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.

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