Hopper/Welles

One evening in 1970, young movie rebel Dennis Hopper accepted an invitation from Hollywood’s maverick suprême, Orson Welles, to spend a night drinking and talking together. Several cameras filmed the meeting at Welles’ behest, as he might want to use some of the footage for The Other Side of the Wind, his free-wheeling meta-movie behemoth which he didn’t live to see finished.

Producer Filip Jan Rymsza and editor Bob Murawski made a final version of it in 2018, using Welles’ working print and notes, and surely some of their own imagination. It was also they who unleashed this strange creation, which one could consider a documentary if it weren’t for Hopper addressing Welles by his ‘Wind’ name Jake, which makes it clear that both are acting – and thus even factually correct utterances must be taken with a grain of salt. A 1960s beast, partly true and partly fiction.