Larry Bishop in Hell Ride Courtesy of Third Rail Releasing/The Weinstein Company

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While the '60s are primarily known as a time of anti-war demonstrations, St. Pepper and Woodstock, another counterculture movement was brewing: the outlaw badass bikers, as exemplified by Dennis Hopper and Peter Fonda in Easy Rider. The drive-ins were full of over-the-top cult flicks like Wild in the Streets, The Savage Seven, Angel Unchained, and Chrome and Hot Leather, and Hell Ride's Larry Bishop was in all of them.

Bishop was exposed to Hollywood at an early age thanks to his father, Rat Packer Joey Bishop, and his Beverly Hills high school education, and his rise to fame was quick. But after the golden age of biker cinema faded, Bishop fell off the radar until he began writing screenplays like Underworld and Mad Dog Time. Long before Bishop's turn in Kill Bill: Vol. 2, Quentin Tarantino called him up and, confessing his love of those early biker movies, told Bishop it was time he wrote and directed his own biker film (with Tarantino exec producing, of course). The result is Hell Ride, a full throttle throwback to the grindhouse motorcycle gangster movies of the '60s and the spaghetti Westerns of Sergio Leone. Bishop plays Pistolero, the leader of the Victors, hell bent on avenging the death of his girlfriend at the hands of rival gang, the 666ers. Together with Comanche, played by 24's Eric Balfour, and The Gent, a tuxedoed gangbanger astride a Harley, Pistolero hunts down The Deuce (David Carradine) and Billy Wings (Brit soccer player and character actor Vinnie Jones). And no self-respecting biker gang movie would be complete without an appearance by the legendary Mr. Hopper, who plays the leader of the 666's, Eddie "Scratch" Zero. While Balfour recalls his fear of having to urinate on Hopper's boots, Larry Bishop chats exclusively with Premiere.com about his surprising first meeting with Tarantino and why wearing the director's hat is easier than either writing or acting.

LARRY BISHOP

This is not your first biker movie.
I made my first motorcycle movie in [1968] called The Savage Seven, and Quentin Tarantino loves this movie. He is the only person who loves this movie. I dig the movie. It is directed by Richard Rush, and he did a great job, but it was so different than all other movies. [Because of the content], it was like your parents stopped talking to you. Your aunts and uncles stopped talking to you. All relatives stopped talking to you. I actually made about ten of these things. The cycle of the motorcycle movie era went from '67 through around to '73 — something like that.

How did you and Tarantino get together to make Hell Ride?
Quentin Tarantino ordered me to star, write, and direct the new motorcycle movie. He ordered me. Because he said it so passionately that I didn't take it as a request. I took it really seriously. "Go and do this! I want you to do this." What happened was, an actress named Laura Cayouette who's in the movie [as Dani] called me around midnight and said, "Quentin Tarantino is your biggest fan." I had never met Quentin Tarantino. She said, "I am standing next to him and he is your biggest fan." I said, "[He knows] me from the gangster stuff that [I wrote]." And she said, "Nah, from those motorcycle movies that you did thirty years ago." And I went, "What!?" And then he got on the phone and said, "Come on up and we'll watch some of them." He owned all these motorcycle movies. He owned them... So I went up to his house and it was really like one of the coolest experiences ever. He has got, like, a 50-seat theater in his house. And it is a beautiful theater, and he's got a lobby and inside the lobby were these posters of all of my movies. Some of these posters I had never even saw before. They were in glass cases and stuff. It unnerved me. Either he has these things up all the time or he put them up specifically for me. Either way, it was pretty cool. Before he showed The Savage Seven, he had strung eight trailers of my movies together. Quentin has just archives of stuff, but there is no such thing as a Larry Bishop trailer package so he had to get somebody to go into his trailers and then edit them together. Imagine! This is the first time that I met him, and so I just knew he was so generous of spirit. It was an amazing thing. So we watched The Savage Seven, and the lights came up, and I said, "So, what do you want to do?" and he said, "Let's make the greatest motorcycle movie ever. It is your destiny."