Billy easy rider movie#

The filmmakers had to show the movie to the different bands involved in order to get licensing approval, and each band received $1000. That’s where I got ‘Born to Be Wild’ and ‘The Pusher’ and all those songs.”

“But I wanted Easy Rider to be kind of a time capsule for that period, so while I was editing the film I would listen to the radio. “No one had really used found music in a movie before, except to play on radios or when someone was singing in a scene,” Hopper told Interview Magazine. Instead of hiring a musician to compose a score for the film, Hopper decided to use pre-recorded music from Bob Dylan, The Band, Steppenwolf, and Jimi Hendrix on the soundtrack. It was one of the first films to integrate found music. But of course, he was hip enough to realize, a minute later, that their death was more or less mandatory.” 3. It wasn’t until the end that it took on a genuinely artistic dimension-when it suddenly evolved into an indictment of the American redneck, and his hatred and intolerance for anything remotely different from himself-somewhat to the surprise of Den Hopper: ‘You mean kill ‘em both? Hey, man, are you outta your gourd?!?’ I think for a minute he was still hoping they would somehow beat the system and sail into the sunset with a lot of loot and freedom. “Use the money to buy a boat in Key West and sail into the sunset was the general notion, and that was slated to be the film’s final poetic sequence.

“The initial idea had to do with a couple of young guys who are fed up with the system, want to make one big score, and split,” Terry Southern told Creative Screenwriting. One of the most shocking things about Easy Rider is its ending, where both of the leads violently perish. The film's original ending involved Bill and Wyatt sailing into the sunset. And then I think it went a bit far, because I kept seeing movie people vomit.” 2. “When you went to see a movie like Easy Rider and when you saw these guys really smoking grass by the fire, and really the camaraderie was warm, real, and rare, you went, ‘What the hell am I looking at? This has value! This has a completely different kind of value than Pillow Talk,” she said in the documentary Easy Riders, Raging Bulls. Karen Black, who co-starred in the film, agreed with Fonda’s sentiment. We made a movie for these people that didn’t have their own movie.” “Those were not really films of the youth that I had grown into and up with, shutting away the establishment, going on their own. Beach Blanket Bingo? C’mon,” Fonda told The Hollywood Reporter in 2015. “They were making films like Pillow Talk and The Glass Bottom Boat. Easy Rider was made for the youth of the time.īefore Easy Rider, Hollywood was churning out happier films starring the effervescent Doris Day, but Dennis Hopper’s film changed that. Despite a difficult shoot, it launched the prosperous New Hollywood period of moviemaking, and ignited a revolution in cinema that we haven’t recaptured since. Shot on a budget of well under $1 million, the 1969 guerilla film went on to gross more than $60 million worldwide the Criterion Collection referred to the movie as “the definitive counterculture blockbuster.” After filming finished in 1968, it took Hopper one year to edit 80 hours of footage-which included scenes of real drug use and a jaw-dropping conclusion-into a 95-minute feature that premiered at Cannes on May 12, 1969. Peter Fonda and Jack Nicholson also starred, and Fonda co-wrote the script with Terry Southern and Hopper, and produced it. Once called The Loners, Dennis Hopper co-wrote, directed, and starred in the Oscar-nominated biker flick about two men riding motorcycles from Los Angeles to New Orleans to Florida during the tumult of the Vietnam-era ’60s. Easy Rider’s tagline of “A man went looking for America and couldn’t find it anywhere” transcended moviedom.

Billy easy rider