by Jason Adams

Picture it: the year is 1970 and the director Orson Welles has just recently begun filming his experimental film The Other Side of the Wind, the production of which would ultimately outlast the director himself (Welles died in '85) and many of the people he put in front of his camera. (Wind was finally released by Netflix in 2018 after nearly 50 years of tinkering.) One such person Welles filmed was actor-turned-director Dennis Hopper, who was fresh off his counter-culture sensation Easy Rider. Strange bedfellows, these two, but they sat down for over two hours of filmed and oft-antagonistic conversation, and now producer Filip Jan Rymsza and editor Bob Murawski, who finally got Wind across the finish line, have gifted us with Hopper/Welles, the fly-on-the-wall footage of that moment screening at NYFF. It's something!

Full disclosure: I went in to Hopper/Welles expecting to find Welles a bit of a boor and Hopper a pip. Fuller disclosure: I came out with quite the opposite...