‘They were sort of profoundly beautiful’: Gus Van Sant on 30 years of My Own Private Idaho
An interview with Gus Van Sant thirty years after the release of "My Own Private Idaho."
- Gus Van Sant’s counterculture classic My Own Private Idaho had hit Asia. Phoenix was young, cool and beautiful, and the streets of Osaka, Tokyo and Kyoto teemed with screaming teenagers eager to glimpse their idol in the flesh. “They were just chasing him around,” Van Sant tells me. “In Japan, he was the model for a certain kind of look that was really popular in manga and cartoons at the time.” It’s partly why he had cast Phoenix in Idaho, as well as his good friend Keanu Reeves.
- As the years went by, Idaho would become a touchstone of New Queer Cinema, an era of independent gay film at the top of the Nineties that simmered with sex, glamour, subversion and violence. It’s also one of the more romantic films of that period, with Mike’s pining for Scott now essential to its overall legacy.
- “I think it’s very important for the gay community to have random characters that represent nothing more than people,” Phoenix told The Face in 1992. “I think it’s part of a wave that will set a precedent of some sort, so that you’ll no longer need a label.”Phoenix walked so the Heath Ledgers and Timothée Chalamets of the world could run, a by-most-accounts heterosexual actor and pin-up playing a gay character with compassion and care.
- It also helps that both Phoenix and Reeves are remarkably, timelessly good-looking here, all fresh faces, pouty lips and sharp cheekbones. “For me, they were people that I initially only knew through images - from films or occasionally some place in the media,” Van Sant says. “I knew that they were really talented, and they were also sort of profoundly beautiful.” It was an asset, along with their status as Hollywood heartthrobs. On set, though, Van Sant quickly separated their rising star power and appearance from their actual work. “I wasn’t constantly telling them how beautiful they looked,” he jokes. “You have to be business-like, you can’t become their fan rather than their director. Instead they became my compatriots.”
- There was occasional tension between Phoenix and Reeves, too. They were close friends and had worked together before - on the black comedy I Love You to Death in 1990 - but had very different approaches to acting. “River really liked to invent and make things up [in the moment],” Van Sant remembers. “Keanu’s orientation was to preserve the author’s words. He was a little bit like a stage actor - if you’re doing Samuel Beckett, you don’t start making up paragraphs on your own. Keanu was brilliant when he improvised, though. I would tell him that, but he wouldn’t believe it. River, on the other hand, was in his element. He knew that the best films are made up of accidents.”
More at the sauce
Saw a mod say the queue was empty so figured I’d bless ya’ll’s day with a little dose of River and Keanu.