The
actor:
Dennis Hopper, a Hollywood legend whose career began in the '50s, during the
dawn of the Method actor, and continued to thrive through the hippie
underground-film era, the early-'80s American independent-film movement,
and—curiously enough—the age of the action blockbuster. Hopper's
latest film is Elegy, a sophisticated drama about lonely, aging academics; he
plays a poet who serves as confidante for the story's lead, Ben Kingsley.
Hopper spoke with The A.V. Club about Elegy and other scattered pieces of his
filmography on November 4, 2008—election day.
Elegy (2008)—"George
O'Hearn"
Dennis
Hopper:
Well, it's the best thing I've been in in the last 10 years, because of the
material—the Philip Roth novel and the screenplay by Nicholas Meyer. And
because of Isabel Coixet, who directed it and who also operates her own camera.
And working with Sir Ben Kingsley. All my scenes are with him, and it's just
wonderful to work with an actor of his quality. He's so real. Penélope Cruz is
just great, too. I think all the performances actually are just wonderful. It's
a really heartfelt, funny, humorous, tragic drama. It's a real pleasure for me
to see this kind of movie, because these are the kinds of films I like to see, rather than
the big action films. I like some of those too, I'm not trying to put them
down, but I think there should be room for these kinds of movies.
The
A.V. Club: Is there a different kind of preparation when you act with someone
of the caliber of Ben Kingsley?
DH: You know you're going to
be in a real scene. It's going to be human. There's going to be a good
give-and-take. Sir Ben likes to live in the moment, which is the way I like to
act. Moment-to-moment reality. There's no anticipation. I'm more relaxed,
because he and I both like to make the scenes good. It's not about our
performances, but about making the scene real. So he's a very giving actor, and
so am I. That's just a wonderful combination for me.
AVC:
Did he make you call him Sir Ben?
DH: He never did, but I was
told by others that that's how I should address him. I had no problem with
that. He is
Sir Ben.
Johnny
Guitar
(1954)—uncredited
Rebel
Without A Cause
(1955)—"Goon"
Giant (1956)—"Jordan
Benedict III"
DH: I was never in Johnny
Guitar.
AVC:
Not at all?
DH: Nope. And it's everywhere
in my bio. I know why that happens. Nick Ray directed it, and Nick Ray directed Rebel Without A Cause, and I was in Rebel Without A Cause. I wasn't even in
Hollywood when he made Johnny Guitar.
AVC:
Then let's talk Rebel Without A Cause.
DH: Well, Rebel Without A
Cause,
that's the first time I saw James Dean act. I came out of playing Shakespeare
at the old Globe Theater in San Diego, and I was 18 years old and thought I was
the best young actor in the world. Then I saw Dean. I had never seen anybody
improvise before. I had never seen anybody do things that weren't on the page.
I was amazed. I grabbed him and said, "I thought I was the best young actor
around, but I don't know what you're doing. You're working so far over my head.
What should I do? Should I go to New York and study with Strasberg? What should
I do?" And he said, "No, no, no. Just start doing things, don't show them. Just
start living in the moment-to-moment reality. Smoke the cigarette, don't act smoking the cigarette.
Drink the drink, don't act drinking the drink." So anyway, it sort of
started there. Then he started watching me when we were doing Giant together, and commenting
on me, and then later had me watch him when he was getting old in Giant to see if I felt he was old. And that was really…
That was what I remember out of Rebel and Giant, basically. Then he died two weeks before
we finished Giant.
I worked with him the last year of his life.
AVC:
Were you friends off the set?
DH: Not really. We were
friends, but I was 18 years old and he was 24. And when I was 19, he was 25. He
died when he was 25. That's a big age difference. And he was either in love
with Ursula Andress or Pier Angeli. He always had someone. He had another life.
But we were working like six days a week, so that was our relationship, really.
AVC:
Did people like Dean and Marlon Brando make it easier for you to do the kind of
acting you wanted to do, or was it still difficult to be a "living in the
moment" kind of actor in Hollywood in the late '50s?
DH: It was almost impossible,
because all the directors gave line readings. All of them wanted to tell you
when to pick the glass up, when to put it down… They wanted to tell you
everything. It was the studio system, and the directors didn't have anything to
do with the casting or the writing of the screenplay or editing the film after.
The only thing that they had to do was direct the film. So your time on the set
with them was their time. They didn't have the movie before or after. The studio
would take it back. It depended on who you were working with, but a lot of
those directors were screaming, yelling schoolmarms who wanted you to do
everything they told you. And so to be able to live in a moment-to-moment
reality with no preconceived ideas was impossible, unless you wanted to fight
for it. And unfortunately, Brando and Dean and Montgomery Clift were in
positions to do that, but when I tried it, it didn't quite work the same way.
[Laughs.]
The
Trip
(1967)—"Max"
DH: The Trip was written by Jack
Nicholson. Peter Fonda was the star, and Bruce Dern, and Susan
Strasberg—Lee Strasberg's daughter. I played the drug connection who they
got acid from. Roger Corman directed it. And it was the first time that I was
allowed to go out and shoot second unit. Jack had written such a complete
script, and Peter and I realized that probably Corman wouldn't shoot all of it.
So we asked if we could just borrow a camera and film on weekends, and we went
out and shot the acid trip, shot stuff on Sunset Boulevard… to give it a little
more color. That was that.
AVC:
Did you feel the film reflected the times fairly well, as you were experiencing
them? Or was it still filtered?
DH: Hmm… I don't know about
that. I think that Corman's genius was that he would take whatever was
sensational from the papers. "Oh, LSD? Let's do something on LSD. Oh,
motorcycles? Let's do something on motorcycles. Oh, how about let's do some
horror films?" They were making movies for the drive-in market; that's how
American International Pictures got around the studio distribution system. Corman
was the king, because he'd just take the most controversial thing he could find
and make a movie out of it. And he was very quick. Maybe not "print every first
take," but close. He wanted to spend as little money as possible.
True
Grit
(1969)—"Moon"
DH: I'd made From Hell To
Texas
with Henry Hathaway, who directed True Grit, and who also directed me
on The Sons Of Katie Elder. He blackballed me after From Hell To Texas, and then he re-hired me
to do The Sons Of Kate Elder some eight years later. During that period, I
went to New York and studied with Strasberg. And then while I was editing Easy
Rider, he
wanted me to do True Grit, and I said, "No, I don't want to do it, I'm
editing." And Bert Schneider, who was my producer and financier, said, "C'mon,
man, go and work for the old man, I won't touch the movie while you're gone. He
wants you for five days, just go and do it." So I went and worked for Henry
Hathaway, near the end of my editing. Which was really… I'd been editing for a
year, because I went out and shot Easy Rider in five and a half weeks,
and I couldn't see any of the dailies. I came back to 80 hours of film that I
hadn't seen, and it took me a year to edit it. But I went and worked for
Hathaway and Wayne and… Yeah, it was okay.
AVC:
Why do you think Hathaway wanted you back, after blackballing you so long ago?
DH: Well, he said it was
because I'd married a nice Irish woman's daughter, and I had a daughter of my
own, and he thought I should go back to work. I'd married Brooke Hayward, who
was Margaret Sullavan and Leland Hayward's daughter. And we had Marin, our
daughter. She was about 3 years old when Hathaway decided I should come back to
work for him.
AVC:
He was trying to reform you?
DH: Trying to give me a job.
[Laughs.]
The
Other Side Of The Wind (1972)—unknown
DH: I was in Taos, editing The
Last Movie,
and I got a call from Bert Schneider and Henry Jaglom that Orson Welles wanted
to shoot some film with me. He was making a 16-millimeter movie. I said, "Wow,
okay." So I flew in from New Mexico, got in around 5 o'clock in the afternoon,
and Orson picked me up from the airport and drove me to his house in Beverly
Hills. And he set up a situation where I was at a table with a hurricane lamp
on it, and there was another table behind me, with a couple of people sitting
around another hurricane lamp. Then this director character—I guess
eventually John Huston played the director, but at this point, it was just
Welles—kept asking me questions off-camera. We shot from dark 'til dawn,
and he kept asking me questions about what I thought about directing, what I
thought about this, what I thought about that. He got all these young Hollywood
directors to come and do this.
The
idea was that the lights had gone out because of a storm, and there's a big
party happening at this director's house. I think Marlene Dietrich was the
hostess and John Huston the host at the party, and they invited all these
people from Hollywood, and this storm happens, and all the lights go out. The
situation allowed Orson to set up these tables and have one table with some
people who were extras that he could tie into another scene, later. That he
could cut it all together and make it look like the lights had gone out and all
these people were at the party at different tables, but you couldn't see any of
them because of the darkness. What a great idea. But I've never seen the film,
and I've never seen any part of it. Has it been released?
AVC:
No, but some cut-together scenes have been shown in documentaries about Welles.
Peter Bogdanovich has been working on a cut off and on for a couple of years,
but there have been legal issues.
DH: Jaglom had something to
do with it when I worked on it. I think Schneider and Jaglom.
AVC:
Did you feel any kinship with Welles, given what you were going through with
the long editing process and studio battles over The Last Movie?
DH: Absolutely. Y'know, I
said to him, "So you're going to play this part?" and he said, "No, no I hate
acting." I said, "You hate acting?" "Yeah, I never liked acting. I never
wanted to act. I'll get somebody else to play this part." Yeah, he was
incredible. He cooked me a spaghetti dinner. He cooked it and he was running the
camera, asking me all kinds of personal things, work things… just really an
interesting evening. I'd met him before that, but this was a really
intense—more
than intense—night. After that, I went back to New Mexico to work on The
Last Movie
some more.
[pagebreak]
The
Osterman Weekend
(1983)—"Richard Tremayne"
DH: Sam Peckinpah, yeah. I'd
known Sam for years. Sam wrote the pilot for The Rifleman, and I was the guest star
in it. This was before he'd directed anything, but he was still on set
whispering, "Do this, do that." Sam and Steve McQueen—we all smoked
grass. So Sam was the only one that we could go into his office and smoke grass
at the studio. This was when he was a writer, before he became a director.
Unfortunately, his last movie was the first time I ever really worked for him,
in Osterman Weekend. I'd seen him down in Mexico. I was living in Mexico City and
he lived in Guadalajara, and I used to go down and see him.
AVC:
When you're friendly with someone like you were with Peckinpah, is your
relationship different with him as a director? He had a reputation for being a
tyrant with some actors.
DH: Well, he was a tyrant. But when you
get on a set, as Hathaway used to say, "That was dinner talk, kid, dinner talk!
Now we're making movies!" You know? When you get on a set, it becomes a
different thing. Hathaway was a wonderful man to have dinner with. Peckinpah
was a wonderful guy to hang out with. But when it came down to making films,
they were tyrants. And that's the way they worked, and that's the way, very
honestly, it should be. If you didn't have respect for them, they scared you into
it.
O.C.
And Stiggs
(1985)—"Sponson"
DH: I'd known Robert Altman
for a long time too. Again from the grass association! [Laughs.] He was an
incredible gambler. And there was a greyhound racetrack across from where we
were shooting in Arizona, across from our location. And he was constantly
running over and taking a bet on a dog and coming back. [Laughs.] That's what I
remember most about that. I've never seen so many people working so hard for
anyone. He had a group of people that would really crawl through shit for him.
It seemed like everybody was really zealous about their work, and really
prepared. I didn't think much of the movie, unfortunately, because I think the
two young guys weren't up to playing their parts. But it had a wonderful cast.
He would have great parties to watch rushes, with food and drink and hours and
hours of dailies. It was a very joyous time. I wish the film had been good.
Blue
Velvet (1986)—"Frank
Booth"
DH: Blue Velvet was wonderful. David
Lynch was terrific to work with. There was no improvisation—David had
written the screenplay and stuck to it. But I had a terrific time. And I really
enjoyed the movie, too. I think it's our first American surrealist film.
AVC:
How do you live with a character as bizarre as the one you play in Blue
Velvet?
How do you apply what James Dean taught you to Frank Booth?
DH: I had just come out of
drug addiction and alcohol. I wasn't even sober like a month and a half. I had
just gotten out of rehab. Then I played that part, and I went from there to
play a part in Hoosiers as an alcoholic, and then a drug dealer in Rivers Edge. Those were my first
three films being sober. [Laughs.] I called David when I read the script for Blue
Velvet and
he cast me without ever having met me. I called him while he was having lunch
with Kyle MacLachlan and Laura Dern and Isabella Rossellini, and I said,
"David, don't even worry about casting me in this. You did the right thing,
because I am
Frank Booth." And he went back to the table and said, "I just talked to Dennis
Hopper, and he said he is Frank Booth. I guess that's really good for the
movie, but I don't know how we'll ever have lunch with him." [Laughs.]
Super
Mario Bros.
(1993)—"King Koopa"
DH: Wow, you really did a
jump there. [Laughs.] My son, who's now 18 years old, was 6 or 7 when I did
that movie, and he came up to me after he saw it and he said, "Daddy, I think
you're probably a really good actor, but why did you play King Koopa?" And I
said, "Why?" And he said, "Well he's such a bad guy, why did you want to play
him?" And I said, "Well, so you can have shoes." And he said, "I don't need
shoes." [Laughs.] So that was my 7-year-old's impression. It was a nightmare,
very honestly, that movie. It was a husband-and-wife directing team who were
both control freaks and wouldn't talk before they made decisions. Anyway, I was
supposed to go down there for five weeks, and I was there for 17. It was so
over budget. But I bought a couple buildings down there in Wilmington, NC, and
I started painting. I made an art studio out of one.
AVC:
You had a real run there in the '90s of playing villains in big movies like Super
Mario Bros., Speed,
and Waterworld.
Was that fun for you?
DH: Speed and Waterworld… I like both of those
films, actually. I did not like Super Mario Bros. I thought Waterworld got a bad name for itself
in the United States, but it did really well in Europe and Asia. I think the
studio sort of shot themselves in the foot by announcing it was so over budget,
blah blah blah, it's going to be a failure… All this came out before we released
it in the States. But I enjoyed it. And Speed, I really loved; I thought
it was a terrific movie. Jan De Bont's first directorial job, coming from being
a cinematographer. He did a terrific job. That was fun.
An
American Carol
(2008)—"The Judge"
DH: I did one day on it.
Kelsey Grammar got me involved. I came in and did a day, playing a judge
shooting ACLU lawyers. I haven't seen it. Doubt I will.
AVC:
After it came out, there was a lot of talk about the subculture of Republicans
in Hollywood, and your name was mentioned often. Has too much been made about
your politics? Is there some confusion out there about where you stand?
DH: I guess there's
confusion, because I voted for Obama. [Laughs.] I hung in there for a while,
until Palin was picked. I couldn't quite go on any longer with this cartoon.
And also, I really resent the negative stuff the Republican party is putting
out on Obama. I just think it's really disgraceful.
AVC:
Generally speaking, do you consider yourself politically conservative?
DH: No. My whole family were
Democrats, and I was a Democrat until Reagan. And I didn't care for Reagan so
much. I thought he wasn't a very good actor, and I didn't know what kind of a president
he'd be. But I was reading a lot of Thomas Jefferson at the time, and Jefferson
said that every 20 years, if one party has stayed in power, it's your
obligation as an American to vote the other party in. At that time, I wanted to
see Congress change, and we did change Congress. Then I just stayed with the
Republicans. I voted for both the Bushes. Things really started falling apart
when President Bush said our financial structure was strong. And then McCain
later repeated the same thing, my God. So it started crumbling down. Also, my
wife's a big supporter of Obama, and I met him. I had marched with Martin
Luther King in the South, and I felt a great empathy and obligation to that
movement. Still, I stayed with McCain until he picked Palin. Then I ditched.
I'm happy I did. We'll see what happens today.