River Phoenix was so prolific in your cinema journey. He definitely is one of the core reasons I, myself, fell in love with movies. How often does he cross your mind?
I mean, I think about him all the time — there's a picture on the wall of him. He was sort of like, you know, a very great collaborator. And we only did that one piece and we were planning on — he was planning on being in what turned out to be "Milk". But that didn't happen till later, before he died, so there was a project that we were talking about. But, yeah, he was very spontaneous. He loved to improvise. That was his favorite thing. And I don't think he got to, necessarily, depending on who he was working with, go off the page and improvise. It probably wasn't the type of films that he was doing — he was doing traditional pieces that were pretty much, like, securely in Hollywood. You know, he was doing traditional pieces, that's what he was offered. And in that environment, you're not making a film like — you know, like you're mentioning Scorsese — where they improvise whole scenes. And when we did, he found out that I like it, you know, that I was okay if he just did something for like five minutes that wasn't even in the screenplay, because then he could feel very open about what he was playing. So that was kind of magical, that he liked it, and he had not been able to do it. So he was very excited about it, because he wasn't normally doing it.
I don't know, there's lots of things. His upbringing was such that he didn't really have a lot of film history connected to his memory banks. He was homeschooled, so he didn't have a lot of teaching that he knew about concerning war. His homeschooling consisted of, like, no war. So characters like General MacArthur weren't in his world — he didn't know who they were. And then conversely, he didn't know what humor was. He didn't know what, like, a quote-unquote joke was, until he was nine. He found that out because he went to a traditional school — a public school — and kids were telling jokes. It was an era when kids were all about jokes. He didn't know what they were; they were just like a foreign thing to him. He also didn't have a smile, which people don't necessarily know. He told me — he said, 'Well, I don't have a smile.' And I said, 'You're kidding.' And then he smiled and showed me his smile, and I said, 'Oh yeah I don't see that smile in your films.'
So he had this interesting thing — for a movie star, an interesting absence of that kind of giant smile. But meanwhile, he was very funny, and his most favorite thing was just to laugh and tell stories.
— Gus Van Sant (Variety, 2025)
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