Punk Filmmaker Fabrizio Federico praises Dennis Hopper's unsung masterpiece
Shot in Peru in 1970 in a narcotic haze, Dennis Hopper's follow up to Easy Rider is the purest experimental mainstream film ever released in Hollywood. Problem is not many people have seen this gem. It has been in exile for 50 years, in limbo as a low resolution bootleg DVD, which is how I first came across it, but it changed my life.
I first watched this amazing movie alone in a school library and it lit a firecracker under me, I had to make a movie! I give The Last Movie complete responsibility for inspiring me to make a film unlike any other. So with no experience what so ever I decided to finish the job Hopper had started in 1970. Now in 2011 I finally completed my first feature film Black Biscuit, I tore up the rule book on cinema and made an anti film with non-actors, no script, shot on mobile phones and toy cameras about a filmmaker lost in a wasteland of prostitution, money and sleaze.
The fact that a major Hollywood studio produced this psychedelic midnight movie is astounding, but once released it was misunderstood, and buried deep; even though it's lyrical beauty is evident in every frame. Easy Rider captured a cultural zeitgeist but The Last Movie could have changed the course of cinema forever if it had been handled differently.
The PINK8 cinema manifesto was born out of this, and just like Hopper; who already had a reputation for wildness, I threw it all away in a hurricane of spotlight, ego and hallucinogenics, but in the process I saved my damned soul, at odds with a system that still didn't understand real youth-quake provoking cinema, and the fact that Arbelos films have had the balls to make a move on re-releasing this masterpiece is better then twenty Christmas put together!!
To me The Last Movie is an allegory about the world as a whole and how it is destroying it's self, and becoming more self conscious and media trained which is boring as fuck. Hopper will always personify to me the true meaning of what an artist truly is; mercurial, insanely talented and untamed.
