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Title: Sweeney Todd

Author: Kim Newman

Publication: UK- Empire

Issue: February 2008

Everybody knows the story of Sweeney Todd, the barber who cut his customers’ throats and turned the corpses over to his criminal partner Mrs Lovett to be cooked up in meat pies. Debate persists as to whether he was an actual historical character, but the Demon Barber Of Fleet Street has been prominent in our national gallery of horrors since the middle of the19th century.

The usual version of the tale – as enshrined in Victorian penny dreadful, sensationalist theatre and a ramshackle but wonderful 1936 vehicle for aptly named British horror star Tod Slaughter – is all about crime. Sweeney Todd’s methods may he gruesome, but he’s primarily in it for the money (the early versions of the story are titled after the loot, The String Of Pearls). Then in I968, playwright Christopher Bond came up with a new take, drawing on Jacobean revenge tragedy and populist melodrama in which horribly violent stories expose social inequities. This reading caught the attention of composer-lyricist Stephen Sondheim, who adapted it into a dark, bloody 1979 Broadway (and West End) musical which has understandably never enjoyed the long carriage-trade runs much lesser shows have managed, but is acclaimed as a peak of the form.

This masterpiece has proved a daunting movie prospect: the few films of other Sondheim shows haven’t been hits,

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Title: Johnny Sings

Author: Gavin Edwards

Publication: Rolling Stone

Issue: January 24, 2008

Attend the tale of Johnny Depp: still Hollywood’s most perverse superstar, he has followed up the family-friendly Pirates of the Caribbean trilogy with Sweeney Todd: The Demon Barber of Fleet Street, a buckets-of-blood saga of cannibalism that is also -gulp!- a musical. That’s right, Depp sings for the first time ever onscreen, and critics are warbling his praises for tackling the notoriously difficult score from theater legend Stephen Sondheim. This gripping adaptation of the 1979 Broadway hit is the sixth movie Depp has done with director Tim Burton, for whom he’s played misfits from Edward Scissorhands to Ed Wood. But a full-out musi­cal is a first for both of them. And the pain-wracked intensity Depp brings to this London barber obsessed with revenge is sparking Oscar talk.

Today Depp meets me in a suite at the Chateau Marmont in Hollywood. His jeans are ripped, and his black shirt is open at the neck to reveal a gonzo necklace, a tribute to his late friend, Hunter S. Thompson. Depp looks around the tastefully appointed room. “They’ve really done this place up,” he says. “I lived in the Cha­teau for a while, years ago, and it was dingy but great. It was like they bought the couches from the Ramada Inn that was closed down by the Health Department in 1970.” Depp has come a long way from his childhood in Kentucky,

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Title: Depp and Burton

Author: Cal Fussman

Publication: Esquire

Issue: January 2008

Tim Burton: There are partnerships where one person is good at one thing and the other is good at another. That’s true in our case! But we’re very connected in terms of taste.

Johnny Depp: Even when we first met, we connected on all these superabsurd levels.

TB: A fascination for weird seventies objets d’art.

JD I remember, growing up, we had this concrete cobra spray-painted gold.

TB: We’re from different parts of the country. But there is a kind of suburban white-trashy connective strand there. Isn’t there?

JD: Yep.

TB: The stories that scared us as children.

JD: Mr. Green Jeans.

TB: Seeing Humphrey Bogart playing a monster. He only did one horror movie and—

JD: We both knew it.

TB: The Return of Dr. X. When something like that comes up, you realize, Yeah, perfect. Things that don’t normally come up in most people’s conversations are things that come up a lot in ours.

JD: We speak in a sort of shorthand.

TB: It’s not literal. We’ll cross-reference things that wouldn’t really make sense to the normal person.

JD: One time, Tim and I were talking before we were getting ready to shoot. Afterward,

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Title: Sweeney Todd: Making up the Demon Barber of Fleet Street

Author: John Calhoun

Publication: Make-Up Artist

Issue: January 2008

What’s black and white and black and white and black and white and red? Forget the unfortunate clergy in those old schoolyard jokes: the best answer to the riddle has to be Tim Burton’s film version of the Stephen Sondheim musical Sweeney Todd: the Demon Barber of Fleet Street. Those who know the story – which features abundant throat-slashing, dismemberment and cannibalism—shouldn’t be surprised by the film’s copious quantities of bright-red blood. The black-and-white parts of the equation comes courtesy of the movie’s high-contrast look, which is partly a product of the skip—bleach process Burton and his cinematographer, Dariusz Wolski, apply to the images. The palette also derives from Dante Ferretti’s production design, Colleen Atwood’s costumes, and perhaps most strikingly from the faces of Johnny Depp and Helena Bonham Carter, a matched pair of cadaverously make—up stars.

Depp plays the title character, an unjustly incarcerated London barber of the mid 19^th century who returns to avenge himself on humanity by cutting more than his clients’ whiskers. Bonham Carter is Mrs. Lovett, the restaurateur who helps Todd dispose of his victims by grinding them up and baking them in her meat pies. This ghoulish enterprise is mirrored in the visages of the actors,

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Title: Burton, Barbarism and the All-Singing All-Slaughtering Johnny-Depp

Publication: Total Film

Issue: January 2008

Mrs. Lovett’s subterranean hake-house looks like a surrealist nightmare Hieronymus Bosch might have painted. To our side sits an enormous meat-grinder overflowing with feet, hands and assorted body parts… to the other is a huge, walk in oven spilling an orange glow onto the dank, stone floor where several corpses lie. their throats slit, heads squished like over-ripe tomatoes — a consequence of being dropped down a chute from Sweeney Todd’s barber shop, two floors above.

Yet the most hellish sight of all is Todd (Johnny Depp) kneeling down beside one body, his face contorted with anger, anguish and madness, his pallid complexion. dark clothes and black hair — with its dominant skunk like while streak (a nod to Humphrey Bogart in The Return Of Doctor X) drenched in blood. He looks up towards Mrs. Lovett (Helena Bonham Carter), his eyes burning into her. Music suddenly booms out, filling the room with a bowel trembling Bernard Herrmann inspired rumble. After a beat, Depp stands and starts towards Bonham Carter, his right hand wrapped around the handle of a cutthroat razor. His blade drips bright crimson, as first she, then he begin to sing, “Now come here my love,” cries Depp, to the playback, arms open wide, bloody hands beckoning her to him. “Not a thing to fear, my love…”

Welcome to the crimson-soaked,

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Title: Sweeny Todd: Singin’ in the Pain

Author: Mark Salisbury

Publication: Fangoria

Issue: January 2008

Secreted below her Pie Shop on London’s Fleet Street. Mrs. Lovett’s bake house is a brick-walled, arch-ceilinged vision of hell, a catacomb for cannibals, packed with bloody cadavers, dismembered remains, piles of bones and an enormous meat grinder over­flowing with arms, legs and sundry other body parts. To one side stands a walk-in oven, a huge iron furnace that flickers and roars as Mrs. Lovett (Helena Bonham Carter), wearing a black-and-white-striped dress, pulls open its heavy door, blasting heat and an orangey-red glow into the dark, gloomy space.

On the stone floor he several dead bodies, their throats slit wide open, their heads like squashed tomatoes—a consequence of being dropped down the chute that links Sweeney Todd’s bar­bershop, two floors above, to this place. Most are male, but there’s one woman whose limp, lifeless corpse is picked over by a distraught Sweeney (Johnny Depp).

After a beat, Sweeney looks up, his dark-rimmed eyes churn­ing with anguish and anger. He gets to his feet, and starts toward Mrs. Lovett, his pallid visage, shirt and waistcoat—and thick mane of wavy black hair with its dominant skunklike white streak—all drenched in blood.

In his right hand, he grasps the handle of a cutthroat razor, its blade dripping pearls of bright crimson.

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Title: The Continuing Adventures of Tim & Johnny

Author: Cal Fussman

Publication: Esquire

Issue: January 2008

One time a guy told me that he brought his wife to see Pirates of the Caribbean. She had lost her motor skills. I forget what you call it. It’s not autism. Jesus, they made a movie about it. You know, where you recede and your functions start to go. Anyway, they’re watching the film, and when Captain Jack Sparrow came on the screen, she started to laugh. This guy said he hadn’t heard that laugh in years. And so he took her back to see the film repeatedly. For some reason, Captain Jack made her laugh every time. That’s right up there.

My mother taught me a lot of things. The first thing that comes to mind is: Don’t take any shit off anyone, ever. When I was a little kid, we moved constantly. Bully picks on you in the new place? Don’t ever take any shit off anyone, ever. Eloquent and right.

My life is my life because of Tim. Definitely.

This is Tim Burton in a nutshell: We were doing Charlie and the Chocolate Factory and I was on the set. We were shooting, work­ing, working, working. All great. Everything’s cool. One of my pals comes up and says, “Helena [Bonham Carter, Burton’s partner] just called. When you get a moment, she’d like you to give her a call back.”

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THE FILM SOCIETY OF LINCOLN CENTER
presents

AN EVENING WITH
TIM BURTON
CINEMA’S DEMON BARBER

November 14, 2007
8:00pm

Frederick R Rose Hull
Home of Jazz at Lincoln Center

CINEMA’S DEMON BARBER

Witty, often elegant and always unpredictable, the films of Tim Burton have created a special niche for themselves within contemporary cinema. A born spinner of tall tales, whose subjects have ranged from Martians to Z-list Hollywood directors to, now; the Demon barber of fleet Street, Burton takes audiences places they’d never thought they’d go—and in ways they couldn’t have imagined. We’re delighted to welcome Tim Burton for an evening of conversation, clips featuring some of the greatest moments from his films, and a “first look” at footage from his eagerly anticipated screen adaptation of Sweeney Todd: The Demon barber of Fleet Street, marking his sixth collaboration with Johnny Depp.

Richard Pena
Program Director, Film Society of Lincoln Center

From the dark, Gothic imagination of director Tim Burton and starring Johnny Depp comes Sweeney Todd The Demon Barber of Fleet Street, a bloody tale of music, murder, melodrama, meat pies and one man’s desperate desire for revenge.

Arriving back in London after escaping from 15 years of false imprisonment in Australia, Benjamin Barker (Johnny Depp) vows to kill the evil Judge Turpin (Alan Rickman) and his nefarious henchman Beadle Bamford (Timothy Spall),

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Title: Sweeny Todd

Author: John Logan

Publication: US-Entertainment Weekly

Issue: August 2007

A bloody musical about a homicidal barber and his human pie-making partner doesn’t exactly sound like standard Christmas viewing, but that doesn’t bother Burton (Charlie and the Chocolate Factory). “Red is a color at Christmas.” He jokes. Actually, the director thinks that his adaptation of Stephen Sondheim’s classic musical might make for a better Valentines Day option. “For me, it sort of sums up relationships”, says the director. “Although people might he horrified by that.”

The movies unrequited-love story also appealed to Bonham Carter, who, fortunately for Burton, is his real—life paramour. “There’s still such a humanity to it, and that’s what Tim always brings,” says the actress, who plays the bizarro baker. Still, Bonham Carter admits that working with her significant other “has its stresses”. Luckily, her costar is more or less unflappable. “[Johnny] was really diplomatic. Whenever Tim and I started arguing, he would just look away” Burton considers this film one of his most challenging productions yet, which means a lot coming from the director of Beetlejuice, Berman, and Edward Scissorhands. “To do an R-rated musical with 70 percent singing was kinda like, ‘Well, I haven’t done that one before.’ It’s exciting to keep surprising yourself and see what happens.”

Depp, like most of the cast (including Baron Cohen as a rival barber in his first post-Borat  role),

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Title: Pirate Kings

Author: unknown

Publication: UK –  DVD Review

Issue: November 2006

The thing that that greets you at the entrance to Industrial Light & Magic’s San Francisco HQ is Yoda. The wrinkly turquoise goblin stands on top of a fountain, wizened old hands resting on a cane, and he looks so realistic you half expect him to greet you with a sage “Help you, l will”, like some friendly Jedi  receptionist.

Yoda, of course, started life as a puppet then went CGI, so it might seem odd to label a statue of him as ‘realistic’. But then that’s exactly what ILM does best — making the impossible seem possible, the incredible seem credible, little green men seem wise  and worldly. It’s no wonder everyone you encounter on this imposing complex – built on the site of a former veterans’ hospital in The Presidio National Park – beams with pride about the quality of lLM’s work.

There’s a calm-before-the-storm atmosphere about the place. ILM has a regular staff of up to 800, which soars to 1,500 when it‘s at a creative peak, but today it seems half empty. “We’re quiet at the moment.” explains marketing and communications director Miles Perkins. Then he flashes a wide screen Californian smile and adds: “But we’re just about to start on Pirates 3…”

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