A Proper Collaboration: Joaquin Phoenix and Gus Van Sant’s Big Step Forward in Don’t Worry, He Won’t Get Far On Foot

One of Van Sant’s key collaborators was cinematographer Christopher Blauvelt, who had assisted Harris Savides on Elephant, Gerry, and other films Savides shot for Van Sant. Together, Van Sant and Blauvelt ultimately decided to shoot on the Alexa with zoom lenses designed for super-16mm photography. (The idea was to echo the direct cinema documentaries of the 1960s.) “I really like the zooms in those documentary films and wanted to emulate them, especially when I was operating,” Van Sant says. “There have been so many emulations of 16mm over the years on MTV and in things like Oliver Stone’s JFK, but the zoom was always left out for some reason. I wanted to bring it back.”

Van Sant notes that over the years his approach to the visual style has become more and more intuitive and fluid. “Mala Noche was all storyboarded,” he recalls. “Then on Drugstore Cowboy, because of the bigger crew I had to learn how to think fast, figuring out the action first and then deciding how to shoot. I never really went back to the way I did it on Mala Noche, though I’d like to someday.” In the years since his debut Van Sant has run the gamut from modestly scaled experimental films like Elephant and Paranoid Park to studio productions like Finding Forrester and Psycho, but he always tries to strip things down as much as possible. (Don’t Worry, He Won’t Get Far on Foot falls in the middle of the budget spectrum, coming it at around $7.5 million.) “I’m always thinking of Mala Noche,” he says. “We had one sound person, a DP, a PA, and the actors, and I helped with the lights. So we’d all fit in one car. I’m always trying to go that direction, but then you have to admit that things like having more than one microphone are good. Certain things can happen that are kind of cool.”

Phoenix notes that Don’t Worry, He Won’t Get Far on Foot was a much faster shoot than To Die For, but he didn’t mind that—in fact, he feels that the rhythm of the shoot always dictates the nature of the movie itself. “The condition of the movie is the movie,” he explains. “Everything that happens is a part of it; you react to things and they become part of the movie. You’ll think, ‘Wait, that’s the scene we’re starting with? Should we be starting with that scene on the schedule?’ And then you look back weeks later, and you think, ‘Thank God we started with that scene.’ For me, everything that happens on set—everything that happens while I’m working—finds its way into the movie in some way. A shorter schedule can make it feel propulsive. I did this in less than five weeks, and then I went and did a movie for four months. They’re just completely different.”

Phoenix argues that in some ways, a shorter schedule is better. “It’s good to not have too much time to overthink things. You’ve done the work, you’ve done the rehearsal, stop fucking around. Let’s just shoot. The ideal would be to do that and then have around four days for additional shooting, because inevitably there are some things that you don’t get right, and it would be nice to have the time to do additional shoots.”

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