Hopper/Welles

Presented for the first time at 77th Venice Film Festival, Hopper/Welles is an intimate and revelatory 1970 conversation between two film giants, Dennis Hopper, then riding high on the massive success of Easy Rider, and Orson Welles, ever the iconoclast and an offscreen interviewer of probing authority. Both had emerged from notoriety to change the face of cinema. It seems only natural that they would meet – and so they did, over a long, boisterous dinner. Captured during the guerrilla shooting of Welles’ troubled, long-in-the-making The Other Side of the Wind (and Hopper’s own difficult editing of The Last Movie), the back and forth yields two fascinatingly similar characters: the elder lion in winter and the younger rebrand headed for a fall from grace. Their subjects are legion and the questions run deep. Is a director a “god” or a “magician”? Will America survive its own violence? Sex, liberation, radical chic and political sincerity—their chat is timelier than ever. Hopper/Welles is an essential piece of movie history, pitched at the hinge of a changing industry, voiced by a pair of filmdom’s most radical creators.

Orson Welles was born into a well-to-do family in Wisconsin in 1915 and grew up surrounded by artists and intellectuals, so that his childhood was spent in a climate of particular creativity. He studied at Todd Seminary for Boys, where he perfected his already evident gifts for drama. At the age of sixteen he went to Ireland, where he managed to get himself hired by the Gate Theatre in Dublin, and began to work in theatre and radio when he returned to the United States. He acted in and staged a series of productions before achieving instant fame in 1938 with the radio broadcast The War of the Worlds, in which he presented a gripping but fictional account of an invasion of New Jersey by Martians that sowed panic among Americans. Signing a major contract at RKO in 1941, he earned a worldwide reputation by directing and starring in Citizen Kane, a movie based on the life of the magnate William Randolph Hearst that was to have a strong influence on filmmaking in the years to come. The difficulty he had in finding producers meant that he only made around a dozen movies, including The Lady from Shanghai, Othello (which won the Golden Palm at the Cannes Film Festival), Macbeth, Mr. Arkadin, Touch of Evil, Le procès and Campanadas a medianoche.

PRODUCTION 1: Filip Jan Rymsza – Royal Road Entertainment
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PRODUCTION 2: Grindhouse Releasing
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PRODUCTION 3: Fixafilm Sp. z o.o.
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WORLD SALES: Nick Ogiony - Creative Artists Agency (North America)
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PRESS OFFICE: Premier
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