Peter Fonda interview
Free-spirit Fonda doesn't look back: Remastered directorial debut a glimpse
of actor's early rebellious days
Calgary Herald
Thursday, October 3, 2002
Page: E7
Section: Arts & Style
Byline: Nick Lewis
The black sheep of the Fonda clan answers the phone in
his hotel room with his mouth full of pasta, and
between the wet sounds of smacking lips, mumbles
something incomprehensible when asked if this is a
bad time to talk.
Fifteen minutes later, he is a more able
conversationalist, although on this afternoon, Peter Fonda sounds
very much like Captain America, his
stoner-hippie-biker character from 1969's Easy Rider.
"Understated?" he'll slur a little later in the
interview. "The critics liked my incredibly understated performance
in (1997's) Ulee's Gold? I remember thinking, where
were they when I did Easy Rider? I mean, you want to talk
understated?
"This is my dialogue from Easy Rider: 'Wow, man. I
mean, that's far out. Beautiful man. Oh, no, they're gonna
make it. You know what, Billy? We blew it.' "
Talking about his 1971 directorial debut The Hired
Hand, though, the 62-year old Fonda is relaxed and candid.
The remastered film is being featured in the Restored
Classics series at the 2002 Calgary International Film
Festival, although Fonda won't be coming to town.
In the film, Fonda plays Harry Collings, who returns
home to his farm after living the life of a drifter with a friend,
Arch (Warren Oates). Harry's wife, Hanna (Verna
Bloom), who had given up on him, reluctantly allows him to
stay on as a hired hand. Soon both Harry and his
friend develop a romantic interest in Hanna.
It was a project Universal Studios allowed Fonda to
work on after the success of Easy Rider, a film he wrote
and his friend Dennis Hopper directed. But the studio
mismarketed The Hired Hand as a buddy action flick,
when it was intended as a lyrical, unconventionally
feminist Western. Universal also rushed the film out
because of the success of Easy Rider, and didn't edit
it to Fonda's plan. The final cut included a shot he
wanted to expunge, which, needless to say, is not in
the remastered film.
"I ran around Europe in 1971, taking the film to
different countries with war notes and a hot splicer," Fonda
says. "I ran into every projection room, grabbed the
reel -- and I still had the long hair and beard from the film,
so they'd be, 'Oh, Charlie Manson's gonna kill us with
a knife!' 'No, it's a hot splicer.' I'd get that bit of the scene,
take the hot splicer and just lob that shot right
out."
Fonda laughs as he recalls this act of rebellion. Son
of Henry, brother of Jane, father of Bridget, Peter's
genetics predispose him to a life of performance. He
grew up watching his father and pal Jimmy Stewart, two
Academy Award winners, construct model airplanes for
him in the family home. When Fonda tells this story,
like he tells most anecdotes, he imitates the people
he's talking about.
"It was all, ostensibly, for me, but of course it was
never for me, it was for the two of them," he says. "I'd watch
these two great men of the theatre spend hours, gluing
and painting and sanding and doing all this stuff, not
saying more than five words to one another.
" 'Yeah, OK, I got C-42' and there'd be a pause.
'Well, that goes into C-13.' 'OK.' And then they wouldn't talk for
another half hour. They were happy as hell, they were
pleased not to have to talk. They were very good friends,
but I always thought it strange that these two great
men of the theatre didn't talk outside it.
"Maybe it was because I was there. They were probably
Chatty Cathy when I left."
Fonda brings up his father Henry several times, and at
one moment, when he admits he sometimes asks
himself, "Will the phone ever ring again?" he
immediately whispers, almost to himself, "my dad used to say
that."
But while the senior Fonda was one of Hollywood's
leading men, Peter Fonda has always been one of the
industry's renegades. He dropped acid with the Beatles
(John Lennon wrote She Said, She Said about it),
smoked weed on the set of Easy Rider, and cost many
naysaying executives their jobs when he proved
motorcycle movies could make money. Then he
disappeared out to sea for almost a decade in the late '70s.
"Everyone who knew about it said, 'He's loaded out of
his gourd.' Well, let me tell you something, you can't do
that when you're ripped, sail a boat 15-20 days
between land. You can't pull over and park, you gotta be on your
toes. I was very happy out there. I didn't come back
to land until seven or eight years later, in 1984."
In a smattering of interviews over the years, Fonda
has always seemed jaded about the world he lives in. "I
don't live my life by what I think others think about
me," he says. "Obviously they don't realize they're talking
about someone who doesn't give a s--t."
Fonda's nonchalance was the spark of inspiration for
Easy Rider, which came to him in a hotel room in
Toronto in 1967. He was there to promote The Trip, a
film about a commercial director whose painful divorce
leads him to find himself through LSD.
As Fonda recalls it, he was at a convention of film
distributors with a tape recorder, collecting audio clips of
people telling him how much they loved his father
Henry and his sister Jane, for a solo music album that he
never recorded. Peter left the tape running during a
speech by a then-unknown Jack Valenti, the newly
appointed president of the Motion Picture Association
of America.
"He says to the audience, 'My friends,' and I have it
on tape, 'My friends, and you are my friends' -- apparently he
didn't think he made his point because he repeated it
-- 'we have to stop making movies about motorcycles,
sex and drugs' -- looking right at me when he says it.
And he says, 'We have to make more movies like Dr.
Doolittle.'
Fonda went back to his motel room and was autographing
publicity stills, when he came across a backlit,
8x10 glossy of himself and Bruce Dern riding his
motorcycle from The Wild Angels. "Suddenly, the lesson of
the day came floating in," Fonda says. " 'No more
movies about motorcycles, drugs and sex.' And I went,
'Boom! That's it!' "
The film was an instant success. In an era of social
protest, young people identified with the free spirits in
Easy Rider, jaded bikers who roam John Ford's America
in search of, well, something. Easy Rider is "a
Southern term for a whore's live-in boyfriend," Fonda
explains. "He's got his 'easy ride' . . . that's what
happened to America, man. Liberty's a whore, and we're
all taking an easy ride."
After they made Easy Rider, Fonda and Hopper had a
falling out. "I think it is so bizarre that Dennis and I aren't
great friends. But he said on television, and on
radio, and in print that I cheated him out of millions and
millions of dollars. I thought that was too much --
'cause he sued me for it and, of course, I hadn't cheated him.
I gave him more than I needed to by contract.
"My wife does not want me to have anything to do with
him. She's so angry at him for the things he's said and
done against me. If the guy would just say . . . say
nothing, and . . . and show up with a great idea, I'd consider
working with him in a second. I really think I chose
the right person to direct my movie Easy Rider."
Fonda is still critical of the United States and
refers to George W. Bush as former governor Bush ("he wasn't
elected"), and in other more colourful terms. He
wanders off into politically incorrect statements about 9/11
(surely he doesn't mean them), and then admits he
shouldn't mix politics with entertainment.
It's a strange disposition for a guy who's called
Captain America by passers-by on the street, and it could be
why Hollywood doesn't call on him more often. But
Fonda says he doesn't regret a thing as he recalls his life.
"Boy those were the days," he says. "I'm certainly
glad I did it instead of turning 62 and going, 'Why didn't you
do that?' No, I did it."
Fonda's long, strange journey
- Son of actor Henry Fonda, father of actress Bridget
Fonda and Justin Fonda, brother of actress Jane Fonda.
- Accidentally shot himself in the stomach when he was
10.
- Arrested once for defacing a sign at a Denver
airport that said, "Feed Jane Fonda to the Whales."
- Broke his back twice in motorcycle accidents.
- John Lennon wrote She Said, She Said about an acid
trip he'd been on during which Fonda kept telling him,
"I know what it's like to be dead, man."
- In Easy Rider (1969), Peter Fonda, Dennis Hopper and
Jack Nicholson were actually smoking marijuana on
camera.
- "I don't trust anybody who didn't inhale." (Time
magazine interview, April 2000)
- Peter Fonda wore his father's (Henry Fonda) watch
throughout the filming of Ulee's Gold (1997) as a
good-luck charm.
- He wore the Captain America jacket and rode his
chopper around L.A. for a week before the shooting of Easy
Rider began, to give them a broken-in look and to get
used to riding the radically designed bike. The American
flag on the back of the jacket and on the gas tank of
the bike caused him to be pulled over several times by the
police.
