The Last Movie

Hopper later said he got the idea for the film when making The Sons of Katie Elder in Mexico. He says he came up with the story and got Stewart Stern to write the script; Stern had written Rebel Without a Cause, in which Hopper played a small role.[1] He stated, "I had time to fantasise as to what would happen when we left this village, leaving behind all the movie set fronts built on their existing adobe houses and church. ... I wanted to use film as film; I wanted to keep saying, you're really just watching a movie."[2]

Hopper tried for several years to secure financing for the film, intending it to be his directorial debut.

In July 1966 the New York Times reported that record producer Phil Spector would help make the movie with Hopper. "It will be an art movie," said Spector. "I am an admirer of Truffaut, Stanley Kubrick, Fellini. It'll be in that tradition. Hollywood needs that kind of movie." Filming was to start in Mexico on 15 September with Haskell Wexler doing cinematography.[3]

However, 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.

Based on the success of Easy Rider, Universal launched a project to give five young film makers $1 million each, and give them free rein to create a movie with little to no intervention from the studio (as had been done on Easy Rider). The other four were The Hired Hand, Taking Off, Silent Running, and American Graffiti, directed by Peter Fonda, Miloš Forman, Douglas Trumbull, and George Lucas, respectively.[2]

In October 1969 Universal announced Hopper would make the film for his Alta Light Production Company.[4] (Hopper wanted to follow The Last Movie with another film called Second Chance about him and Fonda trying to raise money to make Easy Rider.[1] This was never made.) The initial budget was $800,000.[5]

Hopper wanted John Wayne and Henry Hathaway to appear in the movie as a homage to Sons of Katie Elder.[1]

Hopper spent much of 1970 in Peru,[6] bringing many of his actor and musician friends to Peru—including singer Kris Kristofferson and director Samuel Fuller—and shooting the film under the working title Chinchero.

Stewart Stern later said the film was ruined by improvisation saying "That script wasn't taken out of my hands so much as put aside. It's still perfectly serviceable." Stern did not go on location but at Hopper's request, he went to look at a rough cut in Taos: "Mainly, what I felt was very disappointed, not only that he didn't use the scenes as they were written in the screenplay and that he chose to improvise with people who were not up to that kind of improvisation, but also that he hadn't shot scenes that were essential. Including the ending of the picture." He then asked Hopper to shoot the scenes as written but that Hopper would not do it. "He acknowledges the value of the screenplay, but feels that that wasn't the picture that he had in mind then, and that he certainly isn't ashamed of having done what he did. I absolutely respect him for that." Despite these disagreements, Stern said he would be willing to collaborate with Hopper again.[7]

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. He was in a period of severe alcohol and drug abuse (as shown in an extremely rare and barely released documentary titled The American Dreamer, which was directed by Lawrence Schiller and L.M. Kit Carson), 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; he finally completed that final edit in the spring of 1971.