The movie Dennis Hopper admitted got “really out of hand”
From David Lynch’s Blue Velvet to the live-action Super Mario Bros movie, it’s hard for modern-day audiences to associate Dennis Hopper with anything other than deranged movie villains. This was perhaps a logical path for the Hollywood renegade, given he’d become synonymous to older generations with the wayward, bike-riding hippies of the 1960s and 1970s, thanks to his star-making hand in 1969’s Easy Rider.
Along with co-star Peter Fonda, getting into the mindset of a cocaine-dabbling drifter wasn’t too difficult for Hopper. It was a disordered lifestyle he himself lived and breathed for many years, with his heavy drug use plaguing the experimental editing process of the film, a marriage that lasted just over a week, and eventually leading him to sequester himself in the middle of nowhere in the Mexican desert until the early 1980s. So, for Hopper to admit he thought a film he was in spun out of control can’t be hyperbole.
Following his aforementioned disappearing act, Hopper went on a comeback tear, building up to smaller parts in Sean Penn’s early directorial films in the first half of the 1990s. The first of these was 1991’s Indian Runner, Penn’s directorial debut. The crime drama took inspiration from a Bruce Springsteen song and featured Viggo Mortensen in one of his first notable roles. Interestingly, it was also executive-produced by future Trump campaign strategist Steve Bannon.
While Hopper hailed Indian Runner as a “masterpiece”, he was franker in his assessment of its follow-up four years later, 1995’s The Crossing Guard. Starring Jack Nicholson alongside Robin Wright and former Nicholson girlfriend Anjelica Houston, the film is a vengeance saga in which Nicholson’s ex-con Freddy Gale hunts down the person responsible for his daughter’s death following their release from prison.
Despite a generally positive critical reception, the film was not a box office hit. Reflecting on its mixed legacy four years on, Hopper told Index: “The Crossing Guard was not successful. It was a terrific idea that I think got really out of hand and was not clear.”
But he didn’t find the experience detrimentally negative, adding: “You know, this is such a rich time that we’ve just been involved in, and there’s really a job now for historians. Film is still very young. This is the first hundred years of filmmaking. So I think it’s important that we have some sense of history and continuity. Especially in film.”
Around the same time as The Crossing Guard, Hopper appeared in a string of high-profile hits and misses like Speed and Waterworld, as well as future cult classics like True Romance. It was during this period that he burned himself into the brains of an entire audience of cinema-goers as a larger-than-life, wildcard movie villain, matching the often overblown budgets and action of these ’90s blowouts.
However, the period following The Crossing Guard saw Hopper pumping the brakes somewhat, choosing more morally complex parts in lower-stakes films, such as a smalltown farmer in the risque romance Carried Away, a prolific Swiss art dealer in the Basquiat biopic, and a duplicitous father in The Truman Show-aping EDtv in 2005.
