MIFF Session 13: Hopper/Welles

In 1970 Orson Welles interviewed Dennis Hopper. Hopper was still flush with the fame of his runaway no-budget hit Easy Rider and Welles was scrounging for money and ideas to get his final project The Other Side of the Wind off the ground. They gathered with friends and others around a table laden with drinks to see what would happen. One further limitation was that Welles would be addressed in his film's lead role, a film director named Jake. There are almost no shots of Orson Welles. Almost all the shots are of Dennis Hopper. It says and is a collaboration between the two iconic figures but you need to know going in that it will be less a rich exchange of concepts than a veteran maverick filmmaker grilling an emerging one.

The topics range widely but generally stay within the realm of cinema. Favourite directors, recent films and the practice of filmmaking. As the talk broadens, contemporary politics enters and Hopper is increasingly urged to state a position that might typify his demographic and the focus increasingly becomes that of Hopper as an American citizen and an artist with the potential to change what is around him. If this sounds like two hours of rambling Welles does a subtle but sturdy job of keeping the helm steady. Considering the frequent visual upsets of clapper boards and crew, this isn't easy but once the form of it settles the dialogue is easy to follow and interplay between the two men enjoyable.

One moment has Hopper saying that he doesn't believe in fractions (preferring whole quantities of anything) and he draws it out until it sounds identical to a monologue he delivered in Apocalypse Now at the other end of the decade. In fact, if you know that fiml and recall his performance you can work out what to expect of much of this conversation (as long as you turn the craziness down).

Dennis Hopper was engaged in making the long suppressed Last Movie which invovled a lot of improvisation. He was heading into a decade of cinema that Easy Rider had helped into identity for the toughness of films like Taxi Driver, Network or Nashville. His own carreer would dwindle steadily next to the Coppolas and Scorseses and it wouldn't be until the '80s when he returned to terrify them in the aisles as Frank Booth in Blue Velvet. Here, he doesn't know that yet and as he talks lucidly and often passionately to one of his own idols it feels like, however much he is struggling, he is looking forward to the world to come. Welles, persistently if faintly behind his persona, does not know that his patchwork film will only barely survive him, appearing decades after his death in a kind of estimated patchwork quilt of a film. The joy of this film is that those things are easily forgotten as this pair of voices build something beyond even the interrogation style Welles has set up. It's a Kodak moment.