At the time of his death, Phoenix had shot around eighty percent of "Dark Blood," a drama set in the Utah desert co-starring Judy Davis and Jonathan Pryce and directed by George Sluizer, and he had gone back to Los Angeles to film the rest of the interior scenes for the movie when he died that night outside The Viper Room. It had been a contentious shoot where Sluizer and Davis had taken an instant dislike to each other and were vocal about their mutual displeasure. Davis had told Sluizer that she needed to protect her sensitive skin from the sun with a large hat, and he curtly agreed to this, but then this limitation upset him as they shot. "It's important to know what your strengths are," Davis said in an interview for "Premiere" magazine in 1993. "I absolutely believe in my intuition; I think that's a great asset to an actor. The weaknesses in my personality are impatience and sometimes intolerance. Which came out with this guy George. I was very quickly, utterly intolerant of him. I decided that he was dangerous, and kept away from him."

After Phoenix's death, the "Dark Blood" footage was impounded by an insurance company and placed in a vault where it languished for years. According to Sluizer, when he heard that the company was going to burn the film in 1999 rather than pay to keep it stored, he somehow contrived to steal it away within forty-eight hours. Recently Sluizer was told by doctors that he was seriously ill and did not have long to live, and he was determined to use the time he had left to bring what remained of "Dark Blood" to an audience. He hired Florencia Di Concilio to write a score for the film, and he himself recorded a narration in his thick Dutch accent to explain what was supposed to have happened in the scenes that were not shot.

Sluizer's reconstructed "Dark Blood" has traveled to various film festivals, but there are still legal issues to be worked out if it is to be shown for a paying audience. It runs eighty-six minutes, and it has a clear beginning, middle and end. What's missing are several key scenes between Phoenix's character, known only as Boy, and Davis's character, a former Playboy Bunny named Buffy. The film might work in a cryptic way without Sluizer's narration, but his voice on the track winds up being effectively suggestive. We have to fill in the gaps in the narrative ourselves, and so what might have been an iffy psychological triangle thriller in the "Knife in the Water" (1962) manner becomes something else, something predicated on incompleteness.