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Left: Hopper, photographed for the Los Angeles Times in 2008. Below: Shooting The Last Movie in 1971
Over the years, Dennis became my favourite American actor. He broke boundaries constantly. Easy Rider was his directorial debut and, although Jack Nicholson completely steals the film, it is Dennis’s film he steals. With Easy Rider, he put counterculture on celluloid for the first time. He put rock ’n’ roll montages in the middle of a scene – we don’t need any dialogue here, we’ll just have a bit of Jimi Hendrix and film the bikes going into the sunset. He also directed unsung films such as 1988’s Colors in which, I think, Sean Penn gives his best performance ever. It’s a film about the LA ganglands, which the rest of the world barely knew about at the time. Who else would have had the balls to make a movie about the most dangerous gangs in the world? My favourite Hopper films are Tracks, in which he is escorting a corpse back from Vietnam, and Out Of The Blue, a seriously dark film about incest. In the last decade of his life, he was famous for never saying no to a job – he’d spent long enough in the wilderness and was making sure his kids would be all right – but he was prolific earlier in his acting career, too. In 1986, he was Oscar-nominated for the basketball movie Hoosiers and terrified the world as Frank
When maverick actor and filmmaker Dennis Hopper died earlier this year, Hollywood lost a legend. Fellow director Nick Moran salutes him
starred in The Texas Chainsaw Massacre 2 I met Dennis Hopper in a private members’
deal with such hassles. He looked at
club in London in 2008. I was with Kevin
me sideways as though I’d been in this
Spacey – we’d just finished working on
terribly fortunate position and he’d
a photographer, an artist, a writer. He acted
Telstar, which I wrote and directed and in
suffered for 40-odd years.
with James Dean in the mid-Fifties in
which he starred – and he said, ‘Hopper’s
He told me that when he was
and took a smaller part in River’s Edge. He had an amazing life. He was
Rebel Without A Cause and Giant – and
downstairs. D’you want to say hello?’
in New York in the Seventies he was
was friends with Elvis Presley. He hung
I don’t think he realised what a big deal
close friends with Andy Warhol and
out with Marlon Brando – they were
it was for me. So I went down and there
Jean-Michel Basquiat and that he had
both Hollywood hellraisers. As a young
was Dennis. Kevin very nicely introduced
a fantastic art collection – I later learnt
actor, I tried being a hellraiser for a while,
me by saying, ‘This is Nick. He directed
it was worth around $30m. He was
but it was never going to work out – no
my new movie. He’s a really great director.’
really excited about Kevin being artistic
one could match Dennis’s legendary
Dennis leaned over and shook my hand.
director of the Old Vic; he liked the idea
daily intake of three grammes of coke
He was very polite. I think it’s quite
of this Oscar-winning actor choosing
and 30 beers plus Cuba Libres and
different to be introduced as a director
to live and work in Waterloo instead of
marijuana. I tried being mad, creative
rather than an actor.
sitting around in Hollywood and doing
and intense, but it just wears you out
the odd big-budget movie.
and people don’t like you. If it doesn’t
He grabbed my hand and made this little speech: ‘When you direct a
I wanted to invite Dennis to the
come naturally, don’t bother.
film, it’s like giving birth to a beautiful,
premiere of Telstar, but I didn’t want to
perfect baby. But the studio guys come
hassle him. I thought our paths might
Apocalypse Now, Dennis says: ‘Do you
along and take the baby off you. They
cross again. And then, in May this year,
know that “if” is the middle word in life?’
cut off its fingers! They cut off its ears!
just after he turned 74, he died. I was sad
And he goes on to quote Rudyard Kipling’s
Its limbs! They prod out an eye! Then
the coverage of his death centred not on
poem ‘If’. You can find him on YouTube
they wrap it up and give it back to you.’
his career but on inter-family squabbling
reciting it, somewhat nervously, on The
He was stone cold sober, as he had
about his estate, and full of regret that
Johnny Cash Show in September 1970.
been for more than a decade, and yet
I didn’t tell him how important he was to
Those words should be on his tombstone.
it was pure Dennis Hopper. I told him
me. The first film of his I saw was Francis
It’s how I’d like to remember him.
my producer was Simon Jordan, who
Ford Coppola’s Apocalypse Now; my dad
was chairman of Crystal Palace FC
made me watch it, telling me it was the
The Kid, co-written and directed by
and my best mate, so I didn’t have to
best film ever made. He wasn’t wrong.
Nick Moran, is in cinemas now
As the photojournalist in
spencer weiner/los angeles times/contour/getty; snap/rex
the last rebel
Booth in Blue Velvet. Less memorably, he