Dutch director George Sluizer has announced that he will release Dark Blood, River Phoenix’s last movie, eighteen years after the actor’s death.
Sluize has re-edited the footage from a project that was eleven days from wrapping when the 23 year-old star died of a drug-induced heart attack in Los Angeles. He hopes to be able to release a final product next year.
The film also stars Jonathan Pryce and Judy Davis as a husband and wife who find Phoenix’s character, Boy, living on a nuclear test site in the desert. Boy believes that the world will end any minute, but when he starts a relationship with Davis this notion is challenged.
The director will ask River’s brother Joaquin to provide a voiceover for the main character saying, “the voices of both brothers are very much alike.”
River Phoenix was a critically respected actor within his short career, which included roles in Rob Reiner’s Stand by Me and Gus van Sant’s My Own Private Idaho. He died outside of LA’s Viper Room nightclub on October 31st, 1993.
