The directors Dennis Hopper spent an entire day screaming at: “What the fuck can we do?”
Making movies can be a stressful experience. From the lowest-budgeted indie flick to the most gargantuan Hollywood blockbuster, the process of bringing a script to life is fraught with potential pitfalls. Moviemaking requires countless people from different departments to pull in the same direction all at once, and sometimes, having that many cooks in the kitchen can lead to disagreements, delays, and an ominous atmosphere. In the case of one ill-fated 1993 movie, though, the stress of production led to the notoriously crazy Dennis Hopper screaming at his directors at the top of his lungs for an entire day of shooting.
In the ’90s, Hopper experienced a revival in his career that arguably made him as relevant as he’d been in decades. Movies like Red Rock West and True Romance mightn’t have hit big at the box office, but they showed he could still give amazing performances with the right material. He then hit paydirt with Speed and Waterworld, movies that cemented him as one of the ’90s best action movie villains. However, in that period, he also performed villain duties in an abysmal video game adaptation that baffled anyone who saw it – and was no less confounding to make.
In 1990, The Killing Fields director Roland Joffé purchased the rights to make a Super Mario Bros movie from Nintendo. At this time, though, making a film based on a video game was uncharted territory in Hollywood. This movie would be the first of its kind, and Joffé didn’t seem to know how to translate the property to the screen. So, he decided to change it completely. Super Mario Bros: The Movie Archive’s Steven Applebaum told The Guardian, “Joffé wanted to do with Super Mario Bros what Burton had done for superheroes with Batman. He wanted to redefine the characters for young adults.”
The resulting movie, directed by husband-and-wife special effects artists Annabel Jankel and Rocky Morton, was a bizarre debacle that bore little resemblance to the cute video game fans loved. It starred a bewildered Bob Hoskins and John Leguizamo as the Italian-American plumbers Mario and Luigi, and took place in a dark, grimy Blade Runner-esque future noir city named ‘Dinohattan.’ Hopper played the villainous humanoid dinosaur King Koopa, here reimagined as a crime boss-like figure with hair that resembled reptilian spikes.
This already sounds terrible, but matters were made infinitely worse by the movie’s constantly changing script. Directors Jankel and Morton were regularly undercut by their producers, who demanded alterations be made to a story they knew wasn’t working. It all came to a head one day when Hopper walked onto the set of Koopa’s bedroom in his towering skyscraper with a face like thunder.
Cast member Richard Edson remembered the day perfectly, telling The Guardian, “Dennis comes in and he’s looking pissed off. He’s mumbling to himself; he won’t look at anyone. So the directors ask, ‘What’s up Dennis?'”
To their shock, Jankel and Morton’s innocent question lit the touchpaper for Hopper, who exploded with fury in a manner so spectacular that people could only stop and watch in slack-jawed awe. “He just starts screaming at Annabel and Rocky,” Edson claimed. “He’s telling them they’re completely unprofessional, that he’s never seen anything like this. Rocky says, ‘Dennis, what is it?’ And he yells, ‘You rewrote my lines. You call this writing? This is shit. It’s shit! And the fact you’d do it without asking me?'”
Edson felt Hopper had simply seen red and couldn’t even control himself at a certain point. He claimed the Easy Rider star ranted and raved for 45 minutes while the directors sheepishly looked at each other as if to say, “What the fuck can we do?” There wasn’t even any reprieve when they called for lunch because Hopper just kept yelling at them for another two hours about “the state of movie-making.”
By this point, 300 extras had amassed, each one perplexed as to why they weren’t filming the scheduled scene. Edson claimed Jankel and Morton eventually broke down and pleaded with Hopper, “Dennis, please tell us what you want. We’ll do anything.” Amazingly, though, after hours of him venting his spleen about anything and everything, he finally agreed, “OK, we’ll do the scene the way it’s written now.” Edson chuckled, “Everyone sighs; we go back three and a half hours after it was meant to be done. We do the scene exactly the way it was written when he started.”
So, what exactly did Hopper accomplish with his volcanic outburst? Well, not a whole lot. However, the unsavoury incident left a bad taste in everyone’s mouths, with Hopper later describing the production as “a nightmare, very honestly.” Morton admitted that the experience was humiliating and said working with Hopper was “really, really hard.” Perhaps unsurprisingly, he and Jankel never directed another feature film.
