this road will never end

“He was already this amazing actor,” said writer-director Gus Van Sant, “but with this film, he was able to have an effect on what the film was becoming … He was very excited he could control the destiny of his character.” The most obvious example is the campfire confession in which Mike admits his true feelings for Scott, the Prince Hal figure played by Reeves. The dialogue was scripted by Phoenix himself and scribbled on napkins, the scene moved to the end of the shoot so that he could build up to it emotionally. “The character I wrote was blasé and noncommittal,” said Van Sant. “River made him gay and committal; he redeemed him with emotions.”

I think it was a major event in film history that River Phoenix and Keanu Reeves, who were already stars, starred in "My Own Private Idaho," which was very experimental for its time and directly depicted queer desires. It's said that River's agent opposed his participation, but how did you, as the director, react at the time when they chose to play those roles?

Gus: I remember being very surprised. Actually, I wasn't directly informed by them that they had decided to participate. At the time, we were sending the script to various actors, and we had given it to River and Keanu, whom we knew. As you said, River's agent didn't want him to be in this movie. Even so, we knew River was staying at the Chateau Marmont hotel in LA, so we delivered the script directly to him. I knocked on his door and handed it to his sister, Rain. However, there were people in Portland who seemed capable of playing the roles, so we were basically planning to cast non-professional actors.

Later, when I attended a film screening in Westwood, director Michael Apted suddenly congratulated me. When I asked what he meant, he told me that River and Keanu were going to be in my film. When I asked how he knew, he replied, "They turned down my film. They said they'd be in yours." That's when I first learned they had decided to participate.

At the time, River and Keanu were both successful young actors in Hollywood, in a position to choose from numerous projects. Many directors were trying to get them to star in their films. Yet, they chose my film. They had just worked together on a film shortly before, and I think they wanted to work together again. They probably also saw "My Own Private Idaho" as a countercultural project by a young director. Around that time, "Drugstore Cowboy" was also released and had received several awards, including critics' awards in New York and Los Angeles. The fact that the film was starting to gain recognition may have also been a factor in their interest in this project. I think they were drawn to the experimental nature of this film and its departure from mainstream Hollywood.

Did their involvement change the script, the characters, or anything else? Gus: If there was one change, it was the funding. When I first started the project, the script I showed people wasn't in a conventional format. It was only about 70 pages long, and I wrote it on a Mac, which was still quite rare at the time, using various fonts. I think it must have seemed like a pretty strange script to people considering funding. So, initially, I thought we'd be making it with a budget of around $500,000. However, River and Keanu's involvement increased attention to the project, and we were able to raise a lot more money. New Line Pictures also showed interest, and we were ultimately able to secure about $2.5 million in production funds. However, the story itself hasn't changed. The scale increased with their participation, but what we made is the same as what we had envisioned from the beginning.