Dennis Hopper predicts the brilliance of “our most gifted writer” Quentin Tarantino
There are few figures within the history of American film who embodied the true essence of cinema quite like Dennis Hopper. Appearing in the likes of Rebel Without a Cause, True Grit, Apocalypse Now, Rumble Fish and Blue Velvet, as well as directing the truly iconic Easy Rider; Hopper is one of Hollywood’s all-time biggest heroes.
With such a remarkable career both in front of and behind the camera, stretching over five glorious decades, Hopper was well placed to consider who the brightest talents of the industry were, and he had an early taste for the brilliance of Quentin Tarantino when the Pulp Fiction and Kill Bill director was at the beginning of his career.
“Quentin Tarantino is probably our most gifted writer right now, for a 24, 25-year-old, and he has great hope,” Hopper once noted in 1993. “In my mind, I see him as a hope for the future. He’s a young man who grew up in a video store, and so all the videos, and he loved the violence in the videos and loves movies and talks about movies as if he were talking about a child, you know.”
Hopper had been discussing Tarantino in light of the 1993 romantic crime film True Romance, which Tarantino had written himself, being released a year after his directorial debut Reservoir Dogs but a year before Pulp Fiction. Hopper featured in the movie and explained how impressed he was with Tarantino’s personal writing style.
“This film is full of love of film, and the violence in it is a reflection of our time, but it’s also his dream of himself as a hero,” Hopper said. “Here’s a story of a lonely guy who works in a comic book store whose boss wants to get him laid, you know. The young prostitute comes and falls in love with him. This is all the fantasy of a young man! A young man’s dream; Tarantino’s dream.”
True Romance, directed by Tony Scott and starring Christian Slater, Patricia Arquette, Val Kilmer, Gary Oldman, Brad Pitt and Christopher Walken alongside Hopper, sees Slater and Arquette play Clarence and Alabama, a newlywed couple who must evade the mafia after stealing a shipment of drugs. Hopper, meanwhile, played Clarence’s estranged father, retired police officer Clifford.
Going on to express his further admiration for the humanness of True Romance, Hopper noted, “How she had a pimp, and he’s gonna go kill that pimp to straighten out his life, and Elvis is telling him it’s okay. This is a wonderful, human dreamlike – I can’t say Huck Finn and Tom Sawyer – but it has all the aspects of that kind of young writer, young visionary. The violence doesn’t bother me, and it’s also a reference to other films.”
Concluding his thoughts on Tarantino and the film, Hopper said, “He is a historian, Tarantino, and I love the movie, and I can’t say enough good things about it. The violence is a part of it, but it’s a good, entertaining part of it, too. It’s humorous, and when the mafia and the police and the various people come together at the end of this film, it’s like a great big opera.”
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