At the time, in November 1970, it seemed like an ideal game, a meeting of renegade titans: Orson Welles, the long-ago young genius of theater and films who was no longer directed in Hollywood after 1958, and Dennis Hopper , which was smashed out of nowhere with Easy Rider in 1969, made him the boy wonder of the hippie age and the alleged leader of a new wave of counterculture films.
Just as Welles had become cratered from a Hollywood career perspective, Hopper hit five hours long on his second film – the hopelessly presumptuous, financially ruinous The Last Movie, which the younger man was working on when he sat down with Welles one evening filming talkative material that ended up as mere clips in Welles’ The Other Side of the Wind, which wasn’t finalized and released until 2018, courtesy of Netflix.
Why it took Orson Welles ” The Other Side of the Wind ” half a century to debut Venice: Watch the trailer
The pretty important distinction is that Welles’ second film, The Magnificent Ambersons, was a masterpiece while The Last Movie was an unsaved mess. However, at the time of this interview, Hopper was seen as something akin to the Second Coming, an artist who deserves to occupy the same platform as Welles. Let’s just say, to put it politely, history has shown otherwise.
Certainly this bonus document, which has a rather generous 130 minute duration and is officially referred to as “Directed by Orson Welles”, painfully shows that Hopper – in the role of the boy genius, the cinematic child prodigy and the voice of a generation – was an excuse; stoned or not, he was hardly a coherent spokesman for anything. In contrast to the ultra-articulate older man, Hopper had very uninformed opinions, and his sentences often only blurred into a void, whether substance-dependent or not. It now seems a miracle that there was something enticing about Dennis Hopper’s incoherence.
The interview, in which Welles never appears physically, was filmed largely in grainy black and white from constantly changing perspectives by Wind’s resourceful cinematographer Gary Graver. The graphics fit right in with the rough style of The Other Side of the Wind, in which Hopper ultimately appeared very fleetingly.
At first, Welles is optimistic and personable, and plays the role of a friendly interrogator. They get wet discussing European art films while Hopper rattles on Visconti’s The Damned, Bunuel and Antonioni, claiming he went to L’Avventura seven times and always fell asleep. Without asking why his cohort submitted so often, Welles happily proclaims that he didn’t like it either, and says of the filmmaker, “It’s his soul that must be bored.”
The last film, which was shot in Peru under difficult circumstances, caused Hopper great problems in the editing room. He has to reduce 40 hours of film material and feels that “my symbolism is too refined for most people”. Given that Welles, who is always a great interview subject himself, is officially the interviewer, he’s taken on an unusual position here – that of an admiring, or at least professionally interested, fan.
And so it takes quite a while for Welles to deliver a good imitation of a thoroughly professional interviewer half the time, show interest in his topic, and rarely deny or challenge his topic. Even so, it doesn’t take long for Hopper’s lack of real insight, or even a skillful vocabulary, to reveal the subject’s status as a quack with politics. Increasingly, Hopper stumbles in search of the right word or even something to say, whereby his proclamations hardly make sense and have even less intellectual weight. “I’m not a reader,” he apologizes at one point.
The only flaw Welles admits here is that he’s never heard of Bob Dylan.
Until late at night, the two men – Welles was 55 years old at the time, Hopper 34 – got into mostly good-natured arguments, with the younger man often saying things that his oldest refuted. When Hopper announces that being a film director is the closest thing to God, Welles replies that “a director should be more of a poet and a magician than a god”. When the younger man says he would like to play Hamlet, the older man counters that he would rather see him play Jesus. And if Hopper predicts that the US will return to nature within 20 years, what can you do but roll your eyes (and imagine Welles doing the same)?
It’s not that the older man wants to ridicule the younger, not at all; It’s just that because of Easy Rider, Hopper was suddenly empowered to be one (or the) voice of a generation. As a result, answers and solutions are sought by him, and since he is clearly not a coherent political (or any other) thinker, he ends up throwing out half-hearted ideas and clichés that he cannot articulate further than a catchphrase. More than once he cannot finish every thought or phrase he begins to utter.
In the end, the film has some interest, not just for Welles completeists, but also for prominent students. In the mid-50s, Hopper was closely associated with James Dean and played in what was probably the easy rider of his decade, Rebel Without a Cause; Both were anti-establishment areas that had a profound impact on the teenagers of their time. In the 1960s, Hopper made appearances more often than not in westerns, and one of them, True Grit – with Vietnam War cheerleader John Wayne, no less – opened just a month before Easy Rider in the summer of 1969. both were among the biggest hits of the year. Woodstock happened just a month later.
Welles doesn’t get Hopper to investigate this sequence of events, but it does suggest that after years of Hollywood-size (if that was it) Hopper aimed at him instead of deserving or seeking them. At one point in the discussion where he gets lost, Hopper says, “I just need a scriptwriter,” a point that this oddity highlights by itself.
The extremely committed Filip Jan Rymsza, who has managed where others have not been able to revive the other side of the wind from permanent darkness, is to be welcomed because he brought this film to light. And Wind Editor Bob Murawski has also stepped up to bring coherence to this hitherto unknown visual document that for a little over two hours brings the nature of these two men to light.
Hopper / Welles was presented at the Venice, New York and Athens film festivals and will be shown at the AFI virtual festival on October 19th.
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