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Burton
& Depp: Partners in Crime
By
Mark
Salisbury
The Los Angeles Times
January 2, 2008
Deadly
duo Tim
Burton and Johnny Depp are really out there (singing!) for Sweeney
Todd.
Perched
together on a couch in a London hotel room, both
suffering
from the flu, Tim Burton and Johnny Depp make for a brilliant comic
double act,
sharing jokes, finishing one another’s thoughts, laughing like
naughty
schoolboys, goading each other into mischief. Theirs is a special
relationship
that extends far beyond professional respect and into the deeply
personal. 
“He’s
blood,” says Depp, who is godfather to Burton’s 4-year-old
son, Billy. “He’s
family.”
Ever
since their first collaboration—on
Burton’s 1990 magical fairy tale Edward
Scissorhands—both director and actor have pushed each other
to some of the
best work of their respective careers, with Depp not just
Burton’s on-screen
alter ego but a master in his own right at interpreting the
latter’s range of
outsiders, oddballs and misfits—be it razor-fingered Edward
Scissorhands,
cross-dressing film director Ed Wood or creepy confectionary king Willy
Wonka.
Sweeney
Todd: The Demon Barber of Fleet Street marks
the pair’s
sixth collaboration, a melodramatic and gruesome adaptation of Stephen
Sondheim’s
bloody Broadway musical revolving around the exploits of a 19th century
London
barber out for vengeance against the nefarious judge who arranged for
his
deportation on a trumped-up charge so he could steal the man’s
wife and
daughter.
Burton
had originally seen Sondheim’s Tony
Award-winning musical as a CalArts student on a trip to London in the
early ‘80s,
and had twice flirted with directing a film version, once after Batman, and again, almost a decade ago,
before becoming sidetracked by other projects. The delay, he now
reflects,
helped serve both him and the film, which he terms “a silent
movie with music”—not
least in the casting.
“When
I was involved with it a long time
ago, I don’t even know if I knew who Johnny Depp was,”
Burton says. “Now it
seemed more of the right time. Ten years of life experience made me
able to
look at this character in a way that I probably wouldn’t have
looked at it 10
years ago, a certain brooding darkness that creeps in as you get
older.”
That
brooding darkness imbues every frame of
the film, a Grand Guignol-influenced slasher movie anchored by
Depp’s
performance and Helena Bonham Carter as Sweeney’s
ever-resourceful accomplice
Mrs. Lovett, who uses the massive grinder in her bake house to turn
Sweeney’s
victims into the filling for her meat pies.
In
transferring Sondheim’s theatrical show to the screen, Burton
shaved an hour’s running time, cutting some songs entirely,
abridging others,
telling the story almost entirely in song and yet determined to strip
away
anything remotely “Broadway,” with only one cast member,
Laura Michelle Kelly
who plays the beggar woman, a professional singer.
Depp’s
musical pedigree was limited at
best, having played bass and sung background vocals for Florida-based
band the
Kids back in the ‘80s, and his only previous on-screen musical
was John Waters’
Cry-Baby, a film in which his singing
voice had been dubbed. Was Burton the only director Depp would sing for?
“I
don’t think I would have attempted this
with anyone else,” Depp begins. “There was
fear—”
“What
if Barry Manilow asked you?” Burton
suddenly interrupts.
“That’s
a different thing,” Depp retorts,
completely deadpan, “cause that might mean duet, and if
that’s the case, I’m
in.”
A car
horn sounds in the street outside. “And
there he is,” says Depp, not missing a beat.
The pair
start giggling afresh and it’s a
while before Depp continues.
“There
was definite trepidation,” he says,
finally. “I didn’t know if it was possible. I knew I
wouldn’t be tone deaf but
I wasn’t sure I could carry a song, let alone several, and
something as complex
as Stephen Sondheim’s. It was real scary for both of us. And talk
about the
opportunity to really flop. It was one of those, ‘Let’s
turn the heat up a
little.’”
While
Depp toiled away on the third Pirates movie in the
Bahamas, he began
learning Sweeney’s numbers, later
heading into a small L.A. recording studio owned by his friend Bruce
Witkin to
lay down some demos, none of which even Burton heard until the movie
had been
greenlighted and sets were being constructed at Pinewood Studios in
England.
Although
Sondheim, contractually, had
casting approval over the roles of Sweeney Todd and Mrs. Lovett, he
said yes to
Depp without even hearing him sing. “I was shocked,” says
Burton. “I don’t know
the guy very well but he doesn’t shy away from his opinion. I
think he did have
that instinct and belief that Johnny’s a good actor and could
pull it off. He
was a bit harder on everybody else.”
Later,
when Sondheim’s musical director
wanted to hear Depp sing, Burton played the role of protector.
“There was a bit
of a push for ‘I’ve got to see Johnny, I’ve got to
see what his range is . .
.’” Burton recalls. “That wasn’t going to
happen.”
“I
was so in fear when I had my meeting
with Sondheim,” says Depp, as he fetches Burton a Kleenex to
rescue him from a
messy, flu-related incident, “thinking he was going to hook me,
‘All right,
come over here kid, come over to the piano and belt one out for
me.’”
Even
compared
to all the other weird and wonderful characters Depp
has played for Burton over the years, Sweeney stands out as an intense,
brooding, inward-looking fellow, a haunted soul fueled by an unwavering
desire
for revenge.
“He’s
a tragic character,” Burton says. “I
don’t think we ever saw him as a villain or even really insane.
He’s just
single-minded and tunnel-visioned.”
And,
let’s not forgot, a serial killer. Yet
Depp manages to find compassion and humanity within his emotionally
traumatized
shell to make you not just empathize but actually care for him, even as
he’s
slicing the throat of yet another victim.
In
creating their Sweeney, Burton and Depp
paid deliberate homage, both visually and stylistically, to those
horror movie
stars they’d idolized growing up, actors such as Peter
Lorre—whose 1935 film Mad Love is a particular
favorite of
both men—Boris Karloff and Lon Chaney, performers whose minimal
but expressive
acting style they’d always connected with.
“It’s
almost a lost art,” says Depp. “[John]
Barrymore was a master, but the king for me was Lon Chaney. You go back
and
watch films like The Penalty and see
this rage and sadness, this huge range of emotions, without the luxury
of
dialogue.”
Every
day on set, says Burton, they would
cut Sweeney’s lines down to the bare minimum. “Johnny can,
just by looking and
not saying anything, project pain and sadness and anger and
longing,” he says. “That’s
what all those actors could do without a word and that was the exciting
thing
about this. The story’s told through the eyes and the
singing.”
And,
once again, Depp found himself playing
a character, as he did previously with Scissorhands and Wood, that
Burton
connected with emotionally and psychologically. “There were
moments,” Depp
recalls, “when Tim said, ‘You know, I think this is my
favorite character.’”
-- photos added by Zone editors