Dennis Hopper on shooting the scene with Christopher Walken in True Romance:
Everywhere I go, all over the world, I was just in China making a film, I was just in South Africa making a film, I made a film last year in Germany – and everywhere I go they talk about this scene. We shot this in one day, Chris Walken and I. It was a wonderful wonderful creative day. When I first came in in the morning I saw that they were lit to do Chris Walken’s part first. They had three cameras and they had lit the trailer that way. And Tony came up to me, Tony Scott the director, and he said, “I just talked to Chris and Chris has a problem going first. He’d like you to go first. Do you mind that?” And I said, “As an actor, I don’t mind, but as a director, I’d go crazy. How do you feel about it? You’ve got a 2 1/2 hour lighting job to do here to turn it around.” Tony said, “It doesn’t bother me at all.” So I said, “Well, it’s fine with me.” So he re-lit the scene. It took about 2 1/2 hours to turn it around, put the three cameras on me. Tony Scott, a terrific director, one of the best I’ve ever worked with. Morgan Creek put a lot of money into promotion of this movie but it wasn’t successful when it was first released, financially. Artistically it was. I was never at a preview that didn’t have wonderful cards, 90% approval rating. A lot of people think this scene was improvised but this was one of those rare scenes in a movie that Tarantino wrote, you have 3 pages of dialogue from one person, 3 pages of dialogue from the other – the only improvisation was, “You know, you’re all part eggplant” and he said, “You’re a cantaloupe” – those are the only improvised words, the rest of it is word for word what Tarantino wrote. I remember what my teacher Lee Strasberg said: If you watch people on a sound stage or in a radio booth where you can’t hear what they’re saying, you can tell whether they’re acting or not just by the way they’re behaving. And it looks like Chris and I are living and not acting here. Just before we shot the scene, Tony said, “Now, I’ve got this one gimmick where I’m gonna put the gun right up to your head and he can fire it because they’ve fixed the blanks so they won’t come out and you’ll see flame coming out the sides, but everything will be great.” I said, “I don’t really trust that.” He said, “Let me show you, I’ll do it to myself.” So he shot himself in the forehead. Blood started dripping down his face and he said, “Oh. Maybe I won’t do it that way.” He sent me a nice little card and he wrote on it, “If you ever need a stuntman …” and there was a picture of him with the bleeding on his forehead. Tony Scott couldn’t have been more wonderful to work with.
From the special edition of “True Romance”, selective commentaries special features.
This brief scene, to me, is more powerful than Hopper’s entire performance as Frank in “Blue Velvet.”
Oh, no doubt. For me, it’s in the moment when he accepts he is going to die (when he decides to take the cigarette). It’s a flash across his face, but then … he decides to go out blazing. Powerful. He will hurt this man, he will wound him … and he does.
Such a beautiful scene, and maybe my single favorite bit of Taraninian exchange. I didn’t even mention it in my brief piece on Scott because it conjures too much. There’s just too much to cover in the glances and gestures between Hopper and Walken, and the lyrical lighting that makes that whole movie a fairy tale even at its most gruesome.
I now wish I’d said something about Scott’s gift with actors, how he redefined Denzel as maybe the consumate working-class hero, stripping away Denzel’s glamor for the sake of making him an ordinary guy, and then making him extraordinary again. Kim Morgan’s interview with Scott honed in on how great Jim Caviezel is in Deja Vu, and then of course there’s the treatment of Tom Cruise in Top Gun (and, to a lesser extent, Days of Thunder). The man knew how to make a STAR. It’s a shame Domino didn’t do that for Knightley. I loved her going batshit in that and wish she did that more often than suiting up in a corset and huffing. (A Dangerous Method was like manna from heaven for me.)
So much dross comes out of Hollywood that clearly uses Scott’s work as a blueprint, but it’s not his foundation that sucks, it’s everyone else’s inability to match what he does (or I guess did, now. Fuck). Blockbusters just got a whole lot less interesting.
This scene has so much tension and quiet, desperate verisimilitude. Hopper’s control is so complete that at the moment he falters, he’s making himself falter as an actor even, to get the degree of human fear required. The smoke ribbons alone are enough to make the audience scream. I haven’t seen it in years and yet I can smell the gunpowder right now.
It’s a great example of what Tarantino learned, I believe, from Arthur Penn’s Bonnie and Clyde, and used repeatedly in his work — dangle the audience out over a cliff with humor and irony, make them laugh but never too much, never enough to forget they’re dangling — them boom, drop them into violence. The intensely gruesome scene with Virgil the hit man; same trick. Gary Oldman’s masterpiece scene; same technique.
This picture is one of the underrated brilliancies in recent history, and the cast! Forget about Chris Walken — perfection! What about Patricia, and that insanely funny cameo by Brad Pitt? Oh, that Tony Scott is reading us praising him, or that he can sense it somehow — True Romance is a permanent cherry bomb in my memory.