Title: I Felt like an outsider, Now I feel like I can do anything
Author: Martyn Palmer
Publication: Empire
Issue: August 2005
In the Shadow Of two bright-red trucks emblazoned with an ornate “W” and across a courtyard packed hard with (fake) snow, the scarecrow figure that is Johnny Depp, as outlandish factory owner Willy Wonka, adjusts his black tunic before leaning in to have a few quiet words in Tim Burton’s ear. Burton stands away from his camera and has a little chuckle at whatever Johnny’s smiling about. They look happy. They look like two (big) little boys having a good time together kids in a sweet shop, you might say. Or. to be more precise, kids in a chocolate factory.
As if you didn’t know, Charlie And The Chocolate Factory reunites Team Burton and Depp, a kind of modern-day Akira Kurosawa and Toshiro Mifune, with more quirk and fewer swords. Stand by for collaboration No. 4 (following Edward Scissorhands. Ed Wood and Sleepy Hollow) and expect to enter a world originally created by Roald Dahl but perfectly designed for Burton’s particular, weirdly appealing sensibility and Depp’s beguilingly child-like demeanour.
“It’s fun and it’s meant to be fun.” Depp says later. “Tim is doing beautiful stuff: the sets are incredible and the work has been a ball. And for me. going back into the ring with Tim is like being home. Yeah, right at home, you know, comfortable. I feel like I can do anything and he will always pull the reins in or prod me to get me going. It’s great.”
We are on the backlot at Pinewood Studios, outside the titular chocolate factory, an imposingly bleak edifice which wouldn’t have looked out of place in Fritz Lang’s Metropolis. Around the factory there are cobbled streets (made from plaster but feet-achingly authentic) with rows of terraced houses and shops. A newsagent’s boasts a poster advertising Wonka Bars that reads. “It’s The Best Chocolate In The World!” (it’s actually made by Nestle in Yorkshire), copies of the local rag, The Gazette (“Ticket Is A Fake! High Levels Of Pesticide Found In Water!”), and a counter stuffed with chocs and jars of sweets such as bullseyes and candy canes. Opposite, there’s the EZ Pawn Shop and Biggies the toy shop, a dingy bar and a jeweler’s. The overall impression is of a particularly grim Northern town from the 1950s (think L. S. Lowry), given a Burton twist.
The depth of the set is extraordinary. CGI is to be kept lo a minimum, with even the spectacular chocolate river created for real. Nearby, on one of the nine sound stages utilised by the production, 200,000 gallons of the brown Stuff (actually made from a thickening agent used in toothpaste and baked beans mixed with food dye) flows for an impressive 270 feet. It’s six feet deep. 40 feet wide in places, and features a waterfall that uses another 30.000 gallons of the gloop. It’s not chocolate but it is edible — not that you’d particularly want to test the theory. Wet-suit clad crew members dive in each day to make sure that the underwater pumps which keep it flowing are in full working order. It’s Burton eye-candy pun intentional at full tilt, something Depp clearly finds irresistible.
“Well. Tim’s a friend.” he says when asked to explain their relationship. “First and foremost, I love the guy. And yes. we do share a certain sensibility, and outlook about our work. And we go back a long, long way now.”
When Johnny Depp first met Tim Burton it was a form of salvation for the then 26 year-old actor. Depp was headlining 21 Jump Street – yoof cops solve yoof crimes, daddio – gracing the cover of every teen mag and, in his own words, well on his way to becoming “just another piece of expendable Hollywood meat”. Then Burton tapped him up for the shy, sensitive, stainless steel milled Edward Scissorhands. Subsequently, from Ed Wood through Sleepy Hollow’s Ichabod Crane and now Willy Wonka, the pair have conjured up a recognisable hero all their own a quirky outsider, full of a naive optimism and bizarro dress sense, squarely at odds with the conventional world around them.
“It’s a theme that I’ve returned to now and again.” he says. “What society deems normal and abnormal, and who decides and why. There’s also the sense of not allowing the world to throw garbage on you; to try to retain those gift curiosity, fascination that we are given as children.’ His own childhood was fractured. His family moved 30 times, mostly in Florida, and his father left home when he was a teenager. Depp himself fell like an outsider at every school he found himself in, taking solace in music playing in a band called The Kids and, eventually, acting. “I did feel like an outsider. I fell completely and utterly confused by everything that was going on around me. It was the one thing that the teachers didn’t want you to do in school, you know, question things. But I always wanted to know why. It was. ‘Well, you should do this and you shouldn’t do that…’ ‘Oh okay, why not?’ It really pissed them off”, but it shouldn’t piss them off’ because it’s a fucking valid question. It’s the only question.”
That intense feeling of suburban dislocation is a then’ he explored expertly with Burton in Edward Scissorhands of course. In reality, he may not have had eight-inch blade on the ends of his arms, but he wasn’t about to buy into the American teen dream, no questions asked, either.
“I saw these guys and girls competing for most popular this and that, the Prom Queen and the Prom King, and it was like; ‘Jesus, what bollocks.’ you know? Absolute crap I was lucky in that sense. I was raised in such a way that it wasn’t like eyes on the prize. It was. ‘Just get through it man, just get what you can get and keep moving.'”
“Now that’s what I can a big dick.” Depp says, and frankly it’s hard to disagree. The World’s Coolest Man and Empire are currently eyeing up a ten-foot wide (phallus, not Wonka) leaning against a wall, being tender eared for by two prop men. We’re on the Isle Of Man. It’s a few months before our Chocolate Factory meeting, and we’re shacked up with Depp in his Winnebago, on location for The Libertine. The star has just filmed an impromptu pick-up with Richard Coyle (of Coupling fame) in a nearby car park, doubling today for Hampton Court. (“With a bit of smoke swirling all around us, hopefully you’ll never know the difference.” Depp grins. “It’s all smoke and mirrors.”) It’s the end of a long day and he’s uncorked a rather fine bottle of red and invited Empire to share a glass. It would be churlish to refuse.
Taking on the role of John Wilmot, otherwise known as the Earl of Rochester, for The Libertine was indeed a labour of love. Rochester was a 17th century rake, a legendary hell-raiser who wrote rather excellent, often exceedingly filth poetry, a wit who at turns amused and outraged the court of Charles II, bedded nearly every woman he came into contact with, and drank far too much before he died, from syphilis, at the age of 33.
“It was one of those rare occurrences where you read a script and you think, ‘This is great.’ Three sentences into the opening monologue and I was in. I knew it was one of those things, the kind of material that you see just once. Edward Scissorhands was like that for me.”
The Libertine, as you might have guessed, is hardly likely to share a Saturday morning double-bill with Charlie And The Chocolate Factory any time soon. But, says Depp, it would be wrong to assume that this is little more than a romp with lots of naughty bits and a liberal use of words that rhyme with runt.
“It’s very easy for the take on Rochester to be that he was a pig, a drunk, a randy, psychotic madman. But there are a million things to like about him and that’s the beauty of it. And you know, I’m amazed that the majority don’t know who he is. If people do know him, they go, ‘Oh yeah, he wrote the bits about ‘pussy and ‘cocks” or, ‘he made fun of the king with these witty little satires.’ But man, he was very profound, it’s amazing stuff. And I’m amazed that the Marquis de Sade got more action, you know? This guy has been kept in the darkness for too long.”
Perhaps it is musing about a life lived at full pelt (“Rochester was like the first punk”) that prompts Depp to reflect on times when he was running wild. While he has always loved the work, at times he’s struggled to cope with the attention that goes with it. In the early years, he was a poster boy, quite literally, who refused to play the game. Dating Kale Moss, scrapping with paparazzi that followed them everywhere and trashing hotel rooms, this was an angry young man not dealing with the fame thrust upon him at all. He would drink “self-medicate” is how he describes it — to help him get through it all.
“I’d go to functions and back in those days I literally had to be drunk to be able to speak and get through it. I guess I was trying not to feel anything,” he says. “My drug of choice back then was alcohol more than anything. Hard liquor, spirits. And yeah, I had a keen idea that it was not good. But you get liquored up and once you are in that spiral you don’t even get hangovers anymore. You wake up and have a drink again.”
We catch up again in Italy, where Depp is taking a short hiatus from his Charlie chores. On the terrace of the ludicrously posh Motel Cipriani he looks gloriously incongruous, dressed in ripped jeans and a white shirt, with both wrists, and neck, loaded with beads, bangles and leather straps. His roll-ups at his side, a bottle of water — note, water — on the table, he greets Empire with a firm handshake and says. ‘We met on the Isle Of Man, right? I love that place. People complain about it, and I don’t know why.” As the surrounding suits settle into their power brunches, Depp reflects on the security that family life has now given him and the platform it provides to go out and enjoy doing the work.
“It’s all about perspective.” he says, “When your baby comes along you go, “Oh, that’s what it’s all about…’ And all that stuff that was spinning around in my head, all the things I was worried about, when they wrote this about me or when they took a picture outside the restaurant or whatever… All of a sudden I went, ‘Fuck it, who cares? ‘There’s nothing anyone can do lo me these days. I’m lucky to have this job and I’ll do it until they don’t give me gigs anymore.
Depp has probably never enjoyed his work more. Right now, he’s filming back-to-back sequels to Pirates Of The Caribbean. Having done his pirate research – “They keelhauled people and they did draw and quarter, but walking the plank, it never happened. Earrings, never” — he’s up to speed on all the little details, but mostly he’s excited at the chance to play Jack Sparrow once again.
“The first film was very well received and that’s great.” he says. “But for me, selfishly as an actor, you wind up getting to know these characters and, at times, falling in love with them, and then the moment comes where you have to say goodbye to them. And it really beats you up. You have to go through a period of decompression. At least with Pirates they are bringing him back and I get to see an old friend again.”
It is, he says, all about playing it for real but playing it for fun too. A bit like being a big kid. And a big kid in a chocolate factory, well, that will be something to behold.
