Apocalypse Now is one of the five best films I’ve seen in my entire life. I’m saddened to hear that Dennis Hopper has passed on. He was one of the more memorable parts of Apocalypse Now despite a fairly small role. A couple of choice quotes from The Photojournalist.
“What are they gonna say about him? What are they gonna say? That he was a kind man? That he was a wise man? That he had plans? That he had wisdom? Bullshit man!”
You can’t travel in space, you can’t go out into space, you know, without, like, you know, uh, with fractions. What are you going to land on - one-quarter, three-eighths? What are you going to do when you go from here to Venus or something? That’s dialectic physics.
Hopper had a pretty interesting and varied career in the cinema and on the television, appearing in Rebel Without a Cause along with writing and directing Easy Rider. Many folks in Hollywood would have been happy to call that a career. My only thought is that somehow Hopper and Quentin Tarantino should have worked on a project together. Yeah, Hopper had that really uncomfortable scene with Christopher Walken in True Romance, which was written by Tarantino, but it’s not quite the same. Hopper and Harvey Keitel working together and directed by Tarantino? Intense!!
Godspeed kind sir.
Photo courtesy of antje verena via a Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 2.0 Generic license