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This is fresh air.

I'm Terry Gross.

We're going to continue our series classic films and movie icons

with interviews from our archive with Dennis Hopper and Isabella Rossellini, two stars of the groundbreaking

1986 film Blue Velvet.

All right, we're giving our neighbor Joyride. Let's get on with it. Anyone want to go in a joy ride with us? How about you?

That's Dennis Hopper and the film Blue Velvet, which was directed by David Lynch, who described

Hopper as sort of the perfect American dangerous hero. Blue Velvet was one of Hopper's

comeback films. A few years before that, he'd been institutionalized, paranoid, and totally disoriented from years of drugs and alcohol.

Early in his career, he was in two defining films about youth culture, Rebel Without a Cause,

in which he had a small part, an easy rider which he directed and starred in with Peter Fonda.

While Hopper was still using drugs, he played a drug-addled photojournalist

in Apocalypse Now. Dennis Hopper died in 2010 of prostate cancer at the age of 74. We're going to hear excerpts of two interviews

with him starting with the one we recorded in 1990. We began by talking

about his role in Blue Velvet as Frank Booth, a crazy, dangerous, and weird character.

Hopper said that when he read the script, he told Director David Lynch, I am Frank.

I really understood Frank. I didn't have a problem with Frank. I understood I just

understood him and I called David. I'd never met David and he'd given me the

...