Dennis Hopper: Interviews

Blood Lust Snicker Snicker in Wide Screen: Dennis Hopper / 1994

153 Blood Lust Snicker Snicker in Wide Screen Dennis Hopper/1994 From Grand Street magazine, no. 49 (1994). Reprinted by permission of Grand Street. On March 17, 1994, I visited writer/director Quentin Tarantino at the Los Angeles house where he was editing his new film, Pulp Fiction, a trilogy of stories set in contemporary Hollywood whose cast includes John Travolta, Bruce Willis , Uma Thurman, and Christopher Walken. While his staff had lunch, we talked and took pictures. —Dennis Hopper Dennis Hopper: I heard one story, I don’t know how true it is, that you started out in a video store. Quentin Tarantino: Yeah, uh huh. Well, it’s funny. Actually I started out as an actor. I studied acting for six years—for three years with the actor James Best, then for three years with Alan Garfield. That’s been my only formal training. I never went to film school or anything like that. And then—I was right at the point, after studying acting for years and years and years, when it comes time to actually go out and start trying to get a career—I suddenly realized that I really wanted to be a filmmaker, because I really was very different from all the kids in my acting class. I was always focused on the movies, I knew a lot about them and that was always my love. They all wanted to work with Robert De Niro or Al Pacino—and I would have loved to work with them too—but what I really wanted was to work with the directors. I wanted to work with Francis Ford Coppola. I wanted to work with Brian De Palma and I would have learned Italian to work with Dario Argento. So at a certain point I kind of realized that I didn’t want to just appear 154 dennis hopper: inter views in movies. I wanted the movies to be mine. And so right when I should have started trying to get an acting career going, I completely changed focus. In the meantime, the only thing I could do was get a job at this video store because of my knowledge of movies. And it ended up being like my college, all right. It’s not that I learned so much about movies when I was there—they hired me because I was, you know, a movie geek—but it stopped me from having to work for a living, basically. I could just work at this place and talk about movies all day long and recommend movies all day long. And I got really comfortable. Too comfortable, as a matter of fact. It actually ruined me forever having any real job because it just became like a big clubhouse. DH: Where was this? QT: In Manhattan Beach. DH: How long were you there? How old are you now? QT: I’m thirty-one. And I think I was twenty-two when I first started working there. But I got my college experience at that video store, you know. Not because I learned so much—I don’t think you learn that much in college—it’s the experience that matters. You’re kind of breaking away and hanging out with a group of people, doing everything together and just screwing off. DH: And you had access to all those films. QT: Yeah, oh, that was the terrific part about it. I’d seen a lot of them already , but the thing was that I could watch them over and over again. We had a big-screen TV and we watched films all day long in the store. And I’d always put on stuff that I wasn’t supposed to put on—you weren’t supposed to put on stuff that had nudity or a lot of swear words, you know. But I was watching Fingers in the store. And Ms. 45, and wild stuff, Roger Corman women-in-prison movies. People would say, “What’s this?” “Oh, that’s Pam Grier.” Also, because I knew a lot about films and everything, if I wanted to see something, I would buy it. I’ve been collecting videos since videos came out. And so my collection was able to completely enlarge. DH: So Zatoichi: The Blind Swordsman, all those Japanese films, did you already have a knowledge of them? dennis hopper / 1994 155 QT: Yeah. Most of...