
He had just come off an Oscar nomination for his supporting role in that nineteen eighty eight drama Running on Empty. Do you think that put him in a different category as an actor at the time, to be that young and already have accomplished something that few have.
You know, I was very aware of his filmography, and I had seen the movies, really liked his work a lot. I think the fact that he was recognized so young was well deserved. Because he came in so young and so aware of these characters. He had an ability to assess people in psychology and situations in a very empathetic way. He really did become them, and I think the fact that he was recognized did give him then now we're getting to the business side in the industry, absolutely gave
him a power that I think he used wisely. He was very mature for nineteen and I know, you know, we can get into the abuse of the drugs and all that, but I'll start by saying that he was a very aware and very mature and his hyper sensitivity is usually part of what gets people in trouble with substance abuse. He was very sensitive to people in situations and highly intelligent that way, and which could set you up for that.
It's a great point because it's like that thing that is your greatest asset can also be potentially the thing that will undermine you.
I think part one of the many things that were the positives that then could also undermine is he felt a great responsibility with his notoriety, his popularity. He was very It was very interesting. I remember one day we were breaking for lunch and we were on set and
we had across the street. We were in Seattle filming, and we went to his trailer to eat lunch there, and as we were crossing a street, the I want to say, the Norwegian Day Parade, Northern European Day Parade of these lovely young ladies, you know, with batons twirling and legs kicking, was coming down the street with a band and all this stuff, and when the young girls recognized that it was River Phoenix crossing the street, they broke the parade and they ran after him, and it
was like beatlemania, and they chased them to the trailer and we all went inside the trailer giggling. It was like, you know, one of those moments. And he didn't just like sit down there and have lunch to go like how funny these girls are after me kind of thing. He sat with that and he was disturbed by it, and he said, I feel bad, like they just the whole parade just went to stop, like they were there celebrating there, and now they're outside the trailer. Now the
girls are outside the trailer. So I said, well, maybe you want to you want to just go talk to him, you know, thinking he'd signed autographs and stuff. He stepped out. Of course, he's signing autographs. But when he was done, he said, listen, I want you to get back in the parade and finish your celebration because there were a lot of people there were waiting for this to happen,
and you're part of that entertainment and stuff. So he always was very aware of being having the responsibility that there's an audience waiting for him to do what he promised to do. And he took that so seriously to a point where he might have enjoyed it. But I
didn't see him enjoy it much. I saw him take it very seriously and always like sort of figure out how he could make things better through that, Like he would talk about kindness to the young girls, or he would just add stuff to it to help people's lives be better. I mean, he was a really complex and deep young guy.
Take us back to when you first came on board for Dogfight as a director, and however was already attached as Eddie Birdlace with that challenging Usually the director gets to pick the leading actor.
I read the script soon after the first film I did was at Sundance, and I read the script soon after that. Peter Newman, who was one of the producers, brought it to me, so at that point River was not attached. But at that point I wasn't ready to commit. I had just had a baby. But I loved the story so much, and I was so intrigued by these two really opposite people coming together for one night and
how that very simple premise really was intense. So I said to Peter, you know, if this is still available, I'll be back, you know, please let me know in a year or so. And that's when they came back to me with Dogfight and River was attached to it. And I spoke to the folks at the studio and they seemed good, and they said, listen, now you have to speak to River and make sure that he feels good about having as a director. And that made a lot of sense to me because he was on it.
So we had a phone call that I feel like it lasted for a couple of hours, maybe, like you know, definitely more than an hour. And he was in Florida and I was in the Bronx at that point, and we talked a lot about the story. He told me why he wanted to do it. He wanted to try something different than the films he'd made, the other roles he'd had, which were younger characters, And that made a lot of sense to me for him as an act
of the fact that he was stretching. He spoke very much like a professional actor, did not speak like the nineteen year old that he was, because he was both. And he spoke a lot about how he found it so challenging, this character, and he was asking me what did I make of him, because it was so different from the way he had been brought up. I mean, he had been brought up as a very much bohemian, you know, sort of a hippie background, very the opposite
of conservative. And here was this young man who had signed up to be a marine. And I had told him that, you know, I grew up with people that I had signed up to be in the Armed forces, so I was really familiar with that person. And I said, you know, you know, we were talking about people as people, but he knew he was going to be in for a challenge. And his discomfort, which I know, you know a lot of people have spoken about that worked on
the film or whatever. His discomfort with this character, to me was the most beautiful part of the portrayal because I think he played a man who was uncomfortable with the role that he took on that he chose, and
it was a role that you know, super manufactured. We know that today to talk about this stuff as constructions, you know, but you know, back in the day, it's like he was just like, you know, my dad said, it would make me a man, you know, to join the army or the marines, and that's what I'm going to do. I got to become a man. And what it does to him is this constant You get this constant feeling that here's someone who's trying to fit into this the skin that's not his, that he didn't even
know he maybe shouldn't do. And and it was just beautiful to watch that process because I think it's universal that often will make a choice in our lives that's not right for us, and we keep pushing through it
because we made the choice. And I think Lily's character has her own issues of trying to fit into it, her stereotype of who this bohemian chick is, you know, and the two of them together kind of honestly, kind of being trans parent about showing their discomfort is to me what I kind of saw a potential in the story. But when man, when the two of them showed up, that was like, literally, I'm getting goosebumps talking about it now.
It's a it's a privilege to watch people go through this process because we usually want to hide that.
Were you concerned about River pulling off this role, especially given that he was coming off a long list of roles where he was basically a child.
It's funny because I'd seen his movies and I felt like I saw the potential in him. I wasn't concerned. I was actually really excited. I felt like, oh my god, here's a guy who's who's wanting to take a big step in a in a in an unknown place, and I get to go with him. So I was actually very very excited and hopeful that that. You know, I wish, I hope that he liked me enough that I could be a part of it, because that was what was appealing.
What was the first day of filming like.
The first day that I filmed with him. Mind you, I had worked with first time actors on my first film, so we were all learning together and I thought I had a pretty good handle on how to work with actors, acting background, from college whatever. We started day one and we filmed a scene and that was take one. I went over to him and I said, you know, I have a little note for you. He says, okay, take two, and I had the same note because I didn't really
see what he did. So I went over and I'm like, yeah, I'm won doing a few could whatever, and he's like, Nancy, I did it. And I said, I'm sorry, I didn't see. And I stood behind. I stood right by the camera. I never stood by a monitor, so I was right on top of him, and he goes, I did it. So I said, I think we did one more take, and then he said listen. He said, you'll see it in Daily's, you know, when you watch the film and
you'll see that I did it. And when I saw the rushes from that day, by golly, he did it. And I learned, and I can't explain how it was a shift and focus. It was like literally like a rack focus. I learned to watch him and to watch actors as if my eyes were a camera, which is very different from my eyes. And he taught me that. And he was nineteen. He knew what the camera was seeing.
He knew how to play to the camera. And it may not necessarily have been the way I was looking at how And then I started saying, oh that's what the okay, what the camera seeing? What the camera saying?
Where do you think that came from?
With him?
Because that is not something common.
Again, he was a child actor, he was a child performer. He was always aware of what his performances he would like. All I think good child performance is he learned, maybe way too young, the impact of what he does to other people, like how people react to him. So that's a good thing to have. I think it's it's a little healthier as you get older, because at least you have a sense of yourself first, and then you get
a sense of what other people need from you. But as a child, I think you just go straight to what other people need from me, and he always had that what other people need for me, think, and if he felt like he couldn't deliver it, then there would be disappointment in himself. What I really appreciate is that he pulled from himself the awkwardness of the roles that
don't fit him. And they weren't necessarily the marine role, but there were other roles that he had that he didn't feel comfortable with, and he played that awkwardness came through.
What do you think was awkward in his real life that he was able to pull from.
Well, certainly the notoriety, the feeling responsible because the fans I had never really seen it that close at that point, and the way that these young people would literally put them their whole psychees in your hands, you know, like they were like so in awe of him, and he need he didn't want that that artifice. He wanted them to act to him as a person and then go back and be with themselves as people so that they
don't give them themselves up to something like that. It took a lot of I think it was very deep, very deep thinking on his part, and he lived it. He lived it like every day. I mean, he couldn't go anywhere. He's so recognizable.
I think people don't even remember that, like or the people who weren't even alive like he was, what like Leonardo DiCaprio was after Titanic.
It's funny Leonardo DiCaprio reminds me so much of him, like that when I saw when I saw Titanic, I was like, oh, River could have done that, Like yeah, there was definitely that kind of It's an attraction that's so surreal, but inside there's more So that it's not that you don't stop at the very attractive face because there's more going on and so you want to stay and see more. And they know what to do with
the camera. River had he had so much When I worked with him, he had so much more experience than I did. Even though he was like whatever, I think, eight years younger than me. He had so much more space because he'd been acting, and he understood what he looked like and what the camera didn't like, and which, you know, how he could perform in a way that the camera would accept everything that he did and what the movement of an eye I did and what the
movement of a hand did and he understood. You know. He was very and he loved the cinematography. I thought we talked a lot because he had so many suggestions. At one point, I said, hey, River, when are you going to direct me? Because it seems like you want to direct this movie? And we used to joke that way, and he was like, no, I want to. I want to, he says, but I think I have to go away to do it because I don't want people to judge
my early attempts. So again that being in the public eye did not come naturally to him, and I understood, because I can't imagine taking your first baby steps in a new art form and then having the whole world on top of you judging it. You know, the way they judge the thing that you are more experienced than.
Something that you said about him feeling this responsibility, this great responsibility. It's echoed with various people we've talked to, this idea that he was also the breadwinner of his family that also had to have been a tremendous burden when you're nineteen.
Yeah, and again, it's kind of like the way things are set up, right, because you'll get a family that to this day where there's kids that have a talent, and it's the kids that want to act on that talent. They just need to do what they're born needing to do this thing, and so the parents will rally around
in the family. If it's a big family, rallies around, and one child might sort of, you know, step up first and step out first, and then suddenly everything the dynamics of that family, instead of being you know, mom and dad at the top or the adults at the top and the children being whatever, it gets flipped just by the just by the business, by being in this work, and part of it you go, you know, well, he was born to do this. There was a part of him that really loved acting. So it wasn't like he
was in it against his will. I think the other things that come in is usually the business, the responsibility of the business, and that to me is the part that is hard for all of us, you know, because the actual doing the work is play, you know. And he probably would have had more resources, although he did
so well in his roles. But when you're doing that, plus you're aware that of the business side, and you've got people telling you that you need to do this, this and that, and you have to he was aware. He was aware of it very much. He at one point we were having some issues with the studio and he said to me, says, Nancy, pick your battles. He was not again, I'll remind you he was nineteen, and he was telling me, just know how to pick your battles so that you can and you know, get what
you need at the end. But again he was very aware, and he was very aware of what were things that can sort of you could let slide some creative things so that you can make sure that the things that are the most important. Saying again, lesson for me, because I was coming from I had never worked in a studio.
With the first film I did was independent, so there was nothing nobody did really that had an answer to And this was him teaching me and being very He was a very I felt, a very generous teacher with me, because he could have been like, oh man, this chick's just learning, but he was very It was a true collaboration because, like I said, he was very interested in filmmaking.
So we would talk about, you know, looking at the whole picture of it, where whereas his role as bird Lace was the role of Birdlace and he had to
take care of that. And then you know, we would talk about how as a director, if he was doing this and directing, he would be having to take care of his role, but also at the same time at looking at the bigger picture and making decisions on the bigger picture and thinking about audience, what the audience needs in a very different way that he would as an actor. So and he was fascinated by that, really interested, and I think he would have directed.
Did you stay in touch with River after the film was released?
Yeah? Yeah, Actually, he is such a doll. I was filming a movie in the summer of ninety two and he came I was hugely pregnant at that point with my daughter, and River came over and he hugged me, and he said, I just want to let you know that I quit smoking because I was always after him, you know, and I was an ex smoker, so I used to smoke three packs of day. So I'm like, that's good, River, it's good for your voice, you know. And when we hugged, and I was really happy to
hear it. And then, you know, it was a couple of months later that I learned that he was doing heroin at the time that I said that bastard. He said to me he quit smoking and he was doing hard drugs, and I was ignorant of that. But he was like my kid brother, you know. During this time. It was just a very generous kid brother. And when my daughter was born, she was born, I think two weeks before he passed away, he called me and congratulated me.
So it was just yeah, yeah, that was really yeah, it was cool.
So to your knowledge, he was not doing drugs during Dogfight.
No, not at all, not at all. And I may have gotten the years wrong and maybe he died he died in ninety three, didn't correct, So I saw everything was a year later. So he had seen me on the set in ninety two, and when my daughter turned a year old, he called me to say happy birthday to her because he had also congratulated me on her birth. So he was that kind of guy.
How did you learn that he was doing heroin?
I actually I actually learned through people that I knew who knew him, And I was really worried because, you know, having known other people with heroin addiction, having known a lot of people with substance abuse, you know that when you're in that when you the darker, the more you get into that place, the more that you're the friends who are trying to get through to you fall fall away out of your view, and who comes in to fill in the space are people who are just as troubled.
And I've really I worried for him for that. I've sadly known that situation too much. And it's it's a heartbreak to watch somebody get lost like that because they're not going to come out until they're ready to come out, and some people are just unfolds. It's luck, whether you do or don't, it's nothing that you do. It's just pure luck. It is pure luck. I know people who are heroinautics today who are in their eighties and I'm like, damn, I said, what is that a preservative? Like, how is
it that you're still here? But yeah, no, it's just uh it tells you that that you know, and back in the day and still to this day. I think subsists get so much about blaming the people that are ill with it and you know, like alcoholism, like any of it. It's just blaming the people that are ill and they don't have the willpower and they have that. It's like, you know, unless you've been there, unless you've been there, just a great, great, great loss. And yeah, I with Shah to hear it.
Where would you have seen his career going? Obviously you mentioned he would have directed, and you could have seen him in Titanic. Overall, what do you think his career would have been?
I think he was really thoughtful about the roles he picked. He wasn't that movie star that preserves his image, you know, like and nothing wrong with that. There are movie stars that really the audience loves this image that they have of them, and they work hard in every project they pick to make sure that that image stays the way you know, that people expect of them. And that's a dedicated performer in that sense. But in his case, he was stretching. He was I think he was stretching. Look
at Idaho, Yeah, he was stretching from Dogfight. Oh you can't get more different, you know. And he was really, I think, trying to explore all these different parts of himself and see how he connected to all these different unlikely people. And any actor will tell you that they live with that character and that character becomes a part of them. So he picked these very challenging people to live with and we benefited as the audience. We benefited
because we see ourselves. He did it in a way so that we can see ourselves, so you can mirror us. And that's I think his gift.
What do you think was his greatest strength as an actor.
His ability to mirror, to mirror the complexities of a character. Like he's He's very transparent, his face, his body. I think it just he really embodies everyone. And the odd thing is, you know, when I watch him, I think, wow, you know, well, I'm not a hustler. You know, I'm not a marine. You know I'm not a I'm not a kid who discovered a body. You know, I'm not this. I'm not this young guy, and yet and yet I am.
When I'm watching him, I am, and I become one with him, which is why I think he was beloved by people and beloved by young girls. I think not just because he was a hottie, but because he really delivered. He wasn't mister cool and a tail and bill like, you know, kind of like just the face of the face. He really had. He had heart, and so he had soul because his end, his ending was so tragic and you know, we would like to say, you know, avoidable.
Maybe maybe it does take over his story, and I look forward to the day when his full story takes the story, because he is a He's a fascinating person that took every experience he had from the time he was a child until the day he died, and he he actively seek down out characters that were at the fringe of things because I think he grew up at the fringe of things, and he was very appreciative of people that most of the people kind of like back off from, you know, and he did that really honestly.
So that part of it. I want to celebrate his whole filmography and encourage people to find his work so that the last image is not the thing you keep, but the work he did, which is what you know, is what is the gift.
Months after wrapping Dogfight, River began work on another independent film, My Own Private, Idaho, directed and written by Gus Fanzant, that starred River and Keanu Reeves as two queer young men and best friends who embark on a journey of self discovery. In his nineteen ninety one Variety Review, former chief film critic Todd McCarthy said, River cuts a very believable, sometimes compelling figure of a young man urgently groping for definition and his life.
What do I mean to you?
What do you mean to me?
Mike?
You're my best friend.
I know, man, I know your friends.
We're good friends, and it's good to be good friends.
That's a good thing.
So I just.
That's okay, bring your friends.
Variety's current chief film critic Owen Gleiberman shares more about River's career and star quality in the early nineties.
I think most of the directors he worked with recognized that he was a great camera object, and they would just let the camera kind of sit on him and drink him in. I mean, Gus Benzan definitely did that
and my own private Idaho. But I think there was this feeling directors had that he could just he could rule a scene with his with his presence, I think for a while, really starting in the seventies and definitely in the nineteen eighties, young actors in Hollywood were in a category of their own, and then you know, they would kind of grow up on camera, like the members of the Brat Pack did, but they often grew up sort of awkwardly, and they kind of, you know, they
were better as kids than as adults, and some of them, like Debbie Moore, were able to really make the make the leap. But there's something about kid acting that I don't know. It's very punchy, it's very on the nose. It's about kids being cute and charming, and that legacy had kind of carried through in the eighties where you know, the Brat Pack really were the big teen stars of the day, and then by the end of the day they were growing up awkwardly or not, trying to sustain
their stardom or not. And then along comes an actor like River Phoenix, and he just seemed cut from a very different cloth that earlier kind of kid acting. The nineteen eighties kind of kid acting was all about pleasing audiences. It was about being you know, funny or tough, and River Phoenix sort of wasn't going to play that. He
was a quieter actor. He was always drawn I mean, once he got past the after school special period, he was drawn to really interesting kind of indie movies, movies that touched on themes of alienation, where he was going to be sort of on the high wire as an actor, not trying to charm you, and you felt that, you felt that he was a new breed of star, but that maybe did harken back to the seventies or James Dean or whatever, where he he was a more serious
actor in many ways than the actors who had come out of the youth movie machine. I mean, some of them were serious actors too, but they got caught up in the whole blockbuster thing and that desire to please audiences that had become such a thing in nineteen eighties movies. The nineties, the indie movement right from the start was
going to be about something different. It was going to be about going back to a little bit more of what seventies movies were about touching on themes that were darker, about alienation, movies that tried to please audiences but also challenged them. And I think you felt from the beginning that River Phoenix was part of that. But it wasn't a movement yet when he started, it was just these kinds of little interesting movies, and he got in on the ground floor of that.
Will The film solidified River's reputation as a fearless and talented artist. It also marked the beginning of a darker chapter for the actor, one that would end in his death.
River Phoenix was absolutely on the cutting edge of that, on the edge of that new attitude, that new way to project yourself as an artist, and maybe unfortunately as a new way of having almost a kind of self destructive attitude about drugs and pleasure and all that sort of stuff that had been around for a while. And it's not like there weren't casualties before, but it had
all turned a lot, a lot darker. One of the things about My Own Private Idaho is it was this very cool movie, and it was about sort of a new idea of cool in the culture that had originally come up through like you know, the photographs of Larry Clark or something like that, and maybe through a movie like Drugstar Cowboy in nineteen eighty nine, the movie that put Gus Van sant on the on the map, Drugstar Cowboy was about these you know, completely disreputable pharmaceutical junkies.
I mean, they're breaking into drug stores to get their supply, but they are in the sort of nineteen seventy spirit. They're the heroes. I mean, they're the you know, the anti heroes, but we're we're rooting for them. And that's because, you know, as played by Matt Dillon and Kelly Lynch, they are cool. They just have this quality of cool that's just part of what the movies impart in a story like that, and my own Private Idaho has some
of that. I mean, it's about you know, these downbeat characters and they're alienated, and they are hustlers, and they don't have homes and they're you know, just wandering from city to city. But part of the magic of movies is that the way Gus Van shoots those lives, there's a glamor. There's a glamor to them, and River Phoenix, I think got caught up during the shooting of that movie in the kind of the glamor of that lifestyle
or the cool of that lifestyle. You know, heroin had just been considered this drug that was anathma that you know, you didn't do. It was just too too dangerous, it was too dark. But by the nineties, for the first time, it had become a cool drug. But the warnings about it were correct. I mean, it was dangerous, it could
kill you, and that's kind of what happened. But he got he got all, he got all caught up in that, and there was a whole subculture of that in la around places like the Viper Room, where you know, that generation they would gather, they would hang out, Baby would do these drugs, and for the first time that was kind of cool. The element of self destruction in it, of not caring enough about yourself to kind of really look after yourself, that had become that had become cool.
Joining us to unravel this churning point is Matthew Ebert, an actor and crew member on the film and one of River's closest friends during this tumultuous period. Matthew, thank you for joining me. Thanks to the success of Stand By Me and Running on Empty, for which he received an OSCAR nomination. River Phoenix was already a household name by nineteen ninety. That year, he worked on Dogfight, a
film directed by Nancy Savoca. It was on this set that he met Matthew Ebert, a young production assistant and aspiring filmmaker, and the two quickly became inseparable.
I was working with a production designer who had gone out to Seattle to work on Dogfight the movie river Maid in the spring of nineteen ninety, so I was hired as the onset dresser. It was fantastic, and I'm twenty four years old, really in a good height of my personal powers in terms of creative creativity. And I met River in pre production on that film. I remember first seeing him and you know, everybody he's a River Phoenix, so everybody's you know, around him and swarming.
But I'm kind of.
One of those people who when I see celebrities, I go in the other room. About a week later, maybe not even I'm walking down under the Mono rail in Seattle and I hear this, hey, and there he is, so I stop and I wave and he runs across the street and he's like, I hear.
Really cool things about you. D d Da Da Da.
I'm River Phoenix Da Dah. It was on like the minute we met, you know, like I just we were both young. People often talk about him and his personality and his lightness and who he was, and it's really true.
Prior to what happened with his drug addiction, this was a young person who at nineteen years old was buying land in Costa Rica to preserve the environment, was putting all his money where his mouth was, went to things for peta And I mean this guy was fully engaged, as was I. We just hit it off like two peas in a pod.
During and after filming, the two stayed in touch and built a deep friendship based on their mutual love of art and activism.
He comes up to visit me in New York City.
I'm living in New York on East third Street in the Hell's Angels Block, so it's really fun for him to come up run around and me too.
We're not doing any drug.
The only thing we're doing is smoking pot, and not even in mass quantities. We just had lots of enthusiasm and youth and brightness, and we had great careers ahead of us. I did, and it wasn't forced, Like I didn't feel like I ever had to play another role or be another thing to be around River. He was just this really open human being and so creative and talented. And when it comes in that package where you're beautiful and all this stuff and now you're successful.
He had a difficult.
Childhood like a lot of people, and it wasn't big wealth or privilege or any of that. Once he was discovered, he became the breadwinner.
Of his family.
Well filming dog site, River was considering signing on to Gus van Santz My Own Private Idaho. The project would be both a professional challenge and a personal gamble. As Matthew Ebert recalls, River came to him for advice one day.
He said, Oh, I want to do this film with Gus van Zantz called my Own Private Ideow and nobody in my team mi crew wants me to do it.
No one, what do you think.
I'd never met Gus, but I'd seen Malanocci and Drugstore Cowboy. I was really impressed, and I really was like, yeah, that's he's great because he just took Matt Dillon and made him an adult star, and that's what you're trying to do so. He said to me, I'll only do it if you'll do with me. You come with me and show me how. Now people will speculate, and they did then about our relationship. You know, I'm gay, but not we never had sex. He was completely open hearted.
So we would hug and do all this stuff. We really like each other genuinely. He knew because I was gay, because I had some street experience completely different than the kids in Idaho and Oregon. But I wasn't unfamiliar with the role. He was going to play.
The role of Mike Waters, an arcoleptic street hustler, pushed River to a new artistic height, but the film's immersive and gritty production environment would also have a profound and troubling impact on his personal life, something Matthew Ebert sensed from the moment he arrived on set in an Oregon.
River had arrived maybe like a week before I did, and when I got there, the production i'mice said, you know, we had to take away rivers car like why, Well, he went out the other night and got fucked up on coke, and you know his agent heard about then all that pulled away, and I remember being like he went on a coke, Like, what are you talking about? Later on I found out it was not coke, it was crystal math. Someone had taken him in his research to a house of a known drug dealer.
According to Matthew Ebert, River assured him that he was just doing research for the film, but as production continued, Ebert recalls an atmosphere that was chaotic and unregulated, with drug use rampant among the cast and crew.
It was the strangest place in the world for me when I think back at now what it takes for an entire group of people to normalize the behavior I saw every day. How an entire community of independent artists, people, producers, writers, how everyone saw the same thing I was seeing, but no one did anything to stop it. No matter what I did to stop it, I couldn't. And eventually I caved and I started using. Within like a month, we were all on, We were all hooked. River's first use
of heroin was on my own private Idaho. Most people try it and they're like, oh, it takes them a little while to get to the place. But when you have all that money and access and all these people to clean up the mess, No, that goes much faster. The cycle speeds up. So now you have all this access to heroin, you have all this access to alcohol.
Whatever you want math, we can get it for you.
So by the end of it, we're all using pretty heavily. When you're in that sort of situation where it's high pressure, everybody else is doing it, it just takes.
That one little map to burn the whole house down.
Despite the chaos during this period of his life, River's performance in My Own Private, Idaho remains a career defining achievement. The film showcased his unique ability to channel vulnerability and raw motion into a character, something critics like Roger Ebert and fans like actor Norman Rita still remember, maybe not.
I like the picture. This is a challenging, challenging film, and there's I think one of the keys in this guy's worked our home movies in both Drugstore Cowboy and here we see faded film of the kids's children, and I think that what this What's the driving impost that makes you want to follow these characters even though you don't approve of drug dealing or selling sex, is that they are trying in some way to get back to they want to know how their life split apart from
those sweet moments in those scratchy films that now exist in that precious child. This is something that has been a subject in movies constantly. It's one of it's a dream, you see it, Citizen Kane all the way through to get back to that space. And I like these journeys. I like where this guy says it. No matter what they're doing, specifically emotionally, I always know what they're doing to trying to recapture a sweeter time.
This movie, that Gus Benzam movie.
It's so honest, and this is one of the movies that was coming out when I was trying to become an actor, and I was like incredibly influenced by River Phoenix.
I thought it was just like the thing his scene when.
They're sitting around the campfire and he's trying to tell him that he loves him, and Kiddy's talking about, oh, you know, I'm your friend, you know that, right, and he's like, you know, a friend, being a friend is good, but he just he's trying to get there. It goes into a kiss, but he was like one of the most heart movie scenes and I was like, God, how fucking punk rock is the River Phoenix, Like everything is honest with this guy, which is which is just beautiful.
You get this feeling that the culture was trying to tell him, Hey, this is how you get in character. He didn't need any of that. He was just a natural. He just came from the guy. That's what I loved about Doc Fay was a difficult role for him. He plays a marine who's like really a kind of misogynist and.
That wasn't like him at all. Oh, it was really hard for him to do that.
In some ways, playing Idaho was more closely to his spirit because it comes it's a heart character.
Production on My Own Private Idaho ended by December nineteen ninety, but River continued to struggle with balancing his fame, the pressure to keep making films, and his addiction.
Once that move was over, it never stopped. There was no gap. There was no like period of oh, let's try to clean up. He would try, but the breaks were so short. You know, he would be like, Okay, I got to clean up for this movie. Ye, but now I gotta You know, you can't. Your mind, your body is so addicted to the substance that without it you can't function.
Now.
Normally we'd say, okay, we'll take six months off. He can take six months off. He's supporting an entire family, he's supporting an entire operation of machine. The only person I can think of was selling him take six months off of me, and I was still using.
I quit.
Nineteen ninety two. River was the star. Without River, you didn't have a movie. River brought the money. River brought everything, the two three million dollars you needed to make that movie. You didn't have it without River Phoenix. So you know, that's the kind of person he was.
He was the tent.
He could make these movies happen, unlike so many people who can have that. He was also a really beautiful, loving, kind human being. But as we all know, the minute you become an addict, all those great qualities start becoming less and less, and all your money and all your time, you know, all the things you have left, all the life and breath all goes into keeping this thing alive and protecting yourself from exposure.
After my own private Idaho, River went on to do his final four films, Sneakers, a nineteen ninety two thriller starring Robert Redford, Silent Tongue, a western directed by Sam Shephard, and The Thing Called Love, a comedy drama directed by Peter Bugdanovic and co starring River's girlfriend at the time, Samantha Mathis, and Dark Blood, which co starred Judy Davis and wasn't completed at the time of River's death.
Today, we would never let a River Phoenix do the two movies that he did after today. I would say, listen, honey, you look like shit, you look broken, you tore up. We're gonna pull you off. We're gonna give you some time. We're gonna take it out of the spotlight so you can heal. I feel so bad for him because I would hear these comras. He would call me up and say, I gotta do this movie, and this is the one I know.
It's all these people. You could hear the guy working out.
How great this would be to meet Judy Davis and to work with Bugdanovich and Samantha, all the people in his he wanted to work with. But he had this huge sack of pus he was dragging around. You know, he had this huge problem. Now it was untenable. It took me years, and in fact, I only did it last year to finally see this thing called love, because anytime I saw a clip of it, I was like, who is that person? That person is so different from the River Phoenix I met on dog Fight.
That guy his skin is bad.
He's skinny, he's gone, He's not present in his body here. There are times watching that movie where I felt like he's craving. It was horrible to watch that movie.
This is a Fox News update.
The film World is morning two deaths after River Phoenix and director of Federico Fellini. Twenty three year old Phoenix collapsed outside a Hollywood nightclub. The cause of death is under investigation.
In the early hours of October thirty first, nineteen ninety three, River Phoenix was pronounced dead. He was twenty three years old. Matthew still remembers that call with the news.
The speed with which River descended and died.
I've never seen anyone go that fast.
Never many years now of counseling people and being a sponsor and many many years sober, I've never seen anyone deteriorate so quickly in my life. You know, by the time Idahope was over, he was fully hooked.
I was just really.
Constantly telling him, listen to me, you gotta stop. You can come here to my house. We'll hide out, we'll go somewhere, we'll do it together. I'm doing it.
I'm you know.
Four months he could say yes to me, but two hours later, when he's getting a craving and somebody shows up with a bag, what are you gonna do? I got a call from a fellow actor in my own private adaho. I was living in Seattle. I had made the move to try to clean myself up. I answered the phone. He was in tears.
I was like, what's going on? Ever died? Totally? Remember it? You don't you don't forget something like that. I felt terrible. I felt ashamed that I hadn't worked harder to get him out.
For Matthew Ebert River's legacy is as much about his humanity as it is about his artistry.
No one had what he had.
River was really at the peak what would have been the peak of his power, and without those drugs he'd still be at the peak of his power. That film provided everything for him to lose it. He was so big hearted, God, I keep he just had an expansive nature. He could open up and embrace so many different things in different ways. There was just something about this guy that was here to fix shit. Fame, take it or
leave it kind of guy. Fame just happened, So if he didn't have it, his life would have been great. Like he was happy, he loved doing music. He had all these other creative qualities that once you become this Hollywood slot of an actor who brings in all the dough, people only think of you as that person. They don't see the whole spectrum that you live on. They don't
see all the other artistry you create. He was writing music, composing his own stuff, He was doing all sorts of creative stuff with his life, and.
That all went away.
River Phoenix was a star who burned brightly and lived passionately. It's clear his time on My Own Private Idaho was a major turning point in his life in ways both good and bad. While it showcased his brilliance as an actor, it also exposed him to the darker side of Hollywood and put him on a path that would ultimately to
his untimely death. In our next episode, we'll hear more from Matthew Ebert about River's life in those final years and we talk with Samantha Mathis, River's girlfriend at the time of his death and his co star in The Thing Called Love. Mathis was there on that tragic Halloween night. Join us as we can continue to uncover the story of a life that ended far too soon. Don't forget
to subscribe wherever you listen to podcasts. Variety Confidential is hosted by Tatiana Siegel and produced by Karen Mizugucci and Sidney Kramer. Written by Anna Moslam, Karen Mizagucci and Tatiana Siegal. Executive produced by Dea Lawrence, Variety's co editor in chief Cynthia Littleton, and Ramin's a two day Edited and mixed by Aaron Greenawald Variety Content Studio Executive producer Alex Hughes. Please refer to sources incitations on Variety dot com.