
Todd tells us, “Dark Blood was one of the first films on which I started making actual set designs for Ben van Os. Of course Ben put me to work in any way that suited him, so I also drove his car, wrote his correspondence and ran his errands. But chiefly I was hired to paint art and sculpt props. I made all of the wooden Indian figures in the film. I was also put to work as River Phoenix’s “whittling coach”. We sat for hours on the edge of a dessert mesa just carving on wooden blocks.”