The director who couldn’t stand working with Dennis Hopper: “That was really, really hard”
They don’t make ‘em like Dennis Hopper anymore.
An icon, a rebel, a maverick, and a maniac, there simply aren’t enough words to describe his influence on cinema.
One of the films that won’t be featured in any of Hopper’s greatest hits collections came out in 1993 – Super Mario Bros was the first attempt at bringing the legendary video game to the big screen and, as you probably already know, it was a disaster… Bob Hoskins and John Leguizamo played Mario and Luigi, respectively, two New York plumbers who must rescue a princess from the clutches of the evil, dinosaur-like Koopas.
The Koopas are led by President ‘King’ Koopa, who is never referred to as Bowser, but is heavily inspired by the long-running villain, which is the role Hopper played, and aside from some spikes on the back of his head and a long tongue, Hopper bears zero resemblance to Nintendo’s most famous antagonist, and this was just one of the many, many things wrong with this film. Critics were left wondering what they’d just seen, as well as why a star of the calibre of Hopper had taken the gig in the first place.
Super Mario Bros was co-directed by Rocky Morton and his then-wife Annabel Jankel. In 2016, Morton sat down with SciFiNow to talk about making the movie, which he described as a “harrowing experience”. Working alongside Hopper proved to be especially difficult, as the star’s legendary stubbornness reared its ugly head.
“That was really, really hard,” he said, in no uncertain terms. He explained that, due to script changes, they had to shoot the film out of order, which threw Hopper completely for a loop. “We had to shoot on one of the sets that wasn’t ready yet, and we had to shoot on a long lens,” Morton continued.
Adding, “I had to position Dennis in a certain way because if I shot off, I would be shooting off the set, so I had to change his position and he said, ‘Rocky, that’s a big change!’ and I said, ‘All I want you to do is instead of walking here I want you to walk there,’ and because of the whole mess he just couldn’t handle it.”
Hopper wasn’t the only star who hated his trip to the Mushroom Kingdom. Hoskins hated it too, referring to the film as a “fucking nightmare”. The public didn’t care much for it either. Super Mario Bros bombed at the box office, tarring video game movies with its dank reputation for years to come. It’s developed a cult following in recent years, but it would be several decades (and Chris Pratt) before Mario became a proper movie star.
It should come as no surprise that somebody as volatile as Hopper wouldn’t enjoy pretending to be a dinosaur from a video game. His rotten attitude was just one of the many reasons why Super Mario Bros is one of the most infamous bad movies of all time.
