TERRY GROSS, HOST:
This is FRESH AIR. I'm Terry Gross. We're going to continue our series Classic Films and Movie Icons with interviews from our archive with Dennis Hopper and Isabella Rossellini, two stars of the groundbreaking 1986 film "Blue Velvet."
(SOUNDBITE OF FILM, "BLUE VELVET")
DENNIS HOPPER: (As Frank Booth) All right. We're giving our neighbor a joyride. Let's get on with it. Anyone want to go on a joyride with us? How about you?
GROSS: That's Dennis Hopper in the film "Blue Velvet," which was directed by David Lynch, who described Hopper as sort of the perfect American dangerous hero. "Blue Velvet" was one of Hopper's comeback films. A few years before that, he'd been institutionalized, paranoid and totally disoriented from years of drugs and alcohol. Early in his career, he was in two defining films about youth culture, "Rebel Without A Cause," in which he had a small part, and "Easy Rider," which he directed and starred in with Peter Fonda. While Hopper was still using drugs, he played a drug-addled photojournalist in "Apocalypse Now." Dennis Hopper died in 2010 of prostate cancer at the age of 74. We're going to hear excerpts of two interviews with him, starting with the one we recorded in 1990. We began by talking about his role in "Blue Velvet" as Frank Booth, a crazy, dangerous, and weird character. Hopper said that when he read the script, he told director David Lynch, I am Frank.
(SOUNDBITE OF ARCHIVED NPR BROADCAST)
HOPPER: I really understood Frank. I didn't have a problem with Frank. I understood. I just understood him. And I called David. I'd never met David, and he'd give me the part. And I called him. They'd begun filming, and I said, you don't have to worry about this. I am Frank. I really understand this role. So he got off the phone and he told Isabella and Kyle MacLachlan and Laura - he said, my God, I just got off the phone with Dennis Hopper, and he said he was Frank. He said, that may be great for the movie, but how are we going to have lunch with him? But I just - I really meant that I understood the role and I do understand Frank, and I've known Frank. I've known a lot of guys like Frank.
GROSS: Did you think that you were like Frank at some point in your life?
HOPPER: Well, I understood his sexual obsession, you know, and I - even though David wrote it as the stuff that he was sniffing as helium, I had always thought of it as some sort of drug, you know, like an amyl nitrite or a nitric oxide, and I asked David if it would be all right to play it that way. He had helium on the set, and helium - all helium does - it doesn't disorient your mind. All it does is make you sound like Daffy Duck. So I tried it, and I said, David, I'm really aware - I'm just hearing my voice. I'm not, you know, able to act. I said, I want something - couldn't I try to use something that, like, disoriented my mind? And he said, what? And I said, well, think - watch this. Like, I'd do a sense memory of a amyl nitrite and nitric oxide or something. He said, what are those things? I said, just watch. So anyway, he liked what he saw. And I said, if you want to dub that voice in the helium voice, and later we could do that. And he said, no, I don't think it'll be necessary anyway. He did - we didn't dub it in later, and it did work. But, you know, since then I started thinking how strange it would be if I'd used that helium voice and not had it disorient my mind. What a strange character he had actually written. Even more stranger than my portrayal of Frank.
GROSS: Yeah, I see what you mean.
HOPPER: You know, it'd just been this guy who takes this - that does this mask and gets this weird and...
GROSS: (Laughter).
HOPPER: ...Then does all those things and nothing else happens to him. It would be very bizarre. But anyway, because when I read it, I thought of it that way, of the drug-crazed guy and the sexual kind of strange appetite that he had. I could identify with those things.
GROSS: Do you like roles with the kind of intensity that your performance has in the character of Frank?
HOPPER: Well, like, you know, I think that probably of all the work that I've done, Frank is probably the flashiest role I ever had, you know? I like it on that level.
GROSS: Your first movie role was in "Rebel Without A Cause." You were, I think, 18 years old. Did the movie help give you a sense of teenagers being their own culture and their own misunderstood culture, or were you already feeling that way?
HOPPER: I went on that picture - when I went on that picture, I saw James Dean, for the first time, act. And at that point all I was concerned about was being an actor. I wasn't concerned about, like, you know, whether people were juvenile delinquents or not. I'd sort of come out of that out of San Diego, Tijuana and that kind of area. But I was interested in acting, and I saw James Dean act, and I basically - through "Rebel Without A Cause," I was just trying to figure out what he was doing, because I thought I was the best young actor at that time in the world. And I suddenly ran into this guy who's some years older than me, but he was doing work that was so far over my head I had to - I actually grabbed him on the chickie run and threw him into a car and said, what are you doing? You got to teach me what you're doing.
GROSS: So what did he teach you?
HOPPER: He wanted to know what my motivation was for wanting to act, you know, and he asked me if I'd had a problem with my parents, if I had actually hated my parents and that that was part of the drive that I had to want to become an actor. And I said that actually I had felt that. He said, well, that's what he felt also, and that his mother died when he was very young and he used to go to her grave and cry on her grave and say, Mother, why have you left me? Why have you left me? And that turned into, I'm going to show you. I'm going to show you. I'm going to be someone. And that was the drive that he had brought into his acting, which I described the same sort of feelings that I was misunderstood by my parents, and that I had that feeling when they came to the theater that I was going to show them. And it was like, you know, I'm going to show you. I'm going to be something. I'm going to be an actor. So these - this drive, this confused kind of drive and wanting to put it into other people's other parts and other things and these feelings, to use them in some sort of imaginary given circumstance, became the key for acting.
But anyway, he said, you must learn how to not worry about the emotions, but you must learn how to do things and not show them. You must learn how to smoke a cigarette and and just not act smoking a cigarette. You must learn how to drink a drink, not act drinking the drink. And if somebody knocks on the door, you go and answer the door. Then you see they have a gun in their hand. Then you react to the gun and so on. So basically it's like, don't indicate, but, like, do something and don't show it. Moment to moment reality - never anticipate what the next moment's going to hold. And so, like, you know, he said - and you know, you're a very good technical actor. So get rid of all that technique, though. Stop the line readings. Don't worry about how it's going to come out. Just let it come out. Work in a moment to moment reality level.
GROSS: Stop the line readings. What did you stop doing?
HOPPER: Well, I mean, like, you know, I was out of a classical theater background. So I mean, there were ways of reading lines, you know, I mean, even hello; how are you, became a way of reading a line. So there's a lot of ways to say, hello; how are you, besides one fixed way that you decide in your room somewhere that that's the way you're going to say, hello; how are you?
GROSS: Was James Dean the first friend that you had who died - I mean, like, someone of around your age?
HOPPER: Yeah. I mean, there had been - yeah.
GROSS: Did it scare you a lot to have someone who was close to you...
HOPPER: Well, he was more - I mean, more than a friend. I think of him more as a teacher than as a friend. We did two films together, which took about a year of our lives. He only made three movies. We did "Rebel Without A Cause" and then "Giant." And then he died two weeks before we finished shooting "Giant." I was, like, 19. He was 24. It was more - we dealt with acting. We talked about acting. It wasn't like we went out and drank beers together and got high or, like, raced cars or anything. When he died, it just destroyed me because I totally had this belief in destiny and how people are destined, you know, to fulfill their destiny, you know? And I just couldn't understand why James Dean had died so young. He wanted to direct movies. He'd only been in three movies. And it just destroyed my whole concept of destiny, life and that kind of thing for years. I mean, probably still to this day, it still bothers me. I miss him. I wish I'd have seen his work.
GROSS: I have to ask you about "Easy Rider," the 1969 film that you co-wrote, directed and starred in. You had done some work with Roger Corman. Peter Fonda had done some biker-type movies and acid trip movies with Corman. Did you see this as an exploitation film, or did you want it to be, you know, a movie in the spirit of the counterculture?
HOPPER: You're talking about "Easy Rider."
GROSS: "Easy Rider," yeah.
HOPPER: Me, I wasn't really thinking about either one of those things. I wanted to win the Cannes Film Festival. I wanted it to be an art film.
GROSS: Right.
HOPPER: The counterculture was becoming the culture at that time, so I thought I was making a film for everyone. What I did was I showed people smoking marijuana without going out and killing a bunch of nurses for the first time. You know, and I used the music of the day as a time capsule kind of thing, rather than writing a score for a movie. It was the first time individual songs had been used for a film. The editing of the cemetery sequence was like a lot of, like, you know, experimental films that I'd seen of the day, Bruce Connor in particular. I'd used a lot of, like, kind of cutting that I'd seen on television for television commercials.
GROSS: Were you already doing a lot of drugs when you made "Easy Rider," and was that out of control at all?
HOPPER: There was a lot of smoking of grass on that picture. Grass made me paranoiac, and I didn't do it. I mean, I would do it - I did it, like, for the scene where Peter and Jack and I are all smoking marijuana and we see the space people, or Jack talks about space people and so on. But most of the time I didn't smoke it, only because it made me paranoid, but I drank. I was a drinker. I was a classic drinker in the great tradition of John Huston, Howard Hawks, John Ford and Dennis Hopper.
Now, I was an alcoholic. And I was never a great - I was never a big pot smoker. Even though I smoked pot a great deal in my life, I didn't do it while I worked. So, like, you know, it was always the work was the most important thing, and the drugs and the alcohol and all those things were secondary to it. And we never - and I always measured it out. And, you know, if I was getting too drunk, I'd do a little more cocaine, (laughter) you know, and keep the work going. So, like, you know, anyway, that wasn't anything.
GROSS: So how did it get to the point where you did so much drugs that you ended up not working?
HOPPER: Well, I mean, there comes a point where, like, you know, if you're not the most popular guy in the world and in demand, suddenly people start looking at your behavior. So at a certain point, my using and my drinking became, who's coming out of the dressing room, Jekyll or Hyde, you know, what emotional roller coaster is he going to take us on now? So, you know, that's what unfortunately drugs and alcohol did for me in my life. And my personal life was in shambles. It never seemed to hurt what went on the screen, but it was the process to getting it on the screen that terrified people.
GROSS: Dennis Hopper recorded in 1990. He came back to FRESH AIR for another interview in 1996. We'll hear an excerpt of that conversation after a short break. This is FRESH AIR.
(SOUNDBITE OF HOWARD SHORE'S "BE ALERT")
GROSS: This is FRESH AIR. Let's continue our Classic Films and Movie Icons series with the late actor and director Dennis Hopper. Hopper played a lot of crazed characters over his career, but when I recorded my second interview with him in 1996, he was playing against type in the film "Carried Away." He starred as a schoolteacher in a small rural community living on a broken-down farm with his mother.
(SOUNDBITE OF ARCHIVED NPR BROADCAST)
GROSS: You grew up in Dodge City, Kan. At least that's where you spent the early years of your life. Did any of the characters in the movie remind you of anyone you knew growing up?
HOPPER: Oh, yeah. Well, my great uncles. They wore bib overalls until they rotted off of them.
GROSS: (Laughter).
HOPPER: They were wheat farmers. And I used to milk the cow before I went to school in the morning. So...
GROSS: Were there big town scandals when you were growing up?
HOPPER: Well, I mean, Dodge City was - we're still trying to live up to the old days when Bat Masterson and Doc Holliday and Wyatt Earp were there, you know?
GROSS: (Laughter).
HOPPER: I just remember it was a dry state. But if you were old enough to get your hand up on a bar, they'd put a drink in it. So, you know...
GROSS: Really?
HOPPER: And fighting around the drive-ins seemed to be - not the drive-in movies but the drive-in hamburger joints - seemed to be the big thing to do after football games. And, you know, my mother managed the swimming pool in Dodge City, Kan., so I had an active swimming life as a child. And my grandfather was a wheat farmer. So it was a good life.
GROSS: Was it fun to see movies about Dodge City living there?
HOPPER: Well, I remember Errol Flynn came to Dodge City when I was about 5 years old. That was a big time, for the premiere of - I think it was called "Dodge City," I think, for "Fort Dodge" or whatever it was. It was a movie that Errol Flynn starred in with Olivia de Havilland.
GROSS: Was that the only connection you saw between the movie world and your own life?
HOPPER: Well, I mean, I was raised at the end of the dust bowl, so I used to tell people the first light that I really saw was not from the sun, but it was from a movie projector.
GROSS: (Laughter).
HOPPER: Yeah. My grandmother used to - she didn't drive a car, so she used to fill her apron. We lived about five miles outside of Dodge, and so my grandfather would go off to the farm in Garden City, which is 60 miles away. My grandmother would fill her eggs full of apron on Saturday mornings...
GROSS: Fill her apron full of eggs.
HOPPER: Yeah. And we'd walk into town, she'd sell the eggs at the poultry place and get the money. And we'd go to see a matinee. And I'd see "The Singing Cowboys." Once in a while we'd see an Errol Flynn movie or a sword-fighting, -buckling, sword-buckling movie. That's about it. I don't really remember what they were, but I knew I wanted to know where they were making these movies. And Kansas was a very flat place. So I wanted to know where the trains were going and what a mountain looked like, what a skyscraper looked like, what the ocean looked like.
And I think it's one of the reasons I became so interested in the visual aspects of things because in that horizon line - when I finally saw the ocean when I was 13 years old, I saw my first mountain when I came to Colorado when I was 13 on the way to California. I was really disappointed. My mountains that I'd imagined were so much bigger. And I got to California and I saw the ocean, it was the same horizon line that I'd seen in the wheat field. And I thought, wow, this is not what I'd imagined, you know? I don't know what I thought. I thought you could see all the way to China or something or look different. It'd be a different angle. And I always thought that, like, my imagination - it was a little out of whack. You know, my buildings were bigger, my mountains were bigger, and the ocean was bigger in my imagination than in reality. So...
GROSS: You've been collecting art for a long time. What was your first exposure to art? Was there any art around when you were growing up?
HOPPER: Yeah, I don't know. You know, I drew when I was a kid, and I was - I studied at the Nelson Art Gallery on weekends. They had an underprivileged children's art class. And...
GROSS: Wait. Were you an underprivileged child?
HOPPER: Well, I got in there. I slipped in. So at that time, I was in a drawing class, and I was doing a little watercolor like I'd learned in Dodge City. And this man came up to me, and he said, what are you doing? And I said, well, I'm painting this rock and river and so on. And he said, well, son, he said, I don't know how to tell you this, but someday you're going to have to get tight and paint loose. And this man was - God, I'm trying to think of his name - kind of just slipped his name right out. But he was Jackson Pollock's teacher. He was - God, this is going to drive me crazy. Oh, Thomas Hart Benton. Yeah, he taught me. He taught Pollock. Anyway, I studied there, and I found that I would go into the theater and draw the actors.
GROSS: The movie theater or stage theater?
HOPPER: Stage theater, where they were rehearsing plays. And I'd sketch the actors. And so that was sort of my beginning of my art career. When I arrived in Los Angeles, I had worked at La Jolla Playhouse. And my friend who kind of was my boss there - he was an interior designer. And he was working with Mary Price, Vincent Price's wife, who was an interior designer. They had a kiln where they did tile work at Vincent's house. And I went up there and made some tiles, and that's where I saw Vincent was an art collector. And that's where I saw my first Franz Cline, my first Jackson Pollocks, my first de Koonings and so on - were at his house. I'd been painting abstractly, but I'd never really thought that anybody really painted abstractly until I saw these things. And so I started doing work, and I started showing with the painters around at that time.
GROSS: Now, it must have been interesting to be exposed to your first abstract art through somebody's private collection as opposed to through a museum.
HOPPER: Yeah.
GROSS: Did that, in a way, encourage you to later become a collector, I mean, because it was part of how you were first exposed to it? I know you collect a lot of art.
HOPPER: Yeah. Well, Vincent gave me a painting, actually, when I was about - I was 19 or 20. Vincent gave me a small painting. I don't even remember who was by now. And I said, I know that you're probably going to be a collector. So let me start you off.
GROSS: Gee, how nice.
HOPPER: And then when I got my first money, I did start collecting art. It's like a compulsion. I was thinking about it the other day. I think that - you know, I don't have a formula where I go to the right dealer and buy the right painting. I've been very fortunate to seem to have an eye. I bought Andy Warhol's first soup can painting hand-painted for $70.
GROSS: I really want to thank you a lot for talking with us.
HOPPER: Oh, it's always a pleasure. It's great listening to your show.
GROSS: Dennis Hopper recorded in 1996. He died in 2010. After a break, we'll hear my interview with Isabella Rossellini, who starred with Hopper in "Blue Velvet." First, here's Hopper in a scene from "Apocalypse Now." Hopper played a drug-addled photojournalist in Vietnam during the war. In this scene, he's talking to the Martin Sheen character, Lieutenant Willard, who's in a cage in the jungle held captive by the renegade Colonel Sheen's character was sent to find, the character played by Marlon Brando. I'm Terry Gross, and this is FRESH AIR.
(SOUNDBITE OF FILM, "APOCALYPSE NOW")
HOPPER: (As Photojournalist) He likes you because you're still alive. He's got plans for you. No, no. I'm not going to help you. You're going to help him, man. You're going to help him. I mean, what are they going to say, man, when he's gone? - 'cause he dies when it dies, man. When it dies, he dies. What are they going to say about him? What - they're going to say, he was a kind man. He was a wise man. He had plans. He had wisdom. Bull****, man. Am I going to be the one that's going to set him straight? Look at me. Wrong.
(SOUNDBITE OF SONG, "THE END")
THE DOORS: (Singing) This is the end, beautiful friend. This is the end, my only friend, the end. Transcript provided by NPR, Copyright NPR.
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