The
Johnny Depp Zone
Interview
Archive
2 0 0 5
‘Til
Depp Do Us
Part
by
Patrick
Lee
SciFi
Volume 11 / Number 5
October 2005
Tim
Burton
And
Johnny Depp Marry Their Visions Yet Again For The Fractured Fairy Tale Corpse Bride.
Nassau,
Bahamas—It’s pushing 100 tropical degrees outside,
and the tourists
packing the lobby of the aggressively nautical Atlantis Resort are
sweating
through their flowered clothing. 
In a
windowless ballroom
downstairs, director Tim Burton, cinema’s reigning prince of
darkness, looks
like he’d be more comfortable buried alive.
His
untamable black hair forming a corona
around his puffy, pasty face, Burton wears his usual black shirt and
black
pants, eyes
obscured behind thick black-rimmed glasses as he talks
about
corpses, brides and his favorite actor, Johnny Depp.
He
stands in sharp contrast to the pink
fruit-flavored tackiness all around, and it seems all too fitting that
“Johnny
and I have this sort of process
where we sort of speak in the abstract to each other, and yet can still
understand each other,”
In
contrast to
his director, Depp appears completely relaxed,
with a deep tan,
white linen shirt and Captain Jack Sparrow gold teeth and tattoos. 
But
he
mirrors Burton’s deep affection.
“I
know that I respect him so much and love
him so much as a filmmaker,” Depp says. “I would do
anything he wanted . . . . The
thing I most enjoy about our relationship, aside from our friendship,
is the
amount of trust, you know? And the amount of trust that goes into
. . .
that
collaborative process. Because
one minute were talking very, very
deeply about
Captain Kangaroo, and the next minute we’re doing
impersonations of, you know,
Sammy Davis Jr. and Charles Nelson Reilly . . . It can go
anywhere.”
Depp
adds: “One of the things I think Tim and
I share is a kind of fascination with people, with human beings . . .
the human
animal. And I think we share also the idea … that most
people in life . . .
especially the ones that are considered . . . super normal—if
you really take a
step back and observe them, watch them a bit, you’ll realize
that they’re
actually completely out of their minds. . . . Most people are really
nuts. And
that’s fascinating to watch, you know? And I think Tim feels
the same way. [chuckles]
Depp
and Burton previously worked together
on Edward Scissorhands
(Depp’s
breakout role), Sleepy Hollow, Ed Wood
and this year’s Charlie and the Chocolate Factory,
each
characterized by its own brand of weirdness. The same
will undoubtedly
be said
about Corpse Bride, which is
noteworthy for a couple of other reasons: It’s
Burton and
Depp’s first
stop-motion-animated film together, and they both shuttled back and
forth
between 
Charlie, which was shooting
in London last winter, and Corpse Bride, which
was shooting nearby at the same time.
Based
on a Ukrainian folk tale, Corpse Bride
centers on Depp’s Victor
Van Dort, who is about to be married. While traveling through the woods
to meet
his fiancée, Victor puts the engagement ring on a stick in
the ground and says
his wedding vows as a joke. But to his horror, the stick turns out to
be the
bony finger of the Corpse Bride, who rises from the dead and tells
Victor that
they are now husband and wife. The film may recall Burton’s The Nightmare Before Christmas in its
sensibility, but it has its own fantastical look and storyline, about
the
colorful Land of the Dead and its revivifying effect on the drab Land
of the
Living.
“Oh,
Victor, yeah,” Depp says. “He’s a lot
of fun. He’s a very sensitive young man, Victor. Very
sensitive. And a little
bit clumsy.”
“In
some ways it’s maybe a strange kind of
almost romantic comedy in a certain way,” Burton says.
“It’s a triangle between
a groom and two brides and the complications that arise from
that—especially
since one of them is dead and one is alive.”
Burton,
who got
his start as an animator for Disney,
says he had been developing Corpse Bride
for most of the last 10
years and was happy to return to stop-motion animation. “You
know as well as I
do that [computer animation] has taken over, which has it’s
place,” he says.
“But there are those of us that love the stop-motion medium .
. . . It’s not
about, necessarily, the medium, but with stop-motion there is that sort
of
handmade [feel]. 
There’s
just something subconscious and
visceral about people
moving in inanimate objects. It’s like bringing life to an
inanimate object.
There’s something really special about that.”
So
accomplished are the film’s artisans
that they received the ultimate accolade: a nod of approval from Ray
Harryhausen, the pioneering innovator of stop-motion animation, who
paid a
visit to the production. “It was like getting a visit from
God,” producer
Allison Abbate says.
“For
me, it was like, you know, going from [assumes
Willy Wonka Voice] playing Willy Wonka, and then, suddenly, [taking on Victor’s wispy English accent]
you know, going in and deciding to be Victor. It was a really strange
thing,”
Depp adds. “Because I would literally leave the stage playing
Wonka and then .
. . have to find this other character on the walk to the
studio.”
The
two films also shared cast: Besides
Depp, both Helena Bonham Carter and Lord of the
Rings star Christopher Lee have roles in the two movies.
(Similarly,
Danny
Elfman,
“Films
. . . do take on a life of their
own,” Burton says. “If I had my way I
wouldn’t have them so close. It happened
similarly on Nightmare. I was
working
on that and at the same time doing Ed Wood,
although I didn’t quite use the same actors on those films.
But on Charlie . . . because you
can only work
with kids a certain amount of the day, I would just go over with Johnny
or
Helena or Christopher, whomever, and do a little session [for Corpse Bride]. I think it is a little
risky to do something so close with the same group, especially if for
some
reason or another people end up hating the first one. I’m a
little nervous
about that.”
Corpse
Bride
hits theaters in North America on Sept. 23. “It was kind of a
chaotic
situation, but I’m excited about [it],” Burton says.
Dead
In
The Water
A
Pirate
And A
Superhero Will Soon Be Returning And The Only Question
Is—Which Stars Will Join
Them?
Johnny
Depp, who
reprises the character of Captain Jack Sparrow
in the upcoming Pirates of the Caribbean
sequels, told 
“But
I don’t know when.
It’s going to depend on where
we are and where he is, because he’s got a little thing
called the Rolling
Stones tour to do.”
Depp
also confirmed that the first sequel, Pirates
of the Caribbean: Dead Man’s Chest
took an early hiatus because a key cast member fell ill.
“We’ve
been shooting Pirates 2 for, well,
it’s been a few months . . . now,” Depp said
on June 26. “And we had a hiatus that was planned; actually,
probably it was
supposed to start . . . tomorrow or the next day. And we went into the
hiatus a
bit early, because there were bits that we were going to shoot up in
Verbinski
will shoot the first and second
sequels back to back.
Dead
Man’s Chest
reunites the cast from Pirates of the
Caribbean: The Curse of the Black Pearl, including Depp,
Orlando Bloom
(Will Turner) and Keira Knightley (Elizabeth Swann), and adds Billy
Nighy as
the ghostly Davy Jones.
Depp
met with reporters to promote Charlie and the
Chocolate Factory, but
it was clear he had transitioned into full pirate mode:
He
sported a scraggly beard, gold-capped
teeth and a tattoo with the name “Jack” and the
image of a sparrow against a
sunrise on his right forearm. 
But Depp
said it was a pleasure returning
to the
franchise.
“It’s
weird,” he said. “We didn’t quite know
what to expect before we went back into . . . Pirates
2. A lot of things happened. . . .
-- additional photos added by Zone editors