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Hell
and High Water
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The
year 2001 saw two Johnny Depp films released: in spring, Ted
Demme’s Blow featured
another of Johnny’s
uncanny interpretations of a living person, in this case incarcerated
cocaine
trafficker George Jung, while the fall brought From
Hell, the Hughes brothers’ version of the
still-unsolved case
of Jack the Ripper. Johnny played Frederick Abberline, the tormented
police
inspector in charge of the Ripper investigation; From
Hell opened at #1 at the box office in its first week of
release. During June of 2001, Johnny also scampered down to Mexico to
film (in
eight days!) the scene-stealing role of Agent Sands in Robert
Rodriguez’s Once Upon a Time in
Mexico.
2002
begins on a sad note, with the untimely death of Blow
director Ted Demme in January; most of the interviews for this
year come from the U.K. release of From
Hell and find Johnny fielding questions about Demme and Blow
as well. The remarkable documentary
Lost in La Mancha debuts at the
Berlin International Film Festival in February 2002; it recounts the
nearly
incredible series of calamities that beset and eventually doomed Terry
Gilliam’s attempt to film The Man
Who
Killed Don Quixote with Johnny and Jean Rochefort in 2000.
Although
no feature films starring Johnny Depp were released in the U.S. during
the year
2002, the actor was busily filming from June onwards. The first project
was
Marc Forster’s film about the author J. M. Barrie and the
writing of Peter Pan. Co-starring
Kate Winslet and
Freddie Highmore, Finding Neverland
shot in London from June through the end of August. The second project,
a
pirate movie for the Disney studios, began filming with little fanfare
on
October 9, 2002; it would change Johnny Depp’s life forever.
Another
life-altering event, of the happiest possible kind, occurred on April
9, 2002,
when Johnny Depp and Vanessa Paradis welcomed their second child, a son
named
Jack.
Pirates
of the
Caribbean: The Curse of the Black Pearl wrapped its principal
photography in
March 2003 and sailed into multiplexes across North America on July
9th. As
Johnny went to work on David Koepp’s thriller Secret
Window a week later, audiences around the world were falling
in love with Captain Jack Sparrow and making Pirates
of the Caribbean a surprise box-office smash. Capitalizing
on Johnny’s success, Sony Pictures Entertainment released Once
Upon a Time in Mexico on September
12th, and for a while
Johnny Depp had two motion pictures in the top ten at the U.S. box
office.
Johnny ended the year with a November cameo for his friend Yvan Attal,
playing
Charlotte Gainsborough’s fantasy man in Attal’s Ils
se marièrent et eurent beaucoup
d’enfants, and with a fistful
of award nominations for his portrayal of Captain Jack Sparrow,
including his
first Oscar nomination as Best Actor. He had also vaulted to the top of
the
Hollywood A-list.
Interviews
with Johnny during this period undergo a remarkable sea-change once Pirates
of the Caribbean: The Curse of the
Black Pearl is released. The former labels that journalists
used to
compartmentalize him—ex-teen idol, bad boy, rebel, hotel
trasher, Hollywood
outsider, expatriate, star of art-house films—become
irrelevant almost
overnight. Like the pirate he portrays, Johnny Depp has become a force
to be
reckoned with . . . and the only one of his kind.
--Part-Time
Poet
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