Remembering River Phoenix - The Child With The Man In His Eyes
As it's impossible not to be moved by Joaquin Phoenix choosing to name his child after his late brother, so today seems as fitting an occasion as any to remember the Stand By Me star.
It was the film that brought Han Solo and 007 together. But as far as Steven Spielberg was concerned, the real star of Indiana Jones And The Last Crusade was River Phoenix.
Following the globe-spanning success of Indiana Jones And The Temple Of Doom, you’d imagine the first thing director Steven Spielberg would have wanted to do was set off on another adventure with the world’s most celebrated archaeologist. That it actually took the Jaws helmer five years to get around to making Last Crusade stems from a very strange fact indeed – namely that the man behind Raiders Of The Lost Ark didn’t have any desire to make a third Indiana Jones movie.
In the end, it was a binding contract with producer pal George Lucas that forced Spielberg’s hand. If he was to make another film about the fedora-wearing adventurer, Spielberg had certain demands he wanted met. As he explained in 2011, “There was talk for a while of Indy III being a haunted house-style movie, but I scotched that because I’d already made Poltergeist. Then Chris Columbus came up with a screenplay about a monkey king in Africa and that came and went. In the end, we opted to take a similar path as Raiders only with the Holy Grail replacing the Ark of the Covenant. But for me, it was important that Last Crusade be a movie about a father and son. It was very important for me that Indy’s father be involved in the adventure, that he should also on the quest.”
Of course, when Dr Henry Jones Jr is played by Harrison Ford, you can’t just cast anyone as his old man. Right from the off, Spielberg felt that the only man for the role was the man who’d helped jump-start cinema’s love affair with action spectaculars, Sean Connery. It proved an inspired choice. As the director explains, “Harrison and Sean played so well off of one another. They’re great because, while they take what they do very seriously, they don’t take themselves seriously at all. The thing of Henry calling Indiana ‘Junior’, Harrison thought that was hysterical. And the scene where it turns out that they’ve ‘shared’ [Nazi agent] Elsa, the best line in that came from their improvisations. Sean’s line ‘I’m as human as the next man’ was in the script, but Harrison’s comeback, ‘I was the next man’, that was his idea.”
If it was the dynamic duo who guaranteed the film’s international success, Spielberg’s favourite turn in the film came from the young star hired to play the adolescent Indy. “River Phoenix was just superb. When we cast him I think a lot of people were surprised we hadn’t gone for someone a bit more boy-next-door. But what made River exactly the right choice was that he’d worked with Harrison before on The Mosquito Coast and the two of them had got on very well. Harrison actually recommended him to me, in large part because River reminded him of his younger self.”
It was what happened next, though, that utterly delighted the director. “While we were filming Last Crusade, I noticed that River would spend a lot of time watching Harrison, identifying his mannerism and then incorporating them into his performance. It wasn’t so much that he was impersonating as he was reinterpreting Harrison’s little idiosyncrasies. To watch River do that was an absolute joy. Everything about his performance made me smile.”