Dennis Hopper: Interviews

Dennis Hopper: Triple Threat Talent: Movies Now / 1971

50 Dennis Hopper: Triple Threat Talent Movies Now/1971 From Movies Now, July 1971. Dennis Hopper has been called many things. Perhaps the most accurate is complete artist, a “hyphenate”: artist-actor-director. “Da Vinci made a horse out of clay. It was a giant work, five times the normal size. It took him five years to complete. When the war broke out, soldiers shot arrows into the horse. Da Vinci could never recast it again,” Dennis began. That was the image evoked by a simple stick horse made of fireworks by the South American Indians in his latest film venture, The Last Movie. “They are really beautiful people,” he smiled, “I miss being there. “Was I really there?” he reflected for a moment at Musso and Frank’s Grill on Hollywood Boulevard over lunch with Movies Now. “You know, it’s a very lonely sort of scene. One day you sit down and look around, and you know it’s finished. It’s no more,” Dennis said. Upcoming Attraction After eight weeks on location, and one year and two months in editing, The Last Movie is finally ready for release. His labor of love was one week more in the shooting than his last project , Easy Rider. It was shot on location in Peru and Chile twenty thousand feet above sea level in the White and Black Andes. “It’s a test for me,” he said, “and it’s a test for the audience—to see if there is that audience out there. “I think people will have to see it twice before they understand it. That’s a strange thing to ask people to do if it isn’t free.” A Classic “I’m not worried about it being a classic, and I’m not being pretentious movies now / 1971 51 by saying that. It is a classic. They keep saying classics don’t sell, and art doesn’t really make money. Art is dead, they say. It would be nice if that weren’t true.” Dennis really believes “people are ready to see something as art now and relate to it as art.” At the same time, he also feels that “any art that doesn’t try to help humanity in some way is not worth anything.” Likened to a cathedral glass window that shatters, The Last Movie represents movie morality to Dennis. “It deals with reality: what is real? and what isn’t real?” Highstepping on Film “I show a little fancy footwork. I do all the things other movies do. I can make you laugh. I can make you cry. Where do we go now? It’s a play. You can believe in it, if you want,” he was almost animated. “The play’s the thing,” Dennis broke into a laugh. “People either love it or hate it. They will say ‘It’s the greatest movie you ever made,’ or nothing, which means they hated it.” Dennis Hopper talks smooth, soft, and slow—always telling a story, sketching the pictures and the people, not flippantly, but with affection and respect in his voice. He talks of Elizabeth Taylor and James Dean. He talks of Giant and Rebel Without a Cause, his first film. He talks of the original Sons of Katie Elder. “Were you in that?” Angel Tompkins, the pert young lady to his left, asked. “Oh yes. I played the bad man’s son. My father kills me at the end. I die in the ‘Big Duke’s’ arms,” he looked up at the ceiling, shaking his long hair back, “Terrific! “It’s been a great experience, man,” he paused. “But once you have the experience of doing something, you like to let someone else do it. It’s the normal, the natural thing to do.” And life has been experience for Dennis Hopper. “I’ve been a pimp, a prostitute—now that was tax free—pusher, preacher, prophet, and problem when I’m stoned,” he alluded to the words of “the new American poet”: Kris Kristofferson. “I’m very given to the environment. I’m an environmental child,” he shrugged, “I fall in very easily to things. “I even think of Hollywood as Babylon,” he smiled. “We do have to get back to the studios. Come along.” 52 dennis hopper: inter views Editing Is Slow People were at work. A cat was sprawled, legs high in the air, snugly between both...