Onrust

***Onrust*** was a Dutch television show which interviewed River in 1991.

**BvS:** You can have it!

*River is handed his Volpi Cup Award for Best Actor.*

**RP:** I don't wanna hold it. I can't hold it.

**BvS:** Oh, you don't want to hold it?

**RP:** That – that's a little too – um –

**BvS:** Tacky?

**RP:** I don't want to be married with just this sort of thing. I'm very proud of it, but I think it's a bit too showy.

**BvS:** Did you go to an acting school?

**RP:** No! No, I started acting through auditioning and trial by error, basically.

**BvS:** How old were you then, when you started?

**RP:** Ten.

**BvS:** Is that so?

**RP:** Mhm. Television commercials, and then later you get cast in a film if you're lucky.

**RP:** I can't really explain why I understand what I understand – I just do – and to try to figure it out I think would kind of ruin it, you know? I wanna leave it like a mine of gold, you know, without ever mining it, you know, and selling it. I don't want to sell it off, I don't want to talk about it, I don't want to understand it in a way that will exploit the pureness, so I just leave it. I don't understand it, but I – I believe it.

**BvS:** You're a natural.

**RP:** I'm not saying anything.

**BvS:** Hm. I'm saying it.

**RP:** Okay. Thank you very much.

**BvS:** Yeah, I thought you did a wonderful performance in that movie.

The interview cuts to the clip of the campfire scene in *My Own Private Idaho*, before a clip of an interview with Gus.

**RP:** I thought that the home theme – in search of home and the birthplace – very much cued(?) by Gus' visual with the salmon swimming upstream, getting back to that spawning grown.

Interview with Gus.

BvS: At one of the press conferences, I heard you make the connection with how America treats their homeless.

**RP:** Absolutely!

**BvS:** I thought that's interesting.

**RP:** Well I mean we all know it. I mean, there's nothing to hide. It's very obvious. There are priorities that lie more in arms race or supporting like the world bank, which has its subsidiraries [sic] and its affiliates spreading – you know, "develop the third world" or whatever, you know – spreading its havoc across our continent, you know. It's more of like a police state now, more so than ever, in the states, you know. They're controlling things that get the culture in trouble, you know. It's like a pressure cooker and never turning the stove off. And it cooks and cooks until it explodes!

*A montage of homeless people and big cities plays as River is on voiceover.*

**RP:** *Idaho* just reminds you of the street level that is ignored. And perhaps you have a lot of that in Europe – and you do in fact – but we have so much more, you know, in concentrated areas where there's no way of integrating and finding a way out, you know. You're just trapped to, you know, your perimeters.

**BvS:** That was short.

**RP:** Well I mean the problem is, is that, I believe very much in the Native American Indians, who really owned this land beforehand. And their idea was that a photo can take your soul, so of course I've compromised to some degree, but then I haven't because I'm playing another character in films.

**RP:** Beer break! \*River laughs\*

*River holds up a bottle of beer in front of the camera.*

**RP:** It's imported, and it's from: Holland!

**RP:** Did you tell them the story yet? Last night I was at a conference of some kind – it was terrible – and I was asked to do Amsterdam TV by the company. I said: "Well, yeah, where are they?" And then he shows up and I know Bram from the Chilli Peppers, and so then we got together and started this.

**BvS:** Because you normally don't do a lot of –

**RP:** I don't do television. I don't want to sit there and be a puppet – and you become more of like a speaking piece for the show than your own film. And so then you have shows all the time showing clips of the film, us speaking about the film... You don't have: [mockingly] "And then we talk to the actor River... Ra-ra-ra- Rubber Penis!" And you know I sit down like "Yeah" and then like "Yeah, I had a fun time doing this project. Yeah..." [River makes faces] It's just stupid, man. It's just a waste of time. It bores me. And it scares the shit out of me too, to be frank.

**BvS:** To be in front of a camera?

**RP:** Oh, so frightening.

**BvS:** Wow.

**RP:** That's why when I'm on set I never look at the camera. You don't look at the camera.

**BvS:** That's funny(?)

**RP:** I'm very frightened right now. I'm dealing with it somehow.

**BvS:** \*laughs\* Yeah, you're dealing with it quite well actually.

**RP:** But I really am frightened. This is very... \*River laughs\* Yes, yes. A tributary to the Holland imported... brewski.

**BvS:** You have this very particular point of view on how you want to work, and then there's the business that you sometimes will have to deal with.

**RP:** The business always goes for what you do best. When critics start speaking up and they believe in something, then you have the power to get blowjobs, basically, from the corporate leaders. I mean, I found myself being blown by America's film corporations. It's nice.

**BvS:** Yeah?

**River:** Yeah. I cum in their fucking lens.

**RP:** We'll call you back, bye. That's Gus van Sant, the director of the film on the phone.

**RP:** It's not about career. It's about believing in something, it's about prosperity, and it's about caring and empathizing and wanting to create the best, the most true to life, the most real.

**BvS:** Well that's something that you wouldn't hear a lot of Hollywood people say.

**RP:** That's why I don't hang out and talk to those Hollywood people, because they're there to hurt me – they're there to hurt my views.