There's a New Orson Welles Movie Coming Soon

In the 1970s, Orson Welles made an intimate and revelatory documentary that captures a meeting between the movie industry titan and the then-rising star Dennis Hopper. This was sort of a Frost/Nixon or Elvis/Nixon scenario. 

Head over to Deadline to see the first clip from the feature. It shows the two men discussing filmmaking. At this moment in time, The Other Side of the Wind was being filmed and Welles had already reached the pinnacle of his career. Hopper was just coming off of Easy Rider and had the full breadth of his career ahead of him.

The never-before-seen footage was assembled by producer Filip Jan Rymsza and editor Bob Murawski (The Hurt Locker). They found it in the 1,083 reels of footage for The Other Side Of The Wind, another unfinished Welles film that the duo finished for the Venice Film Festival two years ago.

How did this movie even happen? According to Deadline, "The 1970 meeting came about when Hopper agreed to a cameo role in Welles’ troubled The Other Side Of The Wind. The Citizen Kane director flew Hopper from New Mexico to Los Angeles, where he cooked him a pasta dinner before they spent the evening talking as the cameras rolled. The unscripted and timely conversation between the two film legends—with Welles probing Hopper as the off screen interviewer—spans politics, violence, America, religion, family, sex, and moviemaking."

Sounds like a delight!

Hopper/Welles, which runs 130 minutes, will screen out of competition at the Venice Film Festival, which gets underway next week.