Dennis Hopper’s one request of David Lynch for ‘Blue Velvet’: “I thought that was a tremendous contribution”
It’s rare for an actor to be so perfectly suited to a role that they practically don’t have to perform, especially when that role is, shall we say, extreme. Johnny Depp as Captain Jack Sparrow in the Pirates of the Caribbean franchise comes to mind, as does James Caan pretty much any time he played a crime-affiliated livewire. But perhaps the most unsettling example is Dennis Hopper as Frank Booth in David Lynch’s Blue Velvet.
The whole film is hallucinatory and unnerving. Some critics even denounced it for being excessively cruel and meaningless. However, Lynch’s films should never be dismissed as either of these things, even when he was at his most darkly cryptic. Blue Velvet is his most controversial and celebrated film. It stars Kyle MacLachlan as a young man who discovers a severed ear in a field that sends him to the darkest parts of American suburbia, where lounge singer Dorothy Vallens (Isabella Rossellini) has been forced into sexual slavery by a psychotic gangster who kidnapped her son and husband.
That psychopath is Frank Booth, a man who rapes Dorothy while inhaling some type of gas that makes him either childlike and weepy or maniacally, savagely violent. It is a terrifying performance, made all the more so by the fact that Hopper deeply identified with the character.
In a 2008 interview with SAG-AFTRA, the actor said that when he got the part, he called the director and said, “You know, David, you haven’t made a mistake casting me because I am Frank Booth.” Lynch would have been well within his rights to drop the phone and file a restraining order just as a precautionary measure, but instead, he was thrilled.
Hopper further proved the point when they started shooting the film. The original gas that they were using was helium, which it altered his voice but wouldn’t have altered the character’s mind. So the actor suggested that they use “something more exotic,” like amyl nitrate or nitric oxide. In response, Lynch simply asked, “What are they?” Hopper had only just gotten out of rehab, so he drew on his “emotional memory” to conjure how the character might act under such conditions.
Lynch loved the idea, so they entirely removed helium from the plot. “I thought that was a tremendous contribution,” Hopper said, but admitted that a couple of decades later, he wondered if maybe he had made a huge mistake. The helium, he decided, would almost certainly have been better. “What a spooky guy that is,” he said, explaining that in his mind, a character who sucked helium just to achieve a cartoonishly high-pitched voice and who didn’t need to alter his mind to become barbarically violent was much, much worse.
That might be true, but there aren’t many people who emerge from a viewing of Blue Velvet and think, “You know what? That would have been a much better film if only Frank Booth was a bit scarier.” The character is so horrifying that anything that made him just the teeniest bit more chilling might have been a step too far, even for the most devoted Lynch fans.
