Dennis Hopper: The Renaissance Man
Dennis Hopper is a bona fide legend, with a career that has spanned nearly 60 years from old Hollywood to the independent scene that exists today. In addition to his film career, Hopper has also been a high-profile art patron, painter, photographer, and all-around, unstoppable creative force. In person, he is pleasant and affable as well as one of the nicest guys you’d ever want to meet. IFQ recently caught up with Hopper at the 2008 CineVegas Film Festival, where he has acted as the festival’s Creative Advisory Board Chair for some time now lending prestige and helping it grow, to briefly discuss his lengthy film career, art world interests, views on other famous collaborators, and why Johnny Guitar is NOT his first movie role.
IFQ: Since we’re here at CineVegas, you appear in two docs at this year’s festival, Chelsea on the Rocks and The Cool School, could you briefly discuss your involvement in these films?
Dennis Hopper: Well, I haven’t seen Cool School yet but I understand it’s really an excellent movie. It’s about the Ferus Gallery where Andy Warhol had his first show, not in New York but in Los Angeles. It’s about the group of guys that showed there and what sprung out of that so that’s an interesting one. Regarding Chelsea on the Rocks, I was just at the Cannes Film Festival—and had a film in competition there called The Palermo Shooting and was supposed to do four days of press. And my friend David Wasserman produced it and Abel Ferrara directed it (Chelsea on the Rocks). So Abel came to me and said, “You gotta do two days of press for us, you gotta do two days of press” and so on. I hadn’t seen the movie yet but I told them I was going to do two days of press for them. I did the press and then finally see the movie to discover I only have one line in it. [Laughs.] They asked me why did I live in the Chelsea Hotel and I said that I followed my heroes there, Dylan Thomas and Thomas Wolfe, who died there. That’s it. So I said, “You made me do two days of press and I only have one line? Are you insane?” But anyway, it was pretty funny.
IFQ: One aspect of your career that’s rarely shared with the public is your involvement in art, both as patron and artist with your painting and photography. What first piqued your interest in becoming involved with it and sustains your attention today?
DH: Well, I’ve been asked that a lot and I have thought a lot about it; I’ve been very fortunate in my life because when I was 18 years old I went under contract to Warner Brothers and did Rebel Without A Cause and Giant. So coming right out of high school, I didn’t have to stop painting, doing photography and all the things that allowed me to live a cultural life. I’m a very middle-class farm boy from Dodge City, Kansas and I just thought that acting, painting, music, and writing were all art, that they were all one thing and there weren’t different categories to them all. As I later found out, people like to put you in certain categories like “you’re an actor”, “you’re a painter”, “you’re a photographer”, that you couldn’t possibly do all three.
So that’s part of it and the other part is when I was young, I wasn’t going to the beach and the mountains or becoming a tennis bum, I was going to galleries. I went to art galleries, hung out in them, met the artists and I met a lot of them before they had their first shows. I met Andy Warhol before he had his first show. I bought his first soup can painting for $75. So I’ve just been around it and have been making art throughout the years on my own and it’s been a great thing. I recently had great retrospectives in Amsterdam and Vienna, and then we went on to St. Petersburg to the Hermitage Museum. I had five rooms in the Hermitage this last year and then went on to Moscow, so it’s been a really interesting trip. Thomas Krens, the head of the Guggenheim Museum, came to me and said, “How does it feel to be the most famous artist in Russia and no one even knows you are one in the United States?” [Laughs.]
IFQ: So when you went under contract with Warner, was that back in the ’50s?
DH: Yeah, January 7th, 1955, I went under contract with Warner Brothers. I graduated from high school in May 1954, so I was 18 years old.
IFQ: That leads conveniently enough to my next question in that your career has spanned the classic studio era through the so-called Golden Age of the ’70s to today’s independent scene and Hollywood as it exists now. What are your thoughts on how Hollywood’s changed over the years as well as what you feel it has both gained and lost in that time?
DH: Well, first of all I enjoyed the studio system because it was a chance of being with a family of people making a film and you had a great selection of actors, writers, producers, and directors under contract. When I was at Warner Brothers, I mean they had everybody from Bette Davis to Humphrey Bogart, Paul Newman and everyone else in between; it was unbelievable. But the one thing that hasn’t changed is the way we make films; we still make them exactly the same way. You do close-ups, over the shoulders, two-shots, long shots, etc. We have new equipment these days like the Steadicam instead of relying on hand-held and so on, but we make them the same way still. Another thing is now there are independent films, whereas before there were really only studio films, but the problem remains the same. How do you get the independent film distributed? Because you make an independent film, you get the financing for it, but the people never see their money back if it’s never distributed. And that’s part of what CineVegas is about, trying to help find distribution for films that are a little far out and won’t be seen.
IFQ: I was looking at your resumé again online in preparing for this interview and it states that your first role was actually in the Joan Crawford camp classic Johnny Guitar? I’ve seen the film and can’t remember seeing you in it to be honest. Could you touch on that particular film real quick?
DH: I wasn’t in Johnny Guitar and it’s listed everywhere as my first film; and once you get on the Net I guess you never get off the Net. [Laughs.] My first film was a thing called I Died A Thousand Times with Shelley Winters and Jack Palance that was a remake of High Sierra, which had been made with Bogart. That was my first film. I was with Dick Davalos, who played James Dean’s brother in East of Eden, and we had just a few lines. We’re dancing the mambo with Shelley Winters and Jack Palance comes in. He grabs me, throws me against the wall and says, “Hey, that’s my girl.” And I say, “Hey buddy, hands off.” My second film was Rebel Without A Cause with Nick Ray. Nick Ray directed Johnny Guitar, so somehow they got me in Johnny Guitar before Rebel Without A Cause. But Nick was responsible for my going under contract at Warner Brothers because I had done a television show and they called me to Warner Brothers. They’d seen the show. They said, “We’ll put you under contract if Nick Ray says he’ll use you in Rebel Without A Cause.” So I saw Nick and he said, “I’ll use you in Rebel Without A Cause.” I don’t know how they got me in Johnny Guitar, but that was made the year before I got to Los Angeles.
IFQ: One filmmaker you’ve been linked with over the years is none other than David Lynch, who like yourself, is also a fine artist as well as a filmmaker. What is your opinion of his work, both in film and art?
DH: Well, I think he’s a genius. He’s a great filmmaker, a great storyteller, a terrific artist. He’s one of the few people I know who has a direct line into his subconscious, from his conscious mind into the subconscious. Rather than having lunch every day, he goes and meditates and comes back with fresh ideas. With him nothing is set in stone. Even though he may have written it, he’s constantly changing and creating in the moment. He’s just a consummate creator and his artwork is really wonderful. At this past Cannes, the big photograph they used for the official poster was one of his pictures. I loved Twin Peaks too when it was on television, I thought it was so great. They used to have these Twin Peaks parties; I’d go over to people’s houses and they’d all be drinking coffee. [Laughs.] It was great.
IFQ: Another artist turned filmmaker you’ve worked with as well is Julian Schnabel, who has come a long way since you worked with him in his feature debut Basquiat. What is your opinion of how his film career has progressed since versus his painting as he continues to pursue both avenues?
DH: Schnabel’s incredible, man—he’s another one. What a great storyteller he is, I mean from Basquiat to Before Night Falls to The Diving Bell and the Butterfly. Those are such different films about such different subject matter and all three of them are just terrific. They’re things that nobody really tackles, nobody really made a film about the art world for example, our art world. Now they’ve made Pollack since then, which was also produced by Peter Brant who produced Basquiat, but there was no film really about American artists, feature films. And there were no films about Cuba and to think to go into somebody’s office and say, “I’ve got this book, this French book, and I want to do it in French,” you know? [Laughs.] And “the guy’s paralyzed and can only blink one eye,” you know, they’d show you the door real quick on that one. [Laughs.] And now he’s doing one on Palestine; he met a young woman who was a correspondent in Rome, she’s Palestinian and has her own television program in Rome. She, at one time, was the girlfriend of one of the heads of Hamas and became disenchanted with the whole thing, got out of there and went to Rome. She wrote a book which Julian read and he’s going to make a film out of it. I spoke with him when he was in Paris, getting read to go to Palestine to scout locations, and said, “Be careful, man.” [Laughs.]
*Photo Courtesy of Getty Images and Cinevegas Film Festival