“And last but not least, this is a film, Easy Rider, with a special kind of impact for me and history because at some point something strange happened to me. I finished my first film and I was flying back to Romania from some festival in Karlovy Vary or somewhere, and once I got to Europe I got this million messages on my telephone that Dennis Hopper wanted to meet me, which at that moment looked as a very funny piece of information. So I flew back to Romania and what was happening is that Dennis Hopper was shooting as an actor a film in Bucharest, and he stayed so long there, he met the local community of expats and somebody gave him a screenplay just for an opinion. But instead of just delivering this opinion, he decided he wanted to direct that thing, and he gave it to his Romanian producers for which he was working, that it was a piece in his film. And they told him, "Look, this film is about the Romanian Revolution, so the screenplay is not very good. You need a local writer that could write in English." And they checked into their telephones and actually there weren't too many writers who had written something in English, and they found me. I had written a screenplay which got an international award, so it was translated, and Hopper read the screenplay and we met in 24 hours, and he watched my first film. So I think that a week from that moment I was in Wilmington, Carolina here, and for two months I spent time with him rewriting that screenplay. And I think the experience was better than the screenplay, but it brought me closer not only to his films, but to him as a character, and he was a character.”
