Filip Jan Rymsza – Hopper/Welles #Venezia77

PODCAST | Matt Micucci interviews Filip Jan Rymsza, producer of the film Hopper/Welles.

A conversation with Filip Jan Rymsza, producer with Royal Road Entertainment, which presented the film Hopper/Welles in collaboration with Grindhouse Releasing and Fixafilm at the 77th Venice International Film Festival. A must-see for cinephiles and film history lovers, this is an over two-hour long conversation between icons Orson Welles and Dennis Hopper. In this interview, Rymsza shares how this previously unseen footage emerged and how it came to be released as a standalone feature. He also talks about the relationship between Hopper and Welles, which shaped the dynamics of the conversation and that Rymsza points out some have referred to as an interrogation.

Hopper/Welles: Presented for the first time at 77th Venice Film Festival, 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.