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For over fifty years, Dennis Hopper is a living legend of film, with a resume that includes working in over 150 films with the biggest icons of cinema history, but he brought upon a challenge of a different in his latest film ELEGY. In ELEGY, Hopper plays George O’Hearn, a Pulitzer Prize winning poet and best friend of professor David Kopesh (played by Sir Ben Kingsley) in which they talk about women and he offers advice as best he can to his best friend, even if he doesn’t follow said advice himself. Now 72 years old, Hopper has become a go to guy for independent cinema. Averaging four films a year over the past two decades, ELEGY is his fifth released this year alone. Tireless in his love for film and his love for the work, Hopper has literally seen it all in Hollywood. From the studio system in the 1950s to literally changing it with EASY RIDER to the big summer blockbusters and digital independents, Hopper has seen it all and has thrived through every medium, every studio structure, and every genre. To promote ELEGY, Hopper took part in a press junket where he sat down with the Colonel for an in depth look at his latest film, his career, his thoughts on the current studio system, and his solutions on fixing it in this Colonel’s Crypt exclusive.
COLONEL’S CRYPT: We’re talking about your latest film ELEGY, and what was it about this film that made you want to do it? DENNIS HOPPER: The cast. When I heard that Sir Ben Kingsley and Penelope Cruz were already doing it, I felt even before I read the script that I should take this job. Then when I read the script it was a wonderful, wonderful part. It was a no brainer to take this one. CC: In ELEGY, did you ever have friends like your character of George? DH: Hmmm, friends like George. CC: A bad angel on your shoulder? DH: A what? (Laughs) George makes a lot of sense to some of us males. Probably, that’s it. CC: How much did you listen to them? DH: Not at all (laughs). CC: Dropping a spoiler here, when George dies, it felt like such a spur of the moment thing as your character just drops. DH: Oh that’s just good acting. CC: Was that improvised? DH: That was written. It was all written. For my part, there really wasn’t any improvisation at all. I didn’t improvise a single word. CC: Were you allowed to? DH: Probably but I didn’t see any necessity to it. First of all, most of my scenes, almost all of them except one with Debbie Harry are with Sir Ben Kinglsey, and it’s such a pleasure as an actor to work with someone as generous as he is. To do a moment to moment reality with him is so wonderful because you go one place, and he goes with you. It’s just a give and take and he’s so honest that it’s impossible to lie to him. You could know you’re acting immediately so that was all pluses to me. CC: Had you known Sir Ben prior to this film because you two on screen looked and felt like life long friends? DH: We’ve only met a couple of times to say hello. I met him after GANDHI, I partied with him but we didn’t know each other well. I had met Penelope when I was present at the Venice Film Festival and Bigas Luna, a director from Barcelona, had played a film JAMON, JAMON, which Penelope and Javier Bardem had starred in. I presented Bigas with the Silver Lion Award. I think Penelope was 18 and Javier was 19, and they’re together again in this new Woody Allen film which is very cool. I was aware of her but when I saw ELEGY very honestly I mean I love this film. I really do. I love my performance in it. I think Sir Ben and Penelope are just incredible. She is amazing and for the first time I really looked at her like a woman. She’s like a Sophia Loren, this Earth Mother who really has power. I just was really impressed with her when I saw the film. CC: It’s interesting you say that because there was a lot of time in the film setting her up as this object. DH: Yeah, and then she tears it all down. CC: Would you say that George is just a humble, down to Earth guy who just has his own way of talking about women? DH: Yeah, I would say that. CC: Being he is a poet, he doesn’t appear to be one on film. DH: In all honesty, I saw him as a friend, I really didn’t look at him much as a poet. CC: But there is one line in the film that solidifies the entire theme of the film, in which George tells to David (Sir Ben Kingsley) that: Beautiful women are invisible. No one can see the actual person. We’re so dazzled by the outside… DH (continuing): … That we never make it to the inside. CC: Do you find that statement to be true? DH: Absolutely true. I’m dazzled by beauty. I don’t even try to get to see inside. I don’t know what right way to say this (laughs). I’ll play it safe and just say that I’m dazzled by their beauty. CC: Of course, it wouldn’t be right to mention how EASY RIDER changed the course of independent film. With ELEGY, being it is too an independent production, how involved did you get in the project aside from acting? Do you help out in any way? DH: I like the way you’re thinking that I help them out. In actuality, they’re helping me out. It’s always a pleasure to be in a movie where you know that the acting is going to be really good and you know that the people that are in place, when I heard that when they were in the movie, Sir Ben, Penelope, Patricia Clarkson, I didn’t think that I needed to read the script because I believed in them so much. I believed that their choices would be good. When I read the script, I thought it was a wonderful part. You can have a small part in a movie but if a character has a beginning, a middle, and an ending, it becomes a complete world. That’s what I really judge when I take a smaller role. When I saw the film I was really impressed with it, and Isabel Coixet is a wonderful director. She’s also doing the camerawork. She’s behind the camera doing the cinematography. She has such a wonderful way about her, she makes you feel so comfortable and allows you to do your work. She figures out how she’s going to shoot it and it’s such a wonderful relationship. It’s very creative and it’s the way movies should be made. CC: Are there plans for anything special for next year’s 40th anniversary of EASY RIDER? DH: I was eight years old when I made that movie (laughs). Forty years, wow. CC: It did revolutionize Hollywood and paved the way for a young crop of filmmakers so to speak. DH: For a moment. Too bad they weren’t as talented as me (laughs). That was the first time found music was ever used rather than writing a score for the movie. Everybody confused it being a bike movie. I always thought of it more as a Western where we were riding motorcycles but we could be riding horses. You’re outside camping and all the people in town are leery of these bikers, these outlaws coming through. It was a lot about what was happening in the country at the time. It was 1968 and riots were going on. The cities were burning down. The Black Panthers erupted and everybody was trying to stop the war. It was really a nightmare. The symbolism of putting the money, and if you think about it now, it’s really prophetic, putting all the money into the beautiful chrome machine with the American flag on it, putting the money in the gas tank and then it blowing up on the side of the road, hello? So yeah, that all worked out but I’m very proud of that movie. CC: Would you like there to be a re-release? DH: I don’t know but unfortunately, they don’t reissue anything in Hollywood. I think they gave up reissuing GONE WITH THE WIND and THE WIZARD OF OZ. We have no history anymore. It’s all about what next weekend’s box office gonna be like. That’s unfortunate. I think when people make a Cineplex, it would be wonderful if they built ten theaters. You can have seven of them for your big Hollywood blockbusters, one theater for independent films, one theater for foreign films, and one theater for the history of film so that we have some sort of idea of where these films came from. It would also be good to see foreign films because when I was a young guy doing REBEL WITHOUT A CAUSE with James Dean at 18 years old, we were going to see foreign and in Los Angeles at that time there were five or six theaters that played foreign films, we called them Art Houses. Those don’t exist anymore. I’m sure in New York there are a few theaters like that but the rest of the country is starving for that kind of information. I think it would be wonderful way to go at it and I guarantee that after a year that those three theaters would have lines going to them and the others would still be a gamble. I think that there’s a snob and intellectual ideal. When I was a kid, you couldn’t get laid unless you had an existentialist book in your hands so this would add on to that kind of idea. CC: How was it meeting James Dean at that point in your life? DH: It was a pivotal moment because I came out of playing Shakespeare out of the Old Oak Theater in San Diego. I was 18 years old and I got a contract with Warner Bros. I came on the set and I met James Dean and then we started working together. I had never seen improvisation before. I was a line reader and doing gestures on preconceived ideas. Suddenly I see this guy doing all these incredible things and none of it is on the page. I’m thinking, “Where did he get these wonderful ideas?” I had never seen that and I knew nothing about method acting. I had seen Marlon Brando act. I had seen Montgomery Clift act but I wasn’t aware of what Method acting was, so being 18 it was an incredible moment for me to see this. Later I studied for five years under Lee Strassberg. It was an incredible moment. James Dean is still in my mind the best actor I ever saw. I’ve never seen anybody as good as film. CC: OK, being you were talking about the history of film. Let’s say you are a film professor teaching a film class on the history of film, and you have only five movies to show. Which ones would they be? DH: Good question. Well certainly CITIZEN KANE. There’s so many good ones. THE TREASURE OF THE SIERRA MADRE. THE 400 BLOWS. THE SEVENTH SEAL. Hmmm, it’s getting tough after that. CC: You can choose a film you’re in. DH: Oh, then EASY RIDER (laughs). I wasn’t thinking of myself there. I mean, you can put in a Kirosawa film, any film of his. CC: Talking about your rich history of films, and there’s the obvious that are favorites. We talked about EASY RIDER. BLUE VELVET also comes to mind, it’s one of my favorite films, but are there any films that may not have been seen by a huge audience that you count amongst your favorite performances? DH: One of the performances I gave with Amy Irving in a little movie called CARRIED AWAY where I play a crippled farmer who’s a schoolteacher. That I think is a beautiful film. It’s one of my better performances. Unfortunately we didn’t get any distribution at all. You said everybody knows BLUE VELVET and you’re right, but I really love that performance. I made a film that the Cinemateque in Paris are going to show on October 13th, a film called OUT OF THE BLUE which I directed and never got distributed. It was in competition at the Cannes Film Festival. They’re playing fifty films of mine and they’re opening with OUT OF THE BLUE. It’s Sean Penn’s favorite film that I directed and I love my performance in that. I’ve made over 150 movies, a lot of them very bad. A lot of them are only made in Eastern Europe and Fiji where I’m very big in those places. CC: Do you feel there are actors today who are as good if not better than those you grew up with, such as James Dean, Marlon Brando, and Montgomery Clift or do you feel today’s actors or actresses just aren’t as good as those we consider icons? DH: I think there are a lot of incredible actors these days. We’ve come a long way where the old days where you used to have to fight to block your own scenes. You would fight just to get line readings from the director. You’d just fight about everything, even in the certain way you had a pick up a cup. It’s all these preconceived ideas. For a Method actor, it’s certain death. They say if you do this in your golf swing, it’s death, but there’s this preconceived ideas where you can’t live in a moment to moment reality and it’s not happening. For incredible actors, look at Meryl Streep. She’s just an incredible actress. There are so many young actors and I think that acting is very healthy in America. Directing I think is a little behind and movies made by committee, I still think the director should be the one. Hopefully the director wrote the screenplay so you would have a real auteur filmmaker who’s totally committed to the film. I do think the acting is there though. CC: Would you say it’s impossible now because now studios have shareholders and it’s judged by how the stock market and box office receipts go? DH: It’s impossible because they’re a bunch of idiots. When we made EASY RIDER, the executive producer Bert Schneider, who did FIVE EASY PIECES and THE MONKEES and so on, he was Bob Rafelson’s partner. His father was Abe Schneider, who was head of Columbia. EASY RIDER wouldn’t have been seen by anybody if I just went out and made an independent film for $320,000. Abe Schneider had to pay off the unions in order to be shown and it was the first time an independent film was shown by a company. I would tell Schneider that I would have dailies for him and Schneider would say to me “We don’t want to see dailies. You bring me your first cut.” Now THAT’S a producer! That’s a producer who believes in you and lets you go. He did that with all his films, especially with FIVE EASY PIECES and THE LAST PICTURE SHOW by Bogdanovich. CC: Is there still any director you haven’t worked with that you’d like to? DH: I think our main auteur of filmmakers is Woody Allen. I mean he writes, produces, and directs his film. He’s definitely one I’d like to work with. Oliver Stone even though he gets a little confused on history at times is certainly a marvelous filmmaker. There just really aren’t that many when you think about it. CC: What’s your opinion on the digital boom in filmmaking where great looking feature films can be made from $15,000 to $100,000 and have the same feel as a blockbuster? DH: I think it’s incredible. The one thing that was always holding us back is that it was so prohibited. It wasn’t like a piece of paper or a piece of canvas where you could paint and sketch, it took all this money to make films. The idea to take $15,000 or $20,000 and make a feature film on digital and blow it up to 35mm, which unfortunately we still have to do now to play it in theaters. It’ll cost about $140,000 to do so but in the end of it you could make a movie for a total of $150,000. This at least puts it in the thing where if you don’t have a home, you can hock it. Well, as long as you don’t buy gas you can make a profit. CC: What’s coming up for you? DH: HELLRIDE’s coming out. It’s so much fun. Larry Bishop did such a great job on it. Working with Michael Madsen and Quentin Tarantino, it was so much fun. CC: Thank you so much for your time. It is an absolute pleasure. DH: You’re welcome. Take care. (Special thanks to Falco Ink)
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