Hii, how did your love and passion for River Phoenix and his movies begin?
hi oh my goodness tysm for this question i LOVE it
okay so i hadn't heard of river before this year (genuinely i had no clue he existed, idk what rock i was living under) but stand by me had been on my watchlist since like 2023... so i decided to watch it in february!
it was like at the beginning of getting into movies again for me and omg i was absolutely blown away by river's performance in it. i usually don't notice how good an actor's acting is at ALL but how he played chris stuck out so so much for me so ofc i looked him up immediately after i finished the film. i was so sad to hear that he had passed away ☹️ but at the time i didn't think much of it, i didn't (and still don't) know much about actors or hollywood or the film industry much so ig i just saw him as a tragedy that was and is quite common?
anyways after that for like a week i couldn't stop thinking about stand by me and how much i loved it so i convinced my family to watch it with me for their first time! we got about half way through and then everyone else went to sleep. i was still craving more though (and i really wanted to see river, he had felt like even more of a comforting presence on my second watch) so like in the spur of the moment at 11 pm i decided to "start" watching my own private idaho because i had vaguely heard it was sad and had him in it... and yeah everything else kind of happened from there 😭
i finished it in one sitting, couldn't get it out of my head for a single moment, rewatched it within three days, and started researching everything else about river that i could find....
it was definitely a very rapid start to my love and respect for him as a person that has kind of gradually accumulated over the past few months. i watched interviews, read anecdotes, scoured pinterest for any photo i could find, downloaded every unreleased aleka's attic song onto my ipod and looped them, read gus van sant's surreal, semi-autobiographical novel pink (him processing river's death), and watched 9 films from his filmography! i rewatched stand by me twice, running on empty once and mopi... six times so far.
anyways idk if you wanted THIS full of an explanation but yeah... river was such a beautiful soul. he seems so unabashedly himself and kind and thoughtful and genuine and layered and empathetic and respectful and so INTERESTING and from what i've gathered the best storyteller. i wish more than anything that i could have a conversation with him, he feels like a friend i never got the chance to meet ☹️
