20 Questions: Dennis Hopper

After a 30-year career that has featured more dead ends, deaths and resurrections than a "Road Runner" cartoon, actor-director Dennis Hopper inhaled his way into our collective nightmares and revived our respect as "Blue Velvet's" psychosexual deviant, Frank Booth. That same year, 1986, he earned an Oscar nomination for his role in "Hoosiers." Next, thanks to Sean Penn, he helmed "Colors," his first major Hollywood directing job since "Easy Rider." And again, controversy followed--this time over the movies theme of gang violence. Hopper weathered the publicity--as well as the stories about his recovery from substance abuse--and went back to work. Last year alone, he acted in and directed "Backtrack," with Jodie Foster; acted in "Chattahoochee," a film about a mental institution; and co-starred in "Flashback" with Kiefer Sutherland. Contributing Editor David Rensin visited Hopper at his home in Venice, California, just after he'd returned from directing Don Johnson and Virginia Madsen in "The Hot Spot." Hopper calls the film a kind of "Last Tango in Texas." Says Rensin, "When I arrived, Hopper was separating his just-unpacked clothes into plastic laundry baskets. He was also helping some workmen hang three new art pieces in his downstairs gallery/screening room. Later, while talking at his banquet-sized dining table, Hopper spoke softly, evenly, often lapsing into a thoughtful whisper. throughout, he breathed normally."

1.

[Q] Playboy: Frank Booth: Would counseling have helped? If he'd been rehabilitated, what kind of job might he have held?

[A] Hopper: Counseling? [Smiles] I see Frank Booth very differently from other people. To me, Blue Velvet is a love story, and Frank will go to any lengths to keep his lady. That's all. Cuts off the old man's ear. Kidnaps the kid. Just a love story. Most people find that strange. But they didn't play Frank Booth. You gotta have Frank's point of view. [Pauses] It's hard to figure what a straight Frank would have done. Probably run a clothing store. Sell leathers.

2.

[Q] Playboy: Got any advice for actors?

[A] Hopper: What you get on the screen is the only thing that's important. If you let other things get in the way of your work, then you're not doing your work, and I don't care how good you are. [Many actors] carry a lot of baggage, because of their insecurities, that has nothing to do with the work. Some people find this very interesting, see it as mystique. You've got to strip it away. I was never like that. I was interested only in the work, no matter how stoned or how drunk I was. The work was all that I was living for.

3.

[Q] Playboy: You usually play someone close to the edge, characters whose problems are internal, not external. Would it be a challenge to portray a normal person?

[A] Hopper: I would love to play a normal person. But I'm just not offered those parts. I haven't played a normal person since Jordan in Giant. I'd like to do a professional guy, a lawyer or an architect. But it seems like Newman, Redford--there's a list of guys to go through before you get to me. On the other hand, you never see the big emotions from those guys. Gary Cooper never went for that. The story carried him. Oddly enough, when Stanislavsky came to this country, he shocked all the actors by saying that Gary Cooper was what he'd been trying to teach everybody in the Moscow Art Theater. And that he was doing simple reality and that was really what it was all about.

4.

[Q] Playboy: Does the Method still work? Or is the age of genius and your peers-- Brando, Dean, Clift--gone?

[A] Hopper: Those guys were going against the Hollywood system. Today, that same system is mostly Method. Method just means you have a way of working. Today's system is built for actors. Now, very often, actors are asked to block their own scenes. A director wants to see what they're gonna do before he sets his camera. When I started out and when Brando, Clift and Dean were acting, a director told you how to say your line, where to make your gesture, where to pick up a cup. That kind of directing is long gone.

5.

[Q] Playboy: What popular myth about actors would you like to correct?

[A] Hopper: If an actor is at all successful early on, then people expect him to always be financially well off. But job security is limited. It's such a fickle business. I don't know what the percentages are now, but when I was starting out, ninety-eight percent of your stars became stars for three years and were dropped. Edmund Purdom, Tab Hunter, Richard Beymer--the kid who starred in West Side Story with Natalie Wood. Every part that came along for three years, Beymer got. And this happened to guy after guy after guy. It was like Hollywood just read them like the morning newspaper and threw them away. It's a tragedy. And yet for years after their three-year period, everybody assumes that they have money, assumes that they're working, you know? They still get the best table in the restaurant, but do they have the money to pay the check? It's pathetic. I've had my own ups and downs and have lived on the illusion. I've had friends want to borrow money and even they don't understand when I say, "Hey, but I'm broke. I don't have any money." They say, "Are you kidding me? You gotta have money."

6.

[Q] Playboy: What happened to your autobiography? You were reportedly offered a six-hundred-thousand-dollar advance.

[A] Hopper: It was more. [Smiles] I talked myself into a deal and then turned it down. I thought it would take too much of my time, and I would rather direct movies and act. Even with a ghostwriter, I couldn't do it in six months. And I'd have to be very hands-on about it. Also, to do a real book, I'd have to tell an awful lot of stuff that I don't know if I really want to get into. My life is more complicated than it seems.

7.

[Q] Playboy: As someone who has teetered on the edge, tell us: Does America really love a man who earns a second chance?

[A] Hopper: It's too weird. This has happened to me so many times that I don't know what it really means. I remember being nineteen years old and going to the premiere of Giant in New York City. The night before, I'd starred with Natalie Wood in a Kaiser Aluminum Hour show on TV. And the studio, because Natalie and I are both under contract to Warner Bros., wants me to take Natalie to the premiere of Giant. I don't want to do it. I want to take this young woman by the name of Joanne Woodward. So the papers won't interview me [at the premiere] because they don't know who Joanne Woodward is. They say, "Are you a secretary, sweetheart?" And the next year, she wins the Academy Award for best actress for The Three Faces of Eve. At that moment, I didn't have to go any further to understand what it was really all about. By then, James Dean had died; next I was blacklisted. I studied with Strasberg, got married, was looked on as a maniac and an idiot and a fool and a drunkard. And suddenly, I make Easy Rider, man, and the whole world opens up to me. And then I make The Last Movie, win the Venice Film Festival, come back and am told the film won't be distributed. Finally, I go into recovery, come out and I'm straight. And it just happens to fit into everybody's schedule that it's the time to sober up now. That's just luck. I just keep bumping into luck. But you can talk about being sober only so long. You're sober. So your life goes on and things change, and that's it. You change with the times and are not just a sobered-up drunk.

8.

[Q] Playboy: Should public figures go public with their alcohol- and substance-abuse recoveries?

[A] Hopper: I don't think it's a great idea for these people to be telling everybody that they had a drug problem but they don't have it anymore because they've gone three months sober. The idea of being in an anonymous twelve-step program is to stay anonymous. You're not supposed to talk about it, because it's not good for the other people--if you slip. And a lot of these people are slipping. They're in and out of the Betty Ford Center like it's some kind of check-out stand at the supermarket. I don't go around talking about the organizations I belong to, because it's against the format. I also have friends who are major people in the industry who have never stopped anything. I see them go on and on. I find that very interesting, that I get sober and suddenly it's such a major thing. It gets all out of balance.

9.

[Q] Playboy: What would it take for you to backslide?

[A] Hopper: [Laughs] The only thing that could push me toward a joint or a drink is my hand reaching for it. There's no great emotional moment when I'm going to say, "Oh, God, they fucked with me so bad today that I'm gonna drink now, or I'm gonna take drugs." Bullshit. I might get to feeling so good that I'll want a drink and a joint, but that's not going to happen, either.

10.

[Q] Playboy: If Billy and Captain America took off across the country today, what would they find? Did that generation, as it has been suggested, blow its birthright? Did the revolution fail?

[A] Hopper: I guess they'd probably drink V8 juice in a Yuppie cemetery. What would they find out there, man? Has it changed very much? The hippies are gone. The communes are gone. They could find the Jack Nicholson character still in jail somewhere, drunk. I'm sure the rednecks haven't really changed too much. If things have changed, it's just that they've dressed up in different clothes and different guises.

Thomas Jefferson said that every twenty years there should be a revolution if you want to keep a republic. But that doesn't mean an armed revolution. It's healthy that one generation questions another and changes are made. People going back to being conservative was a healthy move in its own way. And the liberals will come back and change it again. Balance is healthy, and that's really what democracy in a republic is all about.

11.

[Q] Playboy: What goes best with a Harley?

[A] Hopper: What do you think? [Heavy laugh] Pussy, man! Pussy.

12.

[Q] Playboy: In 1970, you made The Last Movie, a controversial film that won the Venice Film Festival. It was hardly distributed in the United States and has since endured endless analysis. Perhaps, with the passage of time, we're better prepared to understand it. Care to give it a shot?

[A] Hopper: I wanted to use film like the abstract expressionists were using paint. They were cultivating the illusion of painting a tree, a landscape, a house--but they were using paint as paint, using paint itself as a form. So in The Last Movie, I keep cutting to things like ripped film, a scene missing, a clapper board going bonk. Just when the story starts sucking you in and you start believing, suddenly I rip you back out and stick my tongue out at you, say, "Go fuck yourself" and say, "Look, hey. You're just watching a movie! Ha, ha, ha!"--which does not amuse a lot of audiences. I wanted to make audiences think about what is illusion and what is the responsibility of illusion. In the film, I have a real church and a movie-set church; there's real violence and then there's make-believe violence. I wrote The Last Movie with Stewart Stern--who wrote Rebel Without a Cause and The Ugly American-- before I did Easy Rider. I wanted to do it as my first film and I didn't. So I went right into it afterward, because I'd gone around the universities with Easy Rider and everybody said, "We want to see new kinds of film, new kinds of film, new kinds of film." So I said, "Oh, boy, have I got one for you." But they didn't really want to see new kinds of film. They wanted to go back to the heavy opiate, the romantic energy of the Forties--the kind of movies that Spielberg does brilliantly. What's ironic is that if you now look at The Last Movie, considering MTV and current video-editing techniques, it's no longer far out and hard to understand. It's not your everyday film, sure, but a lot of the things I did in The Last Movie are now used in other films.

13.

[Q] Playboy: When you were in Peru making that film and you were sober, did you ever see anything unusual, such as, well, UFOs?

[A] Hopper: [Hearty laugh] I saw a lot of things that were unusual. I'll tell you one experience. A young woman and a male friend of mine, Victor, and I were in this pickup truck, driving down a mountain going back to our base at Cuzco, which was at about eleven thousand feet, from the set location at Chinchero, which was at about fifteen thousand feet. It was dusk and there was a heavy cloud layer maybe twelve feet above our heads. Victor said, "Can we stop and take a piss?" So he went out in front of the truck, down the road, and I got out on my side. I was standing there, pissing, and suddenly, this whirling sound came out of the clouds. I mean, a major sound. Then sparks started shooting out of the clouds. I mean, literally shooting out and hitting my jacket and my feet. And the girl in the truck started screaming. Victor was speechless and didn't say anything for a long time. Anyway, we both saw it, we all saw it. Unexplainable. Went on for fifteen or twenty minutes. We just were frozen. Then it stopped, but the clouds were still there. We went quietly on to Cuzco.

There is no question in my mind that it was an unidentified flying object--though I never saw anything but the sparks, I mean rains of sparks. Victor has a theory, which I don't buy. He decided years later that it was a bunch of bats and electricity from the bats caused the shower of sparks. I don't go for that one. But then, maybe he knows something I don't know.

14.

[Q] Playboy: Will sensory derangement and avant-garde decadence ever make a comeback? Can drugs be hip again?

[A] Hopper: I didn't know that drugs had really left. I keep hearing about high school students using cocaine and smoking grass, and if young people are doing it, unfortunately, it's hip to them. Some things don't change just because I got straight. There's just been some glossing over because a lot of us are getting sober. Meanwhile, lots of people still do drugs and still function. I'm amazed that I functioned at all, considering all that I did. But now I know that reality is as bizarre as anything you can put in your head. Learning to cope with reality is a bigger high than getting high.

15.

[Q] Playboy: Has having a ballerina as a wife motivated you to stay in good shape?

[A] Hopper: [Laughs] Well, it makes me think about it more. I do a lot of mental exercising. I should be exercising, but I've been really busy. I do pretty well when I prepare for a movie. I go to a gym, get a trainer, do all that. When I'm directing, I don't do that. I don't have time to. Directing is a twenty-hour day, so I have no time to even imagine exercising. But I will act again next, and I will go back into the gym and I will work out and drop weight.

16.

[Q] Playboy: Years ago, you lost thousands of poems in the great Bel Air fire. Care to share a lost gem?

[A] Hopper: I remember only one. It's a strange poem. "I go outside in my garden to pee / Green leaves side me that sweat and rain / My piss runs to weed beside a dust vacant lot that grows baseball players."

17.

[Q] Playboy: IS there anything that any of your three former wives--Brooke Hayward, Michelle Phillips and Daria Halprin--got in a divorce settlement that you regret not having, and it still pisses you off?

[A] Hopper: Well, I can't say it pisses me off, but it would have been nice if I had gotten at least half of the paintings that Brooke Hayward left with, since she didn't have any paintings when we got married. Over the eight-year period that we were married, I spent something like thirty-eight thousand dollars and accumulated a collection that would probably be worth ten to twelve million today--things I would never be able to afford to buy now, no matter how much money I made in the movie business. I'll see something I once owned in the Pompidou, or in the Museum of Modern Art, or the Metropolitan Museum. I had major Warhols. I had Warhol's first soup-can painting; I had the first paintings by Roy Lichtenstein and Claes Oldenburg and Jasper Johns and Robert Rauschenberg and Frank Stella and Ed Ruscha. I had Ruscha's huge Standard-station painting, which is fifteen feet long. I had major, major stuff. Brooke sold them all right afterward. All I asked for in the divorce was--not the house, not the cars-- I just wanted half of the paintings. And I couldn't get any of them.

18.

[Q] Playboy: What else did you always want that you still haven't gotten?

[A] Hopper: A real Santa Claus! I was very angry when I found out there wasn't one. It's hard for me to comprehend why we trick children into thinking there's a real Santa Claus. Is it to set them up for the fact that everything is bullshit later? Christmas sucks! It's my down time. I can't get with Christmas very much. It's difficult for me to accept gifts, because I never give them.

19.

[Q] Playboy: What's the Russian suicide chair, what's it like to sit in and why the hell did you do it?

[A] Hopper: YOU sit inside a circle of twenty sticks of dynamite. The explosion creates a vacuum, like the eye of a hurricane. Dynamite won't blow in on itself. But if three in a row don't go off, you'll be sucked out and killed. Also, you can't raise your head above a certain level or it will be blown off. I asked a stunt daredevil named Ollie Anderson to set up my experience. I got into the middle and hoped like hell it would work. I had to hold my ears. I felt a little disoriented afterward, but besides that, I felt fine. I was alive. I did it because I was at the end of a run. I was doing a Happening at Rice University, a show of my photographs and paintings. I set up a whole video situation so the audience couldn't actually see me. After the presentation, I told them that if they wanted to see me in person, they had to be bused to the Big H Speedway outside town, where, in the Russian suicide chair, I was going to blow myself up after the auto race. I was also really mad. I thought there were people trying to make a hit on me because of various things that I'd been involved in; that this would be the perfect time for them to do it; that they could stop chasing me around and actually get rid of me. It would take care of everything very nicely. But ... if I got through it, then obviously, they were going to let me go.

Once, I'd wanted to start Easy Rider with the suicide chair. Captain America would get in a tissue-paper coffin designed like the American flag. Billy would push the plunger and the explosion would suck off the American-flag tissue paper. Then Peter [Fonda] would stand up and wave to the audience. The whole effect would establish us as trick riders in a carnival. Then we'd make the coke deal in Mexico and go to Mardi Gras. Later, I decided, Hey, fuck it, I'm going to do it myself. So I did. I thought it was a good idea. I still think it is. Art on the edge. Put your life on the line.

20.

[Q] Playboy: Is it better to burn out or fade away?

[A] Hopper: I like the direct cut.

captain america resurrects lost poems and past loves and reveals what goes best with a harley