It's only when an actor is suddenly whisked away by death do we realize how rare their particular talent is. Think back 18 months – the sudden death of Heath Ledger – a lot of the shock was due to a sense that something rare had just been snatched away: what other actor was capable of expressing both the ironic ferociousness he brought to the Joker, as well as the aching tenderness of his sigh in the last moments of Brokeback Mountain.

Ledger was 28 when he died, while River Phoenix was only 23 – immediately you sensed the cinema had lost an actor of great delicacy. Just look at the scene at the campfire between him and Keanu Reeves in My Own Private Idaho – a quality only matched by the young Leonardo DiCaprio in What's Eating Gilbert Grape.

John Boorman marked the passing of River Phoenix in this way:

“River Phoenix and Federico Fellini died on the same day. Easy, hasty comparisons were made in the press. The young actor cut off with so much promise ahead of him was seen as tragic, while Fellini had enjoyed a rich life. Fellini had left a great body of work and so his death was somehow to be accepted as fitting. I rail against that. I grieve for Fellini's unmade movies, the many projects that are now lost to us because money could not be found at the time.

The memorial for River Phoenix was held at the Cecil B.DeMille Theatre in Paramount Studios. Helen Mirren and Christine Lahti, both of whom had played his mothers, spoke, as did Peter Bogdonovich and Sidney Poitier, who read out his daughter's elegy to River, a cosmic effusion, inspired by her belief that the young star was now among the stars and planets of the firmament, an energized fragment capable of shaking the Universe. It seems many young women saw the vegan ecologist as a messianic figure.

I had not worked with River but we had planned to do a film together, Broken Dream, and I came to know him well. Everyone had the same tale to tell. It seemed that every life River touched was somehow made better for it. He had the ability to look past the sins and vices of others and to touch what was best in them. Legions of young people throughout the world rose up to mourn him. He had become a symbol of the possibility of a better way of life, a healthier planet. It was evidence of the way movies can connect people, focus their aspirations.

In very different ways River and Fellini were standard-bearers of our dreams, of our hopes that beneath the cold, thin surface of daily life was a richer, warmer place that we might share and inhabit.”

Essential viewing: Stand By Me [Buy], The Mosquito Coast [Buy], Running on Empty [Buy], My Own Private Idaho [Buy], Dogfight [Buy], The Thing Called Love [Buy]

Extract taken from Projections 3: Film-Makers On Film-Making edited by Walter Donohue and John Boorman (Faber & Faber, 1994).