“I’m not doing that”: the one and only movie scene too dangerous for Dennis Hopper to shoot
Based solely on the off-camera antics that defined his peak hell-raising years, it’s reasonable to assume that the only shot in a movie that Dennis Hopper deemed too dangerous to perform was something that presented the immediate risk of death.
After all, this is a guy who once willingly blew himself up with dynamite for no other reason than shits and giggles, so you’d expect that the only place he’d draw the line when on a film set was a similarly death-defying stunt, whether or not it involved similar levels of explosives.
He’s also the guy who tried to clamber onto the wing of a plane mid-flight because he was in the midst of psychotropic hallucinations, got bailed out of a New Mexico prison by Willie Nelson after dropping acid and shooting a tree outside of a casino because he thought it was a bear, and got deported from Australia with a blood alcohol limit that would have killed a lesser man.
The evidence is right there that Hopper had no issues risking his life and well-being when the cameras weren’t rolling, and that’s without even considering how much of his big-screen output in the 1960s and 1970s was made under a haze of heavy drug use and constant drinking, so safety was never really a concern.
And yet, the one thing that gave him cause for concern was relatively simple, on paper at least. In Tony Scott’s Quentin Tarantino-scripted crime thriller, True Romance, the unforgettable scene between Hopper and Christopher Walken was supposed to have the latter press a prop gun right against the former’s forehead and pull the trigger.
He had his reasons for refusing, and he was proven correct. “Dennis says, ‘I’m not doing that,'” Scott recalled to Robert J Emery. “I said, ‘Dennis, it is perfectly safe. There’s nothing to it’. Dennis said, ‘I don’t like that. The gun against my head freaks me out, man’. So, I said, ‘Dennis, watch me. I’ll do it. I’ll rehearse it for you.'”
The director was a man of his word, but he underestimated the effects. Scott had the prop master place a Beretta “right against my forehead” and pull the trigger. “It left this perfect hole in my forehead,” the filmmaker confessed. “So, Dennis is standing there and says, ‘Oh my god’. And then there’s this blood.”
Scott was left with “this ring in my forehead the size of a wedding band, with blood pouring down between my eyes,” leaving Hopper to utter the four words he knew were coming as soon as he declared the sequence was perfectly safe before being left a bloodied mess: “I told you so.”
In the end, Hopper’s character was killed with a bullet to the forehead, but after Scott’s attempt to convince him that having it pressed right against his temple was nothing to worry about went awry, Walken pulled the trigger from a much safer distance instead.
