Van Sant rolls out tale of disabled cartoonist in ‘Don’t Worry’
BERLIN — “Don’t Worry, He Won’t Get Far on Foot” lets Gus Van Sant tell the true if unusually comic story of the late disabled cartoonist John Callahan.
Joaquin Phoenix stars as the recovering alcoholic cartoonist, a man Robin Williams had once hoped to play.
A quadriplegic after a crash caused by a drunken driver (played by Jack Black), Callahan found sobriety in Alcoholics Anonymous and that led to discovering his talent.
The themes here, of being an outsider, an addict, an artist in recovery, are familiar in Van Sant movies like the thieving junkies of “Drugstore Cowboy,” the high school killers of “Elephant,” the savant of “Good Will Hunting” or the gay martyr of “Milk.”
Van Sant said, “It’s about a character I was familiar with in Portland, Ore. During the ’90s, Robin Williams had optioned the novel John wrote and he and his production company invited me to adapt that into a film.
“We did and time went by and I never got around to doing it. Robin liked John Callahan’s work; he saw it in San Francisco. And Christopher Reeve was a friend of his who had an accident and part of this was he wanted to play a quadriplegic for Christopher.”
With Phoenix aboard, Van Sant cut Callahan’s book (“There are so many stories”) to focus on “his accident and recovery and before his development as a professional cartoonist.”
There’s slapstick onscreen when Callahan comically tumbles in his wheelchair — and it’s true.
“He had a very fast wheelchair,” Van Sant recalled, “and he’d always go very fast. He was always speeding down 21st or 23rd Avenue very fast on the sidewalk, and often had accidents — it was his way of having fun. He couldn’t skateboard or ski.
“One of the questions about John,” Van Sant said with a smile, “he was a storyteller who would change things a lot. We were suspicious if he really experienced some of the things he was telling.
“The tapes I did for research — he was telling completely other stories! He liked to spice them up a little bit.
“We took advantage of the spices, and we’re not sure if it’s true spice or fictional spice.”
(“Don’t Worry, He Won’t Get Far On Foot” opens Friday.)