Filmmaker and actor Dennis Hopper created a lot of buzz during the 1960s and the ’70s, especially with his unconventional acting and directorial approaches. Also known as Hollywood’s Original Hell-Raiser, he became the image of non-conformity.
Hopper wrote and directed the 1969 film Easy Rider. The movie was ridden with controversy due to the method acting applied by the cast to portray the characters, and there had been reports of consistent drug abuse and debaucheries that occurred behind the scenes.
Dennis Hopper And Company Inhaled The Remains Of A Dead Woman
In an interview with The Talks, The Last Movie director Dennis Hopper assured that substance abuse has never affected any of his works. Drugs have become a part of his routine as well as preparation for acting:
“Drugs never interfered with our filmmaking. If somebody had said drugs are interfering with the filmmaking we would have stopped. I’m probably in denial… but at the time drinking and doing some cocaine to work and smoking a little grass, it was all about the work, it wasn’t about the drugs. The drugs were something we did to keep going. You could have cut off my legs, and I still would have been directing movies.”
Hopper added that reading scripts was not enough for him – he had to experience things. He made Van Gogh an example and said that he wanted to know what the artist felt when he cut his ear off. The actor-director admitted liking extremes and believed that every artist has the right to drink and use drugs.
There had been a lot of insane and wild tales that occurred during the making of Easy Rider. One of the most famous stories was when actor Jack Nicholson, producer Peter Fonda, and Hopper accidentally snorted a dead woman’s ashes.
The story was that the trio would congregate at a production company called BBS, where the secretaries’ jobs were to roll and serve drugs to the actors. In a rigorous quest to find more substances, they found the remains of the dead wife of a BBS executive that was kept in a gold dish. Because they were already jacked at the time, they kept on inhaling whatever they could find in a container. They accidentally snorted a dead woman’s ashes.
Dennis Hopper Lived Up To His Image Until His Last Breath
Despite his bad reputation, Dennis Hopper has made over 150 movies, mostly independent films set in different countries, and his talent remains undisputed both as a director and an actor. For someone who breathed and lived through art, he had a vast collection of magnificent works that shaped 20th-century cinema. In fact, many of them won prestigious awards:
“After Easy Rider, I made The Last Movie and won the Venice Film Festival… The year that I made Blue Velvet, I also made Hoosiers, for which I got nominated for an Academy Award. And the same year I made a film called River’s Edge, which is a wonderful film.”
Up until his passing in 2010, Hopper remained the hell-raiser that he is known as and still put up a show, with the remarkable news of a deathbed divorce from his wife as his last act of defiance.
Easy Rider is available to watch on Netflix.
Source: The Talks
