An actress at the Viper Room the night Phoenix died: It was really a fun evening--the music, the people. It was crowded, hard to get around. We went down to check out the VIP lounge, but it was real hard to get in. Samantha was there. Samantha was . . . now I understand why she looked so worried. I didn't realize all this shit was going down. There were all these people around the guys' bathroom, a lot of commotion--I just figured some guys were having a brawl or somebody was getting sick. I kept seeing Samantha running back and forth and back and forth, and she looked really worried. I grabbed hold of her and said, "Hey, Sam, what's up? What's wrong?" She couldn't talk to me. We tried to calm her down. She was just freaking out. Outside there was a crowd of people, and I saw him--lying flat, totally ghostly white. It didn't really look like him. He had, like, this dark hair, this totally pasty complexion, and he was panting and sweating. He was convulsing. People were trying to splash water on his face and move his head and get his tongue out of his mouth. He was kind of changing colors, and his eyes were all dilated and open, and it was really scary. I kept hearing from people, "Wow, it's River, it's River." You don't think it's going to happen. One minute you're on top of the world and the next minute you're gone--you're gone and nobody can help you.

Judy Davis: I think it has to be remembered that he was 23 and he made the choice. There's something about stardom and the way it empowers people--he thought he was immune.

Jonathan Pryce: What was so painful about it was the future relationship that I looked forward to. I felt it was a relationship that would go on for a long time. I wanted my children to know him and him to know them. The day of his funeral in Florida, my wife Kate and I couldn't be there. I told Heart (Phoenix's mother) what we were going to do. So we went to a chapel in London to be in church at the same time--and just to sit. They were setting up for a concert. Afterward we went to the Caprice. We walked in, and they have these extraordinary flower arrangements, like sculptural arrangements. And Kate said, "Look at the flowers." In Utah, everywhere we went--in my house and in River's house--were these Indian things called dreamcatchers. It's like a spider's web, and you hang it in your window and it catches the dreams. Pointing to the flower arrangement, Kate said, "It's a dreamcatcher." Then I looked straight ahead, and Alan Bates was sitting at the next table. River had worked with very few British actors, but Alan and I were two of them. I wanted to go and say something to him and then I thought, I don't know what emotional state he's in. So we smiled and nodded. Then Kate got up and went to the bathroom, and Alan came over and said, "I can't believe you're here." And I said, "I'm so glad you're talking to me." And then we talked about River. I don't know why there was the symbol in the restaurant. I don't know why Alan was sitting next to me on this night.

Peter Weir: It's just the expectation that you were going to work with him again. I recently thought of an upcoming project: Oh, there's . . . No, there isn't River. It's his uniqueness that is gone. I think it was Billy Wilder who said when Ernst Lubitsch died, "Ach, no more Ernst Lubitsch films." They were just his films. Now it's no more River Phoenix characters. Coda

Dan Aykroyd: He slept in my office here at the farm. That was his first and only visit. In fact, he went down to my wine cellar and he grabbed a bottle, a 1970 Petrus--like, an $800 bottle of wine--and I went, "Oh, you opened that!" I was a little shocked, and he felt so bad and I felt so bad because I called him on it. A couple of weeks before he died, he sent me a bottle that he went to the trouble of finding. And that bottle is sitting down in my wine cellar. Someone moved it the other day from where I'd put it, and I went crazy. I don't think I'm ever going to drink that. That just sits there forever, until I go.

Ed Lachman: We did ten takes of the soliloquy, the last day we shot with him on Dark Blood. It was in this cave, could have been a church. It was all lit by candles. After the last take, I didn't turn off the camera. When I realized it was running, I turned it off. When we saw dailies, for ten seconds River was in front of the camera, just a silhouette lit by ambient light. It was . . . eerie. For me as a cameraman, I find that strange, the last take. Why I didn't turn the camera off, why there was just enough light in the room to make him a silhouette, why he stood in front of the camera for ten seconds. People were crying. We knew that was the last we would see of River.

Bobby Bukowski: River never knew when he was going to fall asleep, because he always tried to extend the day much further than a day should be extended. He always felt that he had to fit a lot into the day. At the time when people normally like to sleep, River would like to get up and say, "Here are 25 songs that I wrote since the last time I saw you." He would be playing them and he would kind of fall asleep, and the next morning he would wake up in his clothes, his guitar just out of hand's reach. William Richert: One time we were up in the mountains with this Polynesian girl, and the clouds came right up to the top of the mountain. River grabbed each of our arms and said, "We're going to run and jump into these clouds, and our whole past lives will dissolve, and everything will be new from then on. Hold on." And we did that. And I'm thinking, Here I am, at my age, jumping off this cliff with this kid. But it was incredible, and we landed on this soft iceberg kind of ground covering. But we jumped through the clouds, literally.

River in...

1. His TV debut, Seven Brides for Seven Brothers (1982-83)

2. Explorers (1985)

3. Stand By Me (1986)

4. The Mosquito Coast (1986)

5. Little Nikita (1988)

6. A Night in the Life of Jimmy Reardon (1988)

7. Running on Empty (1988, Best Supporting Actor Oscar nomination)

8. Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade (1989)

9. I Love You to Death (1990)

10. My Own Private Idaho (1991)

11. Dogfight (1991)

12. Sneakers (1992)

13. The Thing Called Love (1993)

14. Silent Tongue (1994)

River's Last Movie