River Phoenix | my Favorite Photos
“Some are bound to die young, By dying young a person stays young in people’s memory. If he burns brightly before he dies, his brightness shines for all time”Unknown
Well, to begin with, nobody, and I mean nobody, can talk a junkie out of using. You can talk to ‘em for years but sooner or later they’re gonna get ahold of something. Maybe it’s not dope. Maybe it’s booze, maybe it’s glue, maybe it’s gasoline. Maybe it’s a gunshot to the head. But something. Something to relieve the pressures of their everyday life, like having to tie their shoes.
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| — | Drugstore Cowboy, Gus Van Sant (1989) |
“I always know where I am by the way that the road looks. Like I just know that I’ve been here before. I just know that I’ve been stuck here, like this one fucking time before, you know that? Yeah. There’s not another road anywhere that looks like this road. I mean, exactly like this road. It’s one kind of place. One of a kind… like someone’s face… like a fucked up face.”
My Own Private Idaho (1991)
First of all, look at those screenshots. The left ones from the original color and the right ones from the modified color from Criterion Collection’s bluray edition.
Now let’s talk about this:
Gus Van Sant: When I see something - a film, say - that I think is a good idea, something that I might want to do, I don’t really see it as a whole. I see an image that I think represents the whole film. And so then I start to work towards that image, and then I fill it all out, and it becomes very complicated, because you have to have a lot of elements to make the image come to life. And on the way, you usually lose that one image It becomes a new thing, a thing unto itself. You keep it going along the lines that it’s got a mind of its own, and then by the end you say ‘Oh yeah, I remember the first image of this particular idea. I thought it was going to be like this black-and-white, dark thing that was set in the l950s.’ And you actually end up with a very colourful, bright story set in the 1990s.
River Phoenix: Referring to My Own Private Idaho?
Gus: Yeah, Idaho is a very good example, because it is very bright and colourful, and it is set in the 1990s. And I think the original ideas were dark and shadowy, but there’s not a lot of shadow in it.
River: Like there is in Mala Noche. So you start with a ‘theme seedling’, and then that sprout s into its own tree and don’t really try to trim it. You let it grow and the end result is - whatever. Do you refine it? Do you try to reroute it back to what it was?
Gus: You refine it every step of the way. Usually I’m presented with new ideas. Like, our production designer, David Brisbin, showed up and said, ‘I think that red and yellow are the colours of the film.’ And I might have no conception like that myself.
River: Right, right.
Gus: Except, actually, I gave him a book cover that was yellow, and that book cover did inspire the look of the film. So he was actually reacting to something. But it was a new idea to me when he said 'Yellow’ and based the colour scheme on pornographic bookshop storefronts, which are usually yellow, and neons… the city colours. So, directions keep changing, because everyone’s interpreting things in their own way. I know that you persuaded me against using black and white. You said, 'No, no, no. It has to be colour.’ [chuckles] I don’t know why you said that.
River: I wanted black and white, and, for me, colour was wrong, and that’s why I thought we should try for it because otherwise we might have ended up with something that really couldn’t be redone, like Stranger Than Paradise or Raging Bull. But black and white is dated in a sense, and this is a timeless picture. One of the things that I really appreciate in working with you is that in that collaborative stage you have no fear of your ego being stripped or anything. You’re not possessive, like some can be, but you let others ideas filter through without stopping them for fear of losing control, which would be rightful fear for someone who wants it to stay as pure as possible.
[My Director and I - Interview Magazine, March 1991]
One of the many things I really like about some films is their way to talk to you through images and colors, and My Own Private Idaho does it successfully. I love the yellow and red always present in the film, especially because it has really strong reasons for that, as Gus stated in this interview with River. He gave us a street hustlers atmosphere through those colors, the neon lights, the color of the city. And the big problem that is bothering me here in this bluray version is how they treated and modified the image, to be less yellow and red. Actually, I’m not seeing the yellow and red at all, everything I’m seeing in this edition is something very white and blue. Everything’s pale, not so colorful like My Own Private Idaho is originally.
Bluray editions always have those problems, they change the films a lot to be more normal and, let’s say, aesthetically pleasing to the general public. Some films you don’t even notice or bother about the changes, but films like Idaho and many others have a very important dialogue with the viewer through their images.
That’s it, I just needed to get this all of my annoying-audiovisual-analyzer-chest. And I hope other people have noticed this and also saw how wrong it is to change drastically the principal colors from My Own Private Idaho.
