As part of the 58th edition of the New York Film Festival, a series of free NYFF video chats with filmmakers was presented, including a talk featuring the team behind Hopper/Welles.
For those who missed the September 29 live stream, there is now a NYFF video of it on YouTube focusing on two festival offerings: Hopper/Welles and Raul Ruiz’ The Tango of the Widower and Its Distorting Mirror. In this online discussion, the resurrectors of both films — producer Filip Jan Rymzsa and editor Bob Murawski in the case of Hopper/Welles, and Valeria Sarmiento, the filmmaker, editor, and widow of Ruiz — focus on fashioning a completed film out of fragments left behind by an iconic filmmaker.
Check out the 50-minute video on YouTube or below.
Comprised of previously unknown interview footage uncovered and assembled by Rymsza and Murawski, Hopper/Welles captures a November 1970 conversation shot during The Other Side of the Wind between Orson Welles and Easy Rider director Dennis Hopper. Two cameras filmed the approximately two-and-a-half-hour conversation, which has been trimmed to 130 minutes.
The overwhelming majority of the two-camera, black and white footage — lit only by hurricane lamps and the glow of a fireplace — had never been publicly seen before. It was among the 1,083 reels of The Other Side of the Wind footage that was inventoried and scanned in 2017.
Film historian Joseph McBride’s review of Hopper/Welles can be found at wellesnet.com/hopper-welles-easy-rider-mcbride and our interview with Rymsza and Murawski at wellesnet.com/inside-hopper-welles
HOPPER/WELLES
Director: Orson Welles
Producer: Royal Road Entertainment (Filip Jan Rymsza)
Co-producers: Grindhouse Releasing (Bob Murawski) and Fixafilm (Wojciech Janio)
Executive producers: Jon Anderson, Jonathan Gardner
Cast: Dennis Hopper, Orson Welles with Janice Pennington and Glenn Jacobson
Director of photography: Gary Graver
Cutter: Bob Murawski, a.c.e.
Assistant editor: Dov Samuel
Camera operators: Gary Graver, John Willheim
Assistant camera: Connie Graver
Gaffer: R. Michael Stringer
Sound: Bob Dietz, Jussi Tegelman
Title design: Garson Yu
Running time: 130 minutes
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