TSPDT

Key Production Country: USA
Key Genres: Drama, Crime, Thriller, Romance, Action-Adventure, Tragedy, Comedy
Key Collaborators: Paul Lewis (Producer), Laszlo Kovacs (Cinematographer), Don Gordon (Leading Character Actor), Julie Adams (Leading Character Actor), Leon Ericksen (Production Designer), Ron Foreman (Production Designer), Grand L. Bush (Character Actor), Sy Richardson (Character Actor)

"Dennis Hopper's career as both an actor and director has, in the course of five decades, swung back and forth between sublime virtuosity and frustrating mediocrity. With a directorial corpus encompassing Easy Rider (1969), the film which 'single-handedly created the road movie as a vital post-1960s genre', the audacious experimentalism of The Last Movie (1971), the urban nihilism of Colors (1988), and the whimsical hack of The Hot Spot (1990), and Chasers (1994), Hopper has always sat uneasily in Hollywood, where self-conscious stylistic and political militancy represents at best an economic gamble, and at worst, business suicide." - Paul Watson (Contemporary North American Film Directors, 2002)

"The rambunctious nature of Hopper's directorial art was arrived at from a variety of disciplines: He was a Shakespearean and, later, Strasberg-trained Method actor; studio contract player; painter; sculptor; photographer whose pictures appeared in Vogue and other magazines; and early collector of Warhol, Ruscha, Rauschenberg and Johns." - Steve Chagollan (DGA, 2018)

"The wayward actor and director whose film career has been subject to steep peaks and deep valleys. Known to have been an obstinate young actor early in his career, he became a director notorious for his drug use. Perhaps best known for having directed, coscripted, and costarred in Easy Rider (1969) - a landmark movie that temporarily changed the face of Hollywood - Hopper later emerged in the 1980s from a hell of his own creation to shine as a brilliant character actor and imaginative director." - The Encyclopedia of Hollywood, 2004

"As a ‘tourist’ filmmaker, each cinematic work directed by Dennis Hopper exists as a unique visual study of American life. From independent features to big-budget studio films, Hopper’s films continuously saw what conventional Hollywood eyes failed to see: alternative aesthetic connections between American cinema and the fine arts, along with the underlying social and political connections between the American art world and ordinary life. While juggling the role of both artist and curator throughout his career, Hopper has left the world with six diverse motion pictures that are rare in that they see the potential in images and characters that were deemed unimportant or unworthy of cinematic space for lengthy periods of history." - Joanna Elena Batsakis (Senses of Cinema, 2017)

"Dennis Hopper is one of the great iconoclasts of American cinema. As an actor in the 1950s, he fetched up in Rebel Without a Cause (1955) and Giant (1956) and was traumatized by James Dean's death in 1955… By the late 1960s he had turned to directing and 1969's Easy Rider became an Urtext of countercultural revolt made for $375,000 but making $19 million in North America alone… One of Hollywood's unhinged geniuses, Hopper remains a model for true independence in American filmmaking." - Richard Armstrong (The Rough Guide to Film, 2007)

"Like all artists I want to cheat death a little and contribute something to the next generation." - Dennis Hopper