You may feel less secure placing yourself in the hands of a film-maker who structures his movie to accommodate those members of the audience who are a bit fuzzy about that Second World War business. In its opening and closing minutes, Saving Private Ryan offers a reminder that the freedom you take for granted today was secured by conflicts resolved half a century ago. “When we went there, he said `we’re going back to the bad, bad town’.”Phoenix’s character in Dark Blood, a disturbed young man living in the wilds and waiting for the apocalypse, was difficult to play, but Sluizer saw no signs that the role was getting under the actor’s skin. In the UK in 1996, he made Crimetime, a satire about television and media violence starring Sadie Frost and Stephen Baldwin. That, I think, would be of interest to all the acting schools of the world, quite apart from its historic and archival value.

Who knows, maybe some day it will happen.”After the abandonment of Dark Blood, Sluizer came back to Europe. Not only were there several crucial scenes that couldn’t be shot without the star; if he had attempted to cobble together a new version of the film, he would have been stepping into a legal minefield The negative is locked away in a safe somewhere. “Until everything is settled between the lawyers and bankers, nobody will see it.” Sluizer originally wanted to use the film as part of a documentary about River: “About his acting; the way he changed from take to take. “Our relationship was not the best you can imagine,” Sluizer says, with what sounds like understatement.Although most of Dark Blood was already in the can before Phoenix died, Sluizer realised he would never be able to finish it. As far as he was concerned, Phoenix was a model professional.”I can’t guarantee that he never took anything, but I never noticed.

I tell you, if people are really stoned, I’m not totally blind.”The only tension on set was caused by the bad feeling between the director and the film’s co-star, Judy Davis. I said: `Have a good time and see you at 10am.’”The next day, Phoenix and Sluizer were due to meet Terry Gilliam (whose work Phoenix hugely admired.) “But I was called at 4am by his agent, in tears, who told me River had died I thought I was dreaming I’m quite stubborn in my own way. I rejected the idea because I absolutely did not expect it.”Sluizer had been shooting with Phoenix and the rest of the cast for eight weeks in the Utah desert They had only just arrived back in Los Angeles “He called LA the bad, bad town,” Sluizer recalls. Sluizer, who was staying in the same LA hotel, remembers vividly his last meeting with the star.”I saw him at about 9.30pm I came back to the hotel and I saw him drive away. He is still haunted by the circumstances under which Dark Blood was abandoned. The 23-year-old actor died of a drugs overdose 11 days before the film was due to be completed. “I’m very pragmatic and reasonably cool about things,” he acknowledges, when asked about the circumstances surrounding his uncompleted 1993 film, Dark Blood, “but I must admit River had a very strong charisma.

He had something special which you do not find with other actors.”
Sluizer, the phlegmatic, sixtysomething Dutchman, and River Phoenix, the wild young Hollywood icon, make an unlikely combination Nevertheless, Sluizer relished working with Phoenix. It somehow doesn’t come as a surprise that before he entered the movie business, he worked as a tram conductor and that he once wrote a prize-winning script for a documentary about railway rolling-stock. IF YOU didn’t know that George Sluizer was a film-maker, you might mistake him for a senior civil servant or a bank manager. Soberly dressed, earnest and quietly spoken, he looks as if he has spent most of his life in an office There is an unflappable quality about him. But a director who switches so cleanly between two disparate styles can easily appear disloyal to both. It may be that the film’s tentative, non-commital closing image – a gossamer-thin American flag rendered grey and bloodless by the sun blazing through its fabric – says more about Spielberg than anything in the preceding three hours..