Hopper/Welles

Orson Welles – 2020 – USA

Orson Welles interviews Dennis Hopper for his film The Other Side of the Wind, in which Hopper was supposed to play a version of himself, as several other “New Hollywood” directors do in the final film, such as Paul Mazursky, Henry Jaglom and Peter Bogdanovich. Welles is credited as the director, but it can’t really be considered an Orson Welles film since it’s not a project that he ever intended to make into an independent film. The footage is all outtakes from The Other Side of the Wind. It should properly be considered a found-footage film crafted by editor Bob Muraski and producer Filip Jan Rymzsa. In November of 1970, Hopper took a break from editing his second film, The Last Movie, to fly from New Mexico to Los Angeles to shoot the scene for Welles. In the wake of Hopper’s sleeper hit Easy Rider the year before, the industry buzz about the young filmmaker was that he represented the new generation and was also the heir to Welles due to his debut film being a galvanizing game-changer. Undoubtedly, Hopper was eager to do Welles this favor out of respect, (as was the case for nearly all the people who worked on The Other Side of the Wind). Conversely, Welles had no respect for any of these people, including Hopper, and his contempt and jealously was on full display in his many interviews, just as it is in Hopper/Welles. The film could have been a stimulating exchange of ideas between two intelligent and very different filmmakers separated by a generation or two, but that wasn’t Welles’ agenda. He was getting scenes for his own film, and he apparently assured Hopper that he (Welles) would be interviewing him off camera in character, as the fictional ‘Jake Hannaford.’ Trying to play along, Hopper addresses his interviewer as “Jake” a few times, but Welles is strictly himself the entire time, and clearly just wanted Hopper to hang himself on camera and provide an assortment of clips where he appears lazy, pretentious, arrogant and drunk, but it took forever to get him to that point. Welles butters him up for an hour or more by pretending to see him as a colleague, and then gradually puts him on the hot seat in search of some fiery snippets that would work for his film. My question is, why go to so much trouble? Did he not consider that Hopper, a famous method actor, could easily have just given Welles what he wanted by preparing and expressing his thoughts in character as a delusional and pompous young film director? Alternatively, Welles could have written some brief dialogue for Hannaford and the “Dennis Hopper” character to act out. Either choice, aside from being less conniving, would have taken a quarter of the time. If anything, the film shows that Welles was the foolishly indulgent one. The Other Side of the Wind was a threadbare production and Welles was lucky to get together any resources, crew and actors at all. It’s mindboggling that he felt free to lounge around for hours sadistically needling the good-natured Dennis Hopper when he couldn’t possibly have expected that more than a few seconds would be used in his film. In any case, this very theme is relevant to The Other Side of the Wind, a portrait of the director as dictator, and that’s what makes this film fascinating. Like Hannaford, Welles had no compunction about abusing younger people who looked up to him and bitterly resented any of them who were successful filmmakers. Hopper/Welles is highly effective as a real-life dialectical horror movie about passive aggression.