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 19th 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, whose pallid skin is strikingly set off by dark—circled eyes and twin mops of tangled black hair—his with a white streak flashing up one side. “It was terribly important that we see Mrs. Lovett and Sweeney Todd as a pair,” said make—up designer Peter Owen. “They’re from the same mould, and that is why they’re the only people who really look like that.”
Burton fans will recognize the look; the bold make-up style echoes everything from Depp’s look in Edward Scissorhands to the ghostly stop-motion characters in the director’s animated Corpse Bride. “I did something very reminiscent of what I’ve done for all Tim Burton’s films, because he loves that dark-eyed, pale—skin look,” said Ve Neill, who was Depp’s make-up artist for Sweeney Todd and who has also collaborated with Burton on BeetleJuice, Edward Scissorhands and Ed Wood among other films.
Owen, who worked on the director’s Sleepy Hollow and Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, said, “After you work with Tim once, it becomes dead easy, because you know that you can go quite a long way and that he doesn’t worry about period. The only sort of important brief I had on Sweeney todd was silent movie and horror, so we started with exaggerated silent-movie makeup.”
With the bleach—bypass process, testing becomes particularly important, because colors are rendered in unexpected ways. “What looks like an ordinary red will go very dark on you,” Owen offered as an example. “So if you want anything to look light red or pink or fresh, you have to get it very bright.” The designer made this discovery on Sleepy Hollow; which was also shot using the skip-bleach method. “So we just used the Sleepy Hollow blood again. It’s the most violent orange—a ridiculous color.”
The blood was mostly the province of special make—up effects supervisor Neal Scanlan. “They had huge contraptions of multiple tubes running up the victims’ necks into these appliances, so that when Johnny would slit their throats, just gushers of blood would come out,” Neill recalled. “Everybody in the room was covered with plastic wrap so when the blood came spewing out nobody got covered in it, because it pretty much saturated the entire room.”
With bleach bypass, contrast is accentuated as well. “lf you put a medium—gray against something fairly pale, it will look like black and white,” Owen said. “So when you’re modeling those faces, to the eye it looks pretty extreme, but nothing like it does after it’s been through the bypass”
For this reason, and also because Burton required a slightly more realistic look than he did in other flms, Neill made less extreme make—up choices than she might have. “We didn’t want to have a solid dark circle around Johnny’s eyes, but we still wanted that depth to give a really haunting look to the character,” she said. “l used some purples and browns, and ended up putting a kind of Christmas-red ring on the ledge of his eyes and underneath his eyes,”
Though Depp and Bonham Carter at times look like they’re wearing Kabuki makeup, Neill said, “They’re not really white; it’s just that they’re fair-completed, and the skip—bleach makes them look white, They were airbrushed with very fair shades, and airbrushing always lends a kind of eerie look to things as well.” On Depp, “l used kett airbrushing colors, I did all the shading with airbrushing, and then a lot of the work around the eyes was done by hand. The red l used was in one of the little Kryolan palettes, and then l also used an eye shadow from M.A.C. called Ashbury.”
Neill conducted some rests with Depp in Los Angeles before embarking for England, where Sweeney Todd was shot. The actor and make-up artist were working together on the Pirates of the Carribean movies, so they had the opportunity to try out some looks Depp had already discussed with Burton, “to see if we could find a character, and if we wanted to alter three-dimensionally or not,” Neill said. We were thinking about using different noses and a brow piece. But we decided after doing a couple of tests not to use prosthetics.”
Owen and key makeup and hair artist Ivana Primorac took Depp’s final look and essentially copied it onto Bonham Carter, applying similar products and colors to the actress’ face, along with more feminine eye-shadow shades. Though Mrs. Lovett is far from a conventional leading lady, Bonham Carter’s beauty manages to suggest itself “Helena`s face still came through on the monkey movie, didn’t it’” said Owen, referring to Burron’s Planet of the Apes”. “An awful lot of what makes her attractive is what she does with her eyes.”
As with Depp, Owen considered using three-dimensional pieces on Bonham Carter, specifically a mouthpiece. “We were going to use bad teeth, but then we realized it would be too risky because of all the lip-synching; she had enough to do with her mouth. We did paint everyone’s teeth down. With the bleach bypass, if they had clean teeth, they’d look like tombstones.”
In the first part of the film, the actress’ real hair was teased and tangled into Mrs. Lovett’s look. But Owen used a wig after Mrs. Lovett dyes her hair once her meat—pie business takes off. “Usually when you see my name on a movie, there are always millions of wigs,`° said Owen, pointing to the Lord of the Rings trilogy as a prime example. “But with Johnny Depp, it was his own hair. If it had been a wig, it wouldn’t have been as stiff as that. He’s got very, very fine heavy hair, and we had to torture it to get it looking like that, stiffening it up like mad.” The white streak was achieved with a lace piece glued to the front of the actor’s hair, which was darkened from its natural color to complete the picture. The transformation of both stars took about 90 minutes every day. “We said to ourselves, we’re not going to tire them out by having them in the chair for hours,” said Owen. Neill added, “It took about 45 minutes to do Johnny’s make—up, and about 45 minutes to do his hair. I had an assistant, Nana Fischer, with me. We both started working on the hair, and when l got the side done with the streak in it, l would move around and start doing his make—up, and she would continue on the back of the hair. We eventually got it down to about an hour and 15 minutes.”
Apart from the two leads, Owen had a half dozen other principals` looks to design, from the blond, comparatively healthy looking ingénue (Jane Wisener) to the villains of the piece, judge Turpin (Alan Rickman) and his slimy henchman Beadle Bamford (Timothy Spall). The make—up designer had particular fun with Todd’s rival Pirelli, a foppish, Italian accented character played by Sacha Baron Cohen (aka Borat and Ali G). Pirelli’s hairstyle is an absurdly curled and fey, and was actually based on a bit of research. “Although we weren’t making a period movie, the Elm is vaguely set in the 1830s to 1850s,” Owen said. “We saw an advertisement in a period magazine, and I think it was for a hairdresser. He had that ridiculous hairdo, and so that’s what went on him.”
The only character to get any sort of prosthetic treatment was the Beggar Woman (Laura Michelle Kelly) who periodically appears to issue ominous proclamations. “They were only tiny bits of prosthetics’—scars, fish skin, things like that,” Owen said. “We had to keep testing her just to see how far we could go with the paint techniques and the bald cap and that sort of thing. You have to deliberately go too far, because it’s easier to pull back than to add.”
Despite the rather extreme styles in Sweeney Todd, Owen said, “It was a perfectly standard procedure of how you build characters with a director and the actors. You just put someone together, You don’t treat anything as, ‘This is our reference for the judge or the Beadle.’ The raw material is the actor, and then it’s ‘How can we apply the feel of this movie to this actor?”’
