The Last Movie - History

History

The Last Movie was a long-time pet project of Hopper and writer Stewart Stern. (Stern had written Rebel Without a Cause, in which Hopper played a small role.) After developing the script in the early 1960s, Hopper tried for years to secure financing for the film, intending it to be his directorial debut. Due to the artistically challenging nature of the film, no studios were interested until Hopper's actual first film as a director, Easy Rider, became a massive hit in 1969.

Given free rein on a budget of $1 million from Universal, Hopper spent much of 1970 in Peru shooting the film under the working title Chinchero, bringing many of his actor and musician friends to Peru, including singer Kris Kristofferson and director Samuel Fuller. With hours and hours of footage, Hopper holed up in his home editing studio in Taos, New Mexico, but failed to deliver a cut by the end of 1970. Hopper was in a period of severe alcohol and drug abuse (as shown in an extremely rare and barely released documentary called The American Dreamer, which was directed by Lawrence Schiller), but managed to put together a fairly straightforward cut in terms of conventional storytelling. He was mocked over it by his friend, cult director Alejandro Jodorowsky, who urged him to edit the film unconventionally and attempt to break new cinematic ground, which caused Hopper to destroy that edit and craft the more disjointed narrative that is known today, and he finally completed that final edit in the spring of 1971.