Director Terry Gilliam, March 1998, in the matter of Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas But he’s reporting as if he’s a front-line war correspondent.” And rather than going where real guns were being fired and real people were dying, he goes to the heart of America: Vegas. It just happened that the bombardment was a self-bombardment, with drugs, and his brain was the battleground. “Hunter wrote that as if he was a war correspondent. THOMPSON: I’m very conscious of the blood.Ģ. And I’m sure they would choose Florence Henderson over me.” THOMPSON: Well, he was a homeboy from Kentucky who had been spurned by his own people.ĭEPP: He said, “You mean you’re not in the Kentucky Hall of Fame?” I said, “Fuck no.
ME: What did you think of him, that first meeting? By the time we left, after the explosion, and no one had been badly burned and lost any limbs, she was Ok.” “Hunter, being a Southern gentleman, went out of his way to try to make her comfortable. “She just thought Hunter was a madman and horribly dangerous, and that we should escape as soon as possible,” says Depp. “A seventy-five-foot explosion, an enormous, huge burst of fire.” Though Depp was having fun, this violent late-night behavior made others in his party a little edgy. He’s survived all these years.”ĭepp hit the target first time. You know he was not going to get you killed, somehow. “He knew what he was going to do,” Depp says. They took the completed bomb into the back yard. “The fatal words.” Leading Depp into the kitchen, Thompson suggested they put the gun to use: “He hands me a propane tank – I’ve got a cigarette hanging out of my mouth – and he hands me this thing about the size of a matchbox and says, ‘Tape these on the propane canister.’ I was, ‘What are these things?’ and he says, ‘Oh, that’s nitroglycerin.’ The cigarette immediately went in the sink.” “Hunter said, ‘Come with me,'” Depp says. “My father was a real gun fanatic I shot guns when I was eight years old.” I probably told him, ‘Yeah, she gets a severe beating.'” As the evening wound on, Depp’s party was invited up to the home that’s referred to, on the back flap of Thompson’s most recent book, as “a fortified compound.” Safely inside, Depp admired a beautiful nickel-plated shotgun on the wall. I was with Kate, and I think he went straight for the romance jugular, shit like whether I beat her enough. “He zeroes in on faults and good points immediately. “I remember laughing constantly,” says Depp. It seemed like watching Oklahoma go on for three years.” “I never saw the end, of course,” Thompson apologizes, “because I had a little acid.
He had seen only one of Depp’s movies, Cry-Baby. You could see it, crackling up.” Depp laughs. “In walks Hunter, wielding two cattle prods,” Depp recalls. One friend suggested they go to Thompson’s local hangout, the Woody Creek Tavern. The Private Lives of Liza Minnelli (The Rainbow Ends Here)ĭepp had gone to Aspen, Colorado, with a party that included Kate Moss and her mother.