The director that saved Dennis Hopper from personal ruin: “I was really out on the edge”
Few actors have lived life in the fast lane quite like Dennis Hopper throughout American cinema history. A genuine icon of the big screen, Hopper first emerged as a talent in the mid-1950s, and in just under a decade and a half, he had become one of the most notorious actors in Hollywood.
Of course, an actor can’t be anything without their performances, and Hopper proceeded to give some of the most memorable of his era. He starred in Easy Rider alongside Peter Fonda and directed the movie, while the likes of True Grit, Apocalypse Now, Rumble Fish, and Blue Velvet also profited from Hopper’s talent.
However, Hopper was one of those actors who had become wrapped up in the excess of the 1960s and 1970s and was well known for his penchant for illicit partying. Hopper said that he popularised the use of cocaine on Easy Rider, although his frequent use of the white powder was certainly present in his personal life.
Like most coke users, though, and let’s not forget that Hopper liked to drink and try other substances, too, there came a time when it all seemed to catch up with the legendary actor, particularly towards the end of the 1970s. In an interview with The Talks, Hopper once explained the length of his drug use and named a director who helped him take the first steps towards getting clean.
According to Hopper, at the end of the 1970s, he was doing “probably three grams of cocaine a day and half a gallon of rum and twenty-eight beers” a day. The actor noted: “I started drinking beer all day long, and I would drink mixed drinks, thinking I would get through the day, and I’d do coke to drink more. So I was really out on the edge.”
Even though Francis Ford Coppola’s Apocalypse Now came out in 1979 and Wim Wender’s The American Friend was released in 1977, the long production of the former meant that Hopper actually starred in it before his effort for Wenders and when Hopper emerged from the jungle addicted to cocaine and in serious need of help, it was Wenders who showed him that there was another way.
When I came out of the jungles in the Philippines, Wim described me as having jungle sores all over my body,” Hopper explained before noting how his German director gave him a haircut for his new role, which made him feel slightly more human again. “It was like being in a blizzard – you’re lost, you’re going to die, and suddenly this St. Bernard dog called Wim comes with cognac around his neck and saves your life,” Hopper said. “And that’s the way I felt about the situation at the time.”
A handful of years later, in 1983, Hopper entered a drug rehabilitation program, although he went after going on a particularly extensive drug bender in the Mexican desert. Still, it was his interaction with Wenders that essentially saved his life and showed the actor that he didn’t always have to live up to his hippie public persona.
In the interview with The Talks, Hopper had admitted that he “lost a lot of work and a lot of opportunities because of the drugs and alcohol” and saw his early career as something of a “waste”.
He said: “I didn’t think of my life as being bad when I was using and drinking; I just thought it was out of control. I mean, when you wake up in blackouts and you don’t remember what you’ve done, that’s not a good sign.”
But thankfully, Wim Wenders was on hand to show him the light, even though it took a few years to get through to Hopper’s eyes.
