My Own Private River

The film was built out of unused footage left over from a production of 1991. That footage was put in a new order and turned into a different account, with the young actor of that film placed at the centre. What comes out is neither a collection of behind the scenes material nor a documentary in the usual sense; it is more an attempt to draw a second film out of the same material. The account looks at the actor’s face and at his hesitations, that is, at the moments that would normally be cut away. A work of this kind says that the material left outside a finished film has a value of its own. River Phoenix appears in the hundred and one minute American work by Gus Van Sant and James Franco, completed in 2012.