Dennis Hopper: Interviews

True Colors: Bill Kelley / 1988

135 True Colors Bill Kelley/1988 From American Film, March 1988. Reprinted by permission of the American Film Institute. After The Last Movie in 1971, Dennis Hopper couldn’t get hired in Hollywood to direct traffic. According to Hopper, Universal viewed the film— with its nonlinear narrative and flirtation with abstract expressionism— as “an attack on Hollywood.” (His only other directorial job since was the 1982 Canadian production Out of the Blue.) The bad rep that Hopper assiduously nourished made it hard for him to get work even as an actor, except for some independent and foreign productions, until his muchballyhooed comeback in 1986 with Blue Velvet, closely followed by River’s Edge. Now Hopper is directing again. Last May, he wrapped principal photography on Colors, a $9-million-plus melodrama about cops and street gangs starring Sean Penn and Robert Duvall. The title refers to the jacket insignia, or “colors,” that identify the gangs. Hopper has recently joined the Directors Guild, and seems set to follow his friend Warren Beatty’s advice: “You shouldn’t be working for other directors. You should be directing yourself.” American Film: Were you nervous about directing, having been away from it for a long time? Dennis Hopper: No, I’ve been ready for a few years. I’ve been close before , but the deals never happened. If I had a dollar for every meeting I’ve had in the last few years about directing . . . [laughs]. American Film: Does it take you back to Easy Rider at all? Hopper: Well, Easy Rider was a very simple film—all direct cuts, noth- 136 dennis hopper: inter views ing flashy. If you can’t direct-cut a film, your story’s in trouble. Frankly, I learned a lot about directing from [Henry] Hathaway. American Film: But you fought with him a lot, didn’t you? Hopper: I had a small part in From Hell to Texas, in 1958, which he directed . We argued all day and then had a wonderful time at dinner. He was a primitive director—rarely moved his camera, he’d have movement come from the actor—and he gave me line readings that were imitation Brando crap. I’d try to reason with him, and he’d snap, “Kid, that’s dinner talk.” I walked off the set three times. One day, he pointed to a huge stack of film cans, and said, “Kid, there’s enough film in those cans to shoot for three months, and we’re gonna film this scene until you get it right.” I don’t know how many takes we did—I say eighty-six because I was really eighty-sixed when we were done—but Hathaway finally wore me down and got what he wanted. He said, “You’ll never work in this town again.” And I didn’t do a major Hollywood picture for several years. American Film: What led to your being hired to direct Colors? Hopper: Sean Penn wanted me to do it. I had met him briefly once before , when his brother Chris was doing Rumble Fish with me in 1983. We met again a few years later, and I told Sean I thought he was the best young actor in films today. We found that we had a mutual liking for Charles Bukowski, and so when Sean was discussing doing the lead in Barfly with Bukowski, Sean wanted me to direct it. I said, “Forget it, you’ll never get it away from Barbet Schroeder”—because years earlier, when I was drinking, I’d caused a scene in Ma Maison by telling Schroeder he wasn’t qualified to direct movies, that he’d made a couple of nice documentaries and he should stick with that. And it turned out that they couldn’t get Barfly from Schroeder, and Sean said, “Well, then, I’m not going to do it.” I went off and acted in a couple of movies, and when I got back, Sean brought me Colors. I met with the Orion people, they knew my work—in part because Orion distributed Hoosiers—and it fell together fairly fast, although it was a totally different script than the film we eventually made. American Film: How so? Hopper: The script was about a white cop and a black cop in Chicago, and it involved gangs, but the gangs were selling this narcotic used in bill kelley / 1988 137...