“Why? We didn’t ask him”: Dennis Hopper’s incredibly specific approach to a movie he hated and disowned
Dennis Hopper was hardly famed for his meticulous and studious nature during the period he spent winning equal amounts of acclaim and infamy as one of the ‘New Hollywood’ era’s foremost hell-raisers.
He’d already burned his Hollywood bridges once before, kicking off his career working with some of the biggest names in the business before spending years in exile after making one too many enemies, but he eventually worked his way back into the industry’s good graces to embark on an incredible second wind.
With his contributions to the seminal Easy Rider, Hopper helped usher in cinema’s counterculture movement and became one of the poster boys for 1970s excess. His work in front of the camera was never anything less than solid, which was remarkable in itself, given that he seemed to spend every moment he wasn’t working in some sort of narcotics-induced stupor.
The success of Easy Rider emboldened him to try his hand at directing again, only for The Last Movie to fall victim to rampant self-indulgence. It was clear that giving a talent like Hopper complete creative autonomy would result in more navel-gazing than boundary-pushing, but trying to find a happy middle ground that suited the filmmaker as well as the film proved troublesome.
Hopper’s fifth feature as a director was the romantic thriller Catchfire starring Jodie Foster, and his dissatisfaction with the finished article is abundantly clear. Repeatedly butting heads with his star, Hopper completely disowned the movie, with the famous pseudonym Alan Smithee taking credit after the person who really called the shots completely washed their hands of the film.
Despite distancing himself from Catchfire, it turned out that Hopper was a perfectionist during shooting. Alex Cox was a friend and regular collaborator who performed uncredited rewrites on the script. Hopper might have hated the movie so much that he wanted nothing to do with it, but he was bizarrely specific about what he wanted when the cameras were rolling.
“Jodie was to hide in Mother Hubbard’s shoe on a miniature golf course; on arrival in New Mexico, she was to visit the ancient church at Chamisal, famous for its lithium-impregnated earth,” Cox explained to The Guardian. “Why Mother Hubbard? Why lithium? We didn’t ask him. Dennis knew what he wanted. It was our job to see that he got it.”
Hopper requested that Cox play the ghost of DH Lawrence in the movie, even though he didn’t have a clue why that was what he wanted or how it fit into the film he was trying to make. In fact, the filmmaker offered an encapsulation of Hopper’s duality, which summed up the two wildly disparate sides of his public and professional persona.
“Dennis, the actor, specialised in chaotic, drug-crazed, out-of-control roles,” Cox offered. “But as a director, he was always disciplined; always in control.” The downside is that all of Hopper’s highly specific requests for the locations, look, and feel of Catchfire were all for nothing in the end after he let Smithee take the credit and pretended like he had nothing to do with it.
