Hopper/Welles

Revered mavericks Dennis Hopper and Orson Welles meet for an intimate, free-ranging conversation on everything from politics and sex to the cinema itself in this unmissable slice of film history.

Wild-eyed and hot off the countercultural smash Easy Rider, Hopper is deep in production for his troubled, eventually-notorious The Last Movie. Welles, the veteran iconoclast feted by the emerging film-school generation, is busy preparing his never-to-be-finished The Other Side of the Wind. It’s November 1970, and these two guerrilla auteurs are at their most radical – and about to meet for a boisterous, uninhibited conversation that will become the stuff of legend.

Directed by Welles, who emerges as a probing, provocative presence behind the lens, the resulting two-hour, alcohol-fuelled conversation roams across vast territory: politics, sex, revolution, America and, of course, the cinema – wherein debates rage over the role of the director, the merits of European arthouse filmmakers, Jane Fonda’s activism and the two men’s respective careers. Originally intended as material for Other Side and only recently unearthed, Hopper/Welles is a fascinating, never-before-seen meeting of two outspoken, complicated giants at a crossroads moment in film history; no cinephile can afford to miss this.

“A spirited showdown … This long, drunken party conversation between two filmmaking titans is brain candy for cinephiles.” – IndieWire