by Jason Adams
Picture it: the year is 1970 and the director Orson Welles has just recently begun filming his experimental film The Other Side of the Wind, the production of which would ultimately outlast the director himself (Welles died in '85) and many of the people he put in front of his camera. (Wind was finally released by Netflix in 2018 after nearly 50 years of tinkering.) One such person Welles filmed was actor-turned-director Dennis Hopper, who was fresh off his counter-culture sensation Easy Rider. Strange bedfellows, these two, but they sat down for over two hours of filmed and oft-antagonistic conversation, and now producer Filip Jan Rymsza and editor Bob Murawski, who finally got Wind across the finish line, have gifted us with Hopper/Welles, the fly-on-the-wall footage of that moment screening at NYFF. It's something!
Full disclosure: I went in to Hopper/Welles expecting to find Welles a bit of a boor and Hopper a pip. Fuller disclosure: I came out with quite the opposite...
The film opens much like I just did... contextualizing these two directors as avatars for two very different scenes. Welles the old school standard, while Hopper, buried under his bushy beard, is a beacon of rough-edged 70s things to come, of New Hollywood, the Raging Bulls and fill-in-the-blanks that were about to permanently change the movie system. To say their conversation is wide-reaching is only half the deal, because everything they talk about -- movies, politics, and to quote Orson "big beaver shots" -- is all in service of bridging that generational divide. To see how they might jive, man.
Even explicitly calling it a "conversation" feels a reach for much of its runtime, because it's more Welles ceaselessly hectoring the younger man with questions about his beliefs, his political and philosophical reasons for the art he makes and wants to make, while Hopper twists and slips his grasp at every turn. Hopper's adamant about not defining himself or boxing himself in -- he answers most pointed questions or comments with an outwardly good-natured but nevertheless devout deflection. (One gets the feeling his veneer of smiles doesn't run too deep by conversation's end.)
To offer an example Hopper talks about watching Easy Rider with different audiences in different states and it meaning oppositional things to them -- rednecks would cheer on the cops while the hippies watching the film would do the exact opposite. Hopper says he didn't intend either of those readings... but then waffles on what he did mean, save noncommittal abstractions. He says the film's famous acid trip scene is full of symbolism... that only he would get.
Hopper's argument, and he returns to it several times, is his films do -- will do (since he'd only made one at this point in 1970) -- his talking for him. That he thinks he can lead a revolution through just his art. A noble cause, in theory! Only once Welles tries to pin down what the revolution is or what it means Hopper gets evasive, unspecific. He feigns a wariness of fearing, we're meant to suppose, The Man -- he doesn't want to put himself into the cross-hairs. Welles needles him on this pretty hard -- what makes Dennis Hopper feel so special they'll finally come for him?
Tiny details reveal themselves across the two hours that make Welles (and my) mounting frustration with Hopper's determined lack of specificity seem justified -- Hopper off-handedly admits he himself has been in contact with the FBI, as they've warned him about keeping his distance from true political agitators. And Hopper tells a story that some tabloid's invented to smear his name with outrageous assertions, which really gets him worked up -- he plans on suing them this time, he says. Welles asks if he ever, you know, handles these things face to face, outside of institutional structures, and Hopper tells some story about beating up an employee who mouthed off at him on set one time. It all adopts a real Karen haze.
Looking back on all of this through our now-knowledge of Hopper's Republicanism-to-be probably colors one's perspective a bit, but what emerged over the course of Hopper/Welles for me was a laser-sharp depiction of the pin-prick thinness of the Boomer counterculture's balloon essence; how this Icon of it -- and yes Hopper was technically born pre-Boomer but he's as much an Icon of it as any -- surfed on wafer-thin feel-good-isms, but the real work, the world-changing work, always seemed to prove impossible. He'll just make a film and hope somebody gets it. Hopper alludes to the problems they were facing in 1970 -- environmental collapse within twenty years, he warns! -- which they nevertheless failed to do jack-shit about, and here we are in 2020 and the Easy Rider path from California to Louisiana is an apocalypse of fires and hurricane floods. Hopper's words then could be cut-pasted from my mother's Facebook page today; memeing towards oblivion.
In the doc Welles speaks, in and out in character, of being branded a Fascist due to his political activity amid globe-trotting derring-do, involving Spain's Franco and airplanes and Ernest Hemingway -- even as fictional mythologizing it all the same stands in stark contrast to Hopper's refusal to be defined as anything, to anyone. No doubt Welles got that and was counting on it for wrangling drama from the conversation. But Hopper's incessant ambiguities, his exhausting both-side-isms, all-side-isms, pile so high they seem to take up all the space where actual substance is supposed to go. In this way Hopper/Welles proves itself an essential portrait of the emptiest generation.