Finally, Rocky and Annabel said, ‘Look, you rewrite the scene, or we’ll go back to the original, whatever you want.’ And finally he goes: ‘OK, we’ll do the scene the way it’s written now.’ Everyone sighs, we go back three and a half hours after it was meant to be done, we do the scene exactly the way it was written when he started.”ĭennis Hopper as villain King Koopa, switched from the games’ giant turtle to a businessman descended from dinosaurs. People were knocking at the door, producers were going out trying to tell people what the fuck was going on. Rocky and Annabel start begging him – they’re like, Dennis, please tell us what you want, we’ll do anything. Meanwhile, there are 300 extras waiting for the next scene. Finally, they say: let’s go to lunch – but lunch turns out to be another two hours of Dennis screaming at the directors and producers about the state of movie making. The producers were looking at their watches, Rocky and Annabel were looking at each other, like, what the fuck can we do? The actors were like, oh my God, this is amazing, this is better than the movie. So I had this idea, let’s create our own. We had a little bit of dialogue, and it sucked. Rocky says ‘Dennis, what is it?’ And he yells: ‘You rewrote my lines! You call this writing? This is shit! It’s shit! And the fact you’d do it without asking me?’ He went on and on. “He’s telling them they’re completely unprofessional, that he’s never seen anything like this. “He just starts screaming at Annabel and Rocky,” recalls Edson. The incendiary actor-director, who had unapologetically told everyone he had taken the role for money alone, stood amid the grandeur of his character’s penthouse suite and exploded. Something was about to go horribly wrong. So the directors ask, ‘What’s up Dennis?’” He’s mumbling to himself, he won’t look at anyone. “Dennis comes in and he’s looking pissed off. “We’re in the bedroom of King Koopa’s skyscraper it’s a big set,” recalls actor and co-star Richard Edson.

He was dressed as a humanoid dinosaur, heavily made up in the sweltering North Carolina heat, his hair gelled into a weird row of reptilian spikes. The lines Hopper was about to deliver had been changed at the last moment, and not for the first time. On set, there were 300 extras waiting to film the next scene. Producers, writers and investors were all working at cross purposes with the directors, the British couple Annabel Jankel and Rocky Morton. Endless rewrites and script splices had scrambled the story and dialogue. It was the summer of 1992, a few weeks into shooting Super Mario Bros: The Motion Picture and the atmosphere on set was febrile.

Super mario bros