JOHNNY-DEPP.org

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. The expression on Sweeney’s face is unmistakable: that of a man who has not only gazed into the abyss but dived in headfirst. Mrs. Lovett reels back away from him, a terrified look crossing her pale features.

Suddenly, music fills the room—a disturbed, bowel-trembling Bernard Herrmann-inspired screech that smacks you in the guts and chills the blood, as first Bonham Carter, then Depp, start singing. “Now come here, my love,” sings Depp to the playback, his arms open wide, his hands beckoning to her. “Not a thing to fear, my love. What’s dead is dead…”

Welcome to the crimson-soaked, revenge-fueled, meat-pies­filled-with-human-flesh world of Sweeney Todd: The Demon Barber of Fleet Street. Music and lyrics: Stephen Sondheim. Artistic interpretation: Tim Burton. Release date: Christmastime, of course, via Paramount and DreamWorks.

It’s May 2007, and here at Britain’s Pinewood Studios, where he previously shot Batman and Charlie and the Chocolate Faciory, Burton is filming the climax of Sweeney Todd. Starring Depp as the eponymous (and fictitious) 19th-century London serial killer who cuts his victims’ throats while they sit in his barber’s chair, and Bonham Carter as baker Mrs. Nellie Lovett, who then uses the bodies as filling in her meat pies—to be sold later to an un­suspecting public—the dark, gruesome, unsettling and blood-soaked Sweeney Todd is only Burton’s second full-length foray into horror following 1999’s Sleepy Hollow.

When Burton calls cut on the scene, the music stops, and Depp and Bonham Carter break into laughter, swiftly followed by their director. For all the blood V guts, macabre set decor and murderous intent on display, this is a fun, relaxed set, and Burton is clearly having a whale of time making a much lower-budgeted movie than he’s used to—and one that, crucially, doesn’t come with any of the inherent stresses associated with directing a summer franchise flick or a studio tentpole. After a quick chat, Depp and Bonham Carter return to their original positions in preparation for another take. More blood is applied to Depp’s face and clothes, the musical playback begins again and as Depp glances up at Bon­ham Carter, he has, once more, become the terrifying embodiment of Sweeney Todd’s monomaniacal retribution.

As Burton, dressed as usual in all black, stares intently at the scene on his monitor, a huge smile breaks across his face. “In a long time, I haven’t liked a character this much,” he says of Sweeney. “I love him. If I was an actor, he would be the kind of character I’d want to play, because all you do is brood all day and rarely speak—it’s f*king great. I said to Johnny, ‘You’ve got the greatest job in the whole world.'”

While music has played a major role in almost every one of Burton’s films to date—from “Tequila” in Pee-wee’s Big Adventure to “The Banana Boat Song” in Beetlejuice to the tunefully macabre stop-motion animated features The Nightmare Before Christmas and Corpse Bride—this is his first proper musical. Albeit a bloodsoaked one centered on a murderous barber, formerly known as Benjamin Barker, who is shipped off to Australia on a false charge by the corrupt Judge Turpin (Alan Rickman) in order to • steal Barker’s wife Lucy and young daughter Johanna. Now ^ going by the Sweeney moniker, he returns to London 15 years later, having escaped his penal servitude, consumed by his desire for revenge on those responsible for his exile.

While not a fan of musicals per se, Burton has loved Sondheim’s Sweeney Todd: The Demon Barber of Fleet Street ever since he saw it on stage in London as a student in the early ’80s. “I didn’t know anything about Stephen Sondheim,” he explains, a month or so later in his London office during editing. “The poster just looked kind of cool, kind of interesting. The play is like an old horror movie. It’s melodramatic—a silent movie with music, really, is how I see it. And it was inter­esting to witness something bloody on stage, too. I actually went to see it twice because I liked it so much.”

Burton first attempted to turn Sondheim’s musical into a movie shortly after making Batman in the early ’90s, and then again in 1997 after Mars Attacks!, before the offer to direct Super­man redirected his attentions. For a while, the project passed to Sam [Road to Perdition) Mendes, but Sweeney never left Burton’s heart. When Mendes dropped out, Burton was approached again and immediately said yes—al­though he was then in preproduction on Ripley’s Believe it or Not, a big-budget biopic of oddity collector Robert Ripley scripted by Ed Wood and 1408 screen­writers Scott Alexander and Larry Karaszewski that was set to star Jim Carrey. After Ripley’s postponement in late spring 2006, Burton moved straight over onto Sweeney.

The man responsible for adapting Sondheim’s three-hour show into a movie was writer/producer John Logan, who is clearly as big a Sweeney fan as Burton, having seen the original Broad­way production starring Angela Lansbury as Mrs. Lovett and Len Cariou in the title role three times while still in high school. “The first time I saw it was their final preview, the night before they opened,” Logan recalls. “Like so many people who have been influenced by Sweeney Todd—like Tim, because he and I have discussed this—the first time you see it, you’ve never seen anything like that before on stage, cer­tainly in a musical. I fell in love with it, and it has just stayed with me forever.”

A former playwright, Logan made the transition to screen-writing and penned Gladiator, the Time Machine remake, Star

Trek: Nemesis and The Aviator. The key to adapting Sweeney, he says, was to write it like a genre piece. “I grew up on Hammer films, on the old Universal hor­ror movies, and I understand that sensibility very well. So I didn’t try to write it like a great work of art; I tried to write it like a Hammer horror movie, so it would have momentum and drive, ripping through this terri­fying story with the dispatch of Curse of Frankenstein and Horror of Dracula, and embracing the sort of black humor that is in­herent in those movies.”

And, let’s face it, in Burton’s work too. “I believe part of my life was born to write this mov­ie, and all of Tim’s fife was born to direct it,” Logan continues. “I am unashamedly a huge fan of his work, and the idea that the sensibility that was formed on those same movies I was talking about—on Guignol, on Hammer, on the understanding of baroqueness—could be filtered into the story of Sweeney Todd seems absolutely perfect. It’s an ideal match of director and material, and my job working with Tim was to make it even more so, to bring the great beast of Sweeney Todd into line with his sensibil­ity and vision, which is already close to the material. The fact that Tim and I share a vocabulary, that we could talk about Peter dishing and know exactly what that meant—we could talk about the asylum scene from The Evil of Frankenstein and know exactly what that was—just helped in the way we communicated.”

Cushing’s Baron Frankenstein, Logan says, was a huge influ­ence on his interpretation of Sweeney. “If you look at the arc of that character through the Hammer movies,” he notes, “there’s a very interesting development from Curse of Frankenstein in terms of him becoming much colder in later life, and focused, by the last couple of movies. In a way, that parallels Sweeney Todd’s journey through this story. He starts with this desire for revenge for his own solace, which becomes universal and cold toward all mankind. It’s something I found very useful, and it certainly played into my thinking about the character.”

For Burton, there was only one actor he wanted to play his Sweeney Todd, although at the time he signed on to direct, Depp was committed to star in Shantaram, an adaptation of the book by Gregory David Roberts about a heroin addict who reinvents him­self as a doctor in the slums of Bombay. But like Ripley, Shan­taram was suddenly postponed, and Depp found himself available, extending a creative relationship and close friendship between director and star that began in 1988 with Edward Scissorhands and continued with Ed Wood, Sleepy Hollow, Charlie and the Chocolate Factory and Corpse Bride.

While there was no doubt Depp would make a great Sweeney, the only real question was, could he sing? Depp wasn’t sure himself when Burton asked. “The answer I gave him was, ‘I don’t know,’ ” Depp recalls, late one afternoon in his trailer on the penultimate day of the Sweeney shoot. “I knew I wasn’t tone-deaf.” In fact, Depp had played guitar and sung background vocals in a 1980s band called The Kids. He told Burton he was going to go into the studio with a friend of his “to investigate and try and sing the songs, and if I’m close, then we can talk about it, or I’ll just call you and say, ‘You know what, I can’t do it.'” As it turned out, Depp has a fine singing voice—one that, at times, sounds a bit Bowie, but which is also distinctly his.

While Sweeney’s name is the one in the title, it’s Mrs. Lovett who not only has the most songs to sing, but the most lyrically complex ones too. Burton auditioned several big-name actresses in the U.S. and UK to find his Mrs. Lovett, but eventually cast his partner, Bonham Carter, who had starred in his Planet of the Apes and had smaller roles in Big Fish and Charlie and the Chocolate Factory. “I was very nervous about it,” the director reveals, “because you don’t want to be perceived as casting your girl­friend. And I couldn’t, in this case. She had to be able to really, really deliver. I knew she looked right for it, I can see those two together, but I felt I had to really go through the process of see­ing other people.”

At the end of the day, however, it was Sondheim who had final casting approval—as he had with Sweeney—and ‘without knowing Burton’s choice, he too picked Bonham Carter. “He knows his music better than anybody,” Burton says, “and vocally, Mrs. Lovett is the toughest part.”

In crafting their vision of the Sweeney character, both Depp and Burton took inspiration from such old-time horror icons as Lon Chaney, Boris Karloff and Peter Loire. In fact, Burton says it was their mutual love of these actors that made him think of casting Depp in the first place. “Because we always talk about old horror-movie stars, we thought it would be fun to do some­thing that taps into that type of acting, and this had it,” Burton reveals. “Those kinds of actors, in those kinds of movies, had a certain style that’s very much of its time, but it’s still very pure. If you see Peter Lorre in Mad Love or Boris Karloff, there’s a certain primal quality to their acting that is fun to watch.”

Moreover, Burton wanted his Sweeney and Mrs. Lovett to look like silent-movie stars. Both characters have a deathly pallor and red-rimmed eyes surrounded by pools of darkness. “You put them next to each other, and they make a weird couple,” says Burton of Depp and Bonham Carter. “That was, again, part of the energy of it. It goes back to the image on the album or the poster of the two characters standing next to each other; it’s kind of like Punch and Judy It’s a weird thing to say, but I can see them being in a wax museum, or in the London Dungeon as an exhibit It was important just visu­ally that they looked right for each other—that sort of perverted alliance.”

But Depp and Burton didn’t just want Sweeney to resemble a silent-movie character, they actually wanted him to be almost silent. “Christopher Lee didn’t speak in the whole of Drac-ula, and Vincent Price did it too, in Dr. Phibes* Burton explains. ^;‘We kept cut­ting out Lines in this, because unlike the stage, what’s great about film is it’s closer, the actors can do things with a look. Also, you can read between the lines. You don’t necessarily know what they’re thinking, but you see that they’re thinking, and there was some­thing quite liberating and pleasing about that aspect of just looking at peo­ple and knowing that there’s a whole bunch of stuff going on inside that you’re not exactly sure about.

“There are lots of movies about ser­ial killers, but I wouldn’t put Sweeney Todd in that category per se,” Burton continues. “Again, it goes back to those old horror movies. There’s a sympa­thetic quality to him, because it’s about somebody going through a lot of things in his life, and in a melodramatic and fable-like way, it distills all those things into one person.”

‘He’s troubled,” Depp agrees. “I started flunking of Sweeney, initially, as a victim, because he falls prey to the judge and his cronies. And then I kind of saw him as innocent in a way—some­one who’s a little bit off, a little hit slow.”

Another direct inspiration for their Sweeney was Doctor X, played by Lionel Atwill in Doctor X and Humphrey Bogart in Re­turn of Doctor X—not least because of the white streak in Swee­ney’s hair, “That was so amazing, to see Humphrey Bogart playing a monster,” Burton says. “That’s what I thought about Johnny as Sweeney Todd. It’s so cool to see him in a part like this, because you see those other horror-movie actors do it all the time.”

That vintage feel Burton wanted from his actors also extended to the film’s look and production design, which opt for a slightly fantastical image of 19th-century London rather than a historically accurate version of the city. “We decided not to be real hardcore, because it is kind of a fable and it’s slightly styl­ized,” he notes. “It’s like those Frankenstein movies; it doesn’t go, ‘The Romanian Mountains. 1740. There’s a certain fable aspect you get by not doing that which is important to the piece. Because the story starts in the time when Jack the Ripper was around, I wanted it to feel a bit earlier than that—just a slightly cruder time—without [directly] acknowledging it.”

While Burton is famous for his traditional filmmaking meth­ods, building massive sets on soundstages and studio backlots rather than resorting to CGI. he says he initially planned to film Sweeney in the manner of Sin City, shooting his actors against greenscreens with minimal sets and props, adding the rest in postproduclion. “Part of the reason was the budget” he explains. “But when I really thought about it, being on a set helps me, it helps the actors, it helps everybody. And at the end of the day, people are singing. And singing on a greenscreen, you’re so far removed from any reality that it would have been a really scary nightmare. That aspect made it even more important to have sets on this one.”

Walking around the Sweeney Todd sets, one can’t help but stop and admire the detailing and artistry involved in their creation. Behind every shop front lies a meticulous interior. The man responsible for bringing the London of Sweeney Todd to life was legendary Italian production designer Dante Ferretti, a two-time Oscar-winner whose credits include several films for Martin Scorsese and Federico Fellini, as well as Interview With the Vam­pire, The Adventures of Baron Munchausen and, more recently, The Black Dahlia.

“He said, I want to do a London that’s a little bit like an old black-and-white Hollywood movie,’ ” reveals Ferretti, who had been collaborating with Burton on Ripley before that film’s post­ponement. “Not too many details; it has to be like black and white in color, just a few colors. It’s very graphic.”

“In the screenplay, I said the barbershop looks haunted, and that’s what every square inch of this world looks like,” says Logan on a neighboring soundstage, across from Mrs. Lovett’s Pie Shop. “It’s creepy. They are very unsettling sets to walk through, because they’re dark and have strange broken angles and you never quite know what might come around a corner— whether it’s Sweeney Todd with a razor, Mrs. Lovett with a pie or Jack the Ripper. They’re frightening sets, which is appropriate, because it’s a horror movie.”

In Sondheims original stage production, blood was a vital and copious ingredient, shocking the show’s initial Broadway audiences more used to kinder, gentler, less sanguine-soaked fare. “The first time Tim and I met, the first thing we talked about was when we originally saw Sweeney Todd on stage and how much we remembered the blood,” Logan notes. “At the first throat-slitting, the razor went wide, the blood arched across the stage, the light hit it and it was this unique red.”

Burton was determined that his Swee­ney Todd wouldn’t shy away from the crimson stuff, even though that would necessarily mean an R rating. “First note we gave to the studio was, ‘Guys, don’t even mention blood; there’s going to be blood in the movie,’ ” Burton recalls. “I had seen several stage productions since where they toned down the blood, and I thought, ‘Don’t bother.’ You can’t be polit­ically correct with this, because it’s a story about a serial killer and they cook people in pies, Don’t try and soften it. But it’s not overly graphic. It’s all done in a Hammer-esque way, not in a Hostel man­ner. The blood is bright red. It goes back to the show, where it’s more of a symbol and a part of the fabric of the color scheme.”

Prosthetics supervisor Neal Scanlan says that the challenge Burton laid down to him and his crew was to design the makeup so that he could film the actors having their throats slit -without having to cut away—allowing him to show the actors, if he desired, bleeding out on cam­era. The effect is sensational and, it must be said, extremely splattery. “It was a case of seeing just how far one could go with the blood and what worked well, cinematically speaking, rather than having to be horrendously gruesome or horrific,” explains Scanlan, who previously worked with Burton on Charlie and the Chocolate Factory. “It was more a case of trying to find a nice balance between movie deaths and movie blood, and the real world.”

“I always thought this needed to be a very visceral movie.” adds Logan. “We didn’t war.t to hide from the squalor, from the blood, from the depravity—that had to be a part of it, which Tim is completely embracing. This central character is moti­vated by so much desire that he has to kill people with his hands, and their blood gets on his hands, on his face, and he is coated with it—figuratively and literally.”

Which just so happens to be the case today, as Depp’s Sweeney Todd steps ever closer to Mrs. Lovett, murder in his haunted, vengeful eyes and a Sondheim song on his lips. Jack Sparrow, he most definitely is not. “Tim’s not afraid of blood or the ridiculous, because he always puts you in a position where you believe it, although you know you have to suspend belief in a way,” notes Oscar-winning pro­ducer Richard {Jaws) Zanuck, hooking up with Burton for the fourth time since Planer of the Apes. “He has a way ul doing the most outrageous things and making them feel very real.