Easy Rider

Dennis Hopper viewed the making of Easy Rider passionately as something exciting and new, something adventurous and something that would be meaningful in the future. He enjoyed a legendary five decade career as actor, filmmaker, photographer, and artist. From 1954 onwards he was a jobbing actor mostly appearing in supporting roles in mainstream Hollywood productions, but his often insolent on set behaviour eventually resulted in diminishing offers of work. When Easy Rider came along, he was on a fast track to nowhere. Although Hopper had never directed a movie and there were ongoing arguments with producer and star Peter Fonda, this $300,000 movie went on to make $40 million at the box office. It inspires decades of independent, alternative low-budget filmmaking and kick-starts the career of Jack Nicholson. Major studios quickly realised that there was money to be made from independent movies that were low on costs, but large on creativity and the 1970s work of such maverick directors as Bob Rafelson, Robert Altman and Arthur Penn is Easy Rider 's outstanding cinematic legacy. The film itself is now a time capsule that captures the sights and sounds of a conformist and corrupt America in the 1960s - the tensions, paranoia bigotry and violence as well as the spirit of a fearful young generation and their search for freedom that is so vividly personified by two hippie bikers travelling from Los Angeles to New Orleans only for their odyssey to meet a truly shocking end.

Date	Time	Venue
7/8/2016 (Sun) #	2:00pm	Cinema, Hong Kong Film Archive

# Post-screening talk with Herman Yau

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