Surprise nudity and uncontrollable laughter: Dennis Hopper’s first scene with Isabella Rossellini on ‘Blue Velvet’
‘Disturbing’, ‘nightmarish’, and ‘unsettling’ were all adjectives proudly plastered onto the movie poster for David Lynch’s 1986 masterpiece Blue Velvet. As the master of madness, Lynch looked at the death of the American dream and delved beyond the picket fences of the suburbs, in one of the most alluring and confounding manners ever put to screen.
It earmarked him, (pun intended), as a cinematic craftsman, and like many auteurs before him, he also upheld the tradition of being equally idiosyncratic behind the scenes. In fact, the weirdness you see unfurl in Blue Velvet, that pairs flashpoints of madness with a strange liminal equanimity and youthful innocence, is mirrored entirely by the creative frenzy on-set. While the crew might look back on it as an amazing experience, there are more than a few anecdotes from the cutting room floor that typify the strangeness of the proceedings.
One of which, is the tale of filming what became known as the “ritualistic r-pe scene” between Dennis Hopper and Isabella Rossellini. The energy was frantic from the get-go. Hopper had reportedly beaten off intense competition for the role of the fierce Frank by yelling, “I’ve got to play Frank. Because I am Frank!” This apparently amused Lynch who found the outburst fitting and handed him the role, apparently oblivious to the fact that Hopper’s proclamation essentially declared, ‘I see so much of myself in this depraved madman’.
Echoing this fit-for-the-role casting, was Isabella Rossellini, who played Dorothy Vallens, a stage performer who becomes entrapped as a sadomasochistic slave. Proof that she was primed for this role comes from one off her most recent exploits whereby she wrote and presented a series of performances based on the mating habits of various animals, deploying a strap-on spam javelin to cavort in the fashion of a thrusting earthworm.
Thus, with the picture firmly painted of the odd mix of eroticism and meshuga in the air, the first moment of filming was to set to commence between Hopper and Rossellini. Once again, it is not known why Lynch thought this would be a fitting ice-breaker for the pair. Action was called—unbeknownst to Hopper, and, indeed, much of the crew, Rossellini opted to go completely nude under her blue velvet robe for the sake of fidelity to the fictional situation.
So, within seconds of the first scene that Hopper and Rossellini had ever filmed with together, Hopper was drawn to his knees, and his face was thrust between parting legs that then exposed an entirely unsheathed vagina. Naturally, this was quite an introduction to filming on Blue Velvet for the Apocalypse Now star. By all accounts, he took it in his stride.
Meanwhile, behind the camera, Lynch had succumbed to a fit of uncontrollable laughter. The surreal nature of the situation induced in Lynch, the man who was supposed to be in control of the whole thing, a bout of nervous giggles. This began to catch on, while the stone-faced Rossellini purveyed the madness with utter bewilderment. She might have been too flummoxed to laugh then, but now, she claims she can’t watch the utterly disturbing scene without breaking out in hysterics at the comic memories it conjures.
In an attempt to quell the frenetic atmosphere, Lynch decided not to say the word ‘fuck’ during the entirety of the filming. Hopper recalls that while giving instructions, he would simply point to a copy of the script and say ‘that word’. Hopper quipped, “He can write it, but he won’t say it. He’s a peculiar man.” While Lynch might be coy about profanity, he has since clarified that the rationale on this occasion was because he feared that anymore degeneracy and strangeness on set and the whole thing might have turned into a tinderbox, and as a result, he just about kept a lid on one of the most entrancing films in Hollywood history.
