Excerpted from Thursday night’s Blue Velvet Q&A with Dennis Hopper...
Julie Cruise is still singing. She is singing with three or four different bands. I just heard her sing in Paris with a German band, and they were great, unbelievably good. Julie Cruise is alive and well, and singing.
The story of Dennis and Frank: Dennis was considered very, very early on, and everybody around said, "No, no, no, no. You can’t work with Dennis." So that kind of drifted away, but then looking and looking, there was nobody, honestly, nobody like Dennis. Things have a way of working out. So one day I get a call from Dennis’ manager, who says Dennis is clean and sober; Dennis has made another picture, and you should talk to the director and he’ll tell you how great it was. All I needed to hear was that, but then Dennis called me. I said, "Hello?" He said, "This is Dennis Hopper. I have to play Frank because I am Frank."
I always think films are like little children, so you don’t want to say which is your favorite. But then I add: Dune is a very, very bad little film-child.
I would love to work with Dennis again. I hope it happens. Dennis is, I always thought, one of the coolest actors in the world. Dennis came out of Kansas and went up into Hollywood, and was with all the girls back in the ‘50s. So many stories and such a life. And he was in a transition, where the Old Guard was going away and a brand new thing was starting, which really didn’t catch on until the ‘60s, but Dennis was there at the very, very, very beginning.
Think of the great, great actors who have gone and how great it would have been to work with them. What a thrill it would have been to work with Elijah Cook Jr.
The original cuts of all films are super long. But it’s not the finished film, so you whittle away and you work and you work and you work, and you try to get that thing true to the original idea. And some scenes that we loved, they do not fit and work in the final thing. So the cut of Blue Velvet is the cut. It’s the Director’s Cut. There isn’t any other cut. But there’s a scene when Frank goes to visit Ben, down in the back of the bar where there’s a pool table. Two parts to this scene, and I always wanted to get that, because we cut the scene. It really was beautiful. It was almost too much of a good thing for the film, and it went out. I’ve looked and looked for that, but that scene is gone. It’s Winkie's and the pool table and Dennis going, “You’re really going up in flames this time, motherfucker.”
I’m very careful to pin down specific meanings for myself, and I don’t want to putrify others’ experiences. So if you knew the meanings of things and you come up with your thing, it’ll be valid; it’ll be as valid as mine. But you have to know what you’re doing. Sometimes ideas come: "What does this mean? What does this mean?" You struggle and you focus and you think, and the answers come. But you’ve got to know what you’re doing for yourself.
Actors are magical creatures. They live in an abstract word. They can catch a thing like his [grabs at air].
[The role of Frank] rang all the bells in Dennis. He walked in…I met Dennis in the living room of Dorothy Vallens' apartment for the first time, and it was Frank, really.
Dennis, what do you want to be remembered for?
Hopper: Uh…I don’t know.
There isn’t going to be another Dune. There may be a Blue Velvet 2010.
I don’t develop ideas; I catch ideas. But I love Ronnie Rocket and I just read it again. I just don’t know why, but I’m not quite ready to go there.
The place where we live conjures ideas. The world we live in conjures ideas. I live in Hollywood and ideas come, but they don’t have nothing to do really with real Hollywood. It just conjures it, and stories come out that I fall in love with. I always fall in love with them, I say, for two reasons: the story and the way cinema can tell the story. So you fall in love with certain ideas and go and translate those ideas into cinema. And Hollywood, it’s impossible to catch, because it’s always changing.
Hopper: I’ve never talked about this. I don’t even know if David knows this. I assume that David knows this but I’m not sure he knows this. But that first day, that scene on the set when I ask—demand—Isabella to show me her private parts, uh…the camera was behind her, and she did.
Lynch: I knew that.
Hopper: I assumed that. But I never really knew. Because her back was to the camera, and David was behind the camera.
Lynch: Dennis was a little flat in the performance up to that point.
Am I going to go back to television? No. But the Internet’s the new television, so I have always liked the idea of a continuing story, so now the Internet can be the new home for that.
When I introduced Inland Empire, I read a thing from the Aitareya Upanishad. I’ll repeat that to you, and then I want to say I hope you enjoy Blue Velvet. The verse is: “We are like the spider. We weave our life and then move along in it. We are like the dreamer who dreams and then lives in the dream. This is true for the entire universe.” Thank you.
Lynch's Inland Empire arrives on DVD August 15.
- Julie Seabaugh