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, revenge fuelled, meat-pies-filled-with human-flesh world of Sweeney Todd: The Demon Barber Of Fleet Street. Music and lyrics: Stephen Sondheim. Artistic interpretation: Tim Burton. It’s May 2007 and here at Pinewood Studios, Burton is filming part of Sweeney Todd’s climactic sequence. When he calls cut, the music stops, and Depp and Bonham Carter break out of character and into fits of laughter, soon followed by their director. For all the blood, macabre sets and murderous intent on display, this is a remarkably relaxed set, with Burton having great fun making what, at a rumoured $50m, is a much lower-budget film than his norm and one that, crucially, doesn’t come with any of the stresses inherent with directing a summer blockbuster or studio tentpole. Not that it has all been plain sailing… Earlier in the shoot, Depp’s young daughter fell ill, with the production shutting down for a couple of weeks to allow him to be with her. For a while, Depp wasn’t sure he’d make it back again, telling Burton to recast his role if need be. Fortunately for all concerned, she pulled through.
After a quick conversation with Burton, Depp and Bonham Carter return to their positions for another take. More blood is applied to Depp’s face and clothes and the musical playback begins again. “This character is one of my favourites.” says Burton, dressed in his usual all-black, later that day. “Just because I love his interior, brooding quality. Then you put that with him singing…”
Cannibal holocaust
Burton wouldn’t identify himself as a fan of musicals, but he’s loved Sondheim’s version of Sweeney Todd ever since he saw it on the London stage as a student in the 1980s. “I didn’t know anything about Stephen Sondheim” he recalls, a month or so later in the central London office where he’s editing Sweeney Todd, “The poster just looked kind of cool, kind of interesting.”
The story of a barter in Victorian London who slits his customers’ throats as they sit in his chair – and the accomplice, baker Mrs. Lovett, who uses the bodies to fill meat pies she sells to the unsuspecting public was perfect material for Burton: bloody, macabre, and melodramatic. “It’s like an old horror movie,” he continues, “an old silent movie kind of a thing. It’s like a silent movie with music, really, is how I see It. And it was interesting to see something bloody on stage, too. I went to see it twice because I liked it so much.”
Originally staged on Broadway in 1979, with Len Cariou as Sweeney and Angela Lansbury as Mrs Uivett, Sondheim’s show won eight gongs at prestigious theatre awards the Tonys, but it was something of a commercial failure. And though film musicals such as Chicago, Dreamgirl and Hairspray have all managed to pull crowds in recent years. Sweeney, with its themes of revenge and cannibalism, wasn’t exactly a movie clamoring to be made. According to Sondheim, Burton was the first person to even ask about adapting it, shortly after Batman was released, but nothing came of it. Burton tried again in 1997. before becoming sidetracked by a potential Superman movie and watching as Sam Mendes stepped in. When the Brit director opted for Jarhead instead, Burton was approached by DreamWorks and immediately said yes. At the time, though, he was in pre-production on Ripley’s Believe It Or Not, a big-budget Jim Carrey-starring biopic of oddity collector Robert Ripley. Locations had been scouted in China and a crew hired, when Paramount postponed the film due to script and budget concerns. Burton was devastated, but soon embraced the bloody opportunity of Sweeney Todd.
With Sondheim and writer/producer John Logan (Gladiator, The Aviator), he set about cutting some songs – including the show’s famous opener ‘The Ballad Of Sweeney Todd’ – and trimming others, in order to boil the three-hour stage production down to a two hour movie. His idea was to use the songs to tell the story, rather than simply provide interludes between dialogue scenes, as in most musicals.
As his Sweeney, Burton had only one actor in mind: his five time collaborator Johnny Depp. Ever since Edward Scissorhands, Depp had proved a master at interpreting Burton’s onscreen misfits, be it cross-dressing film director Ed Wood or creepy confectionery king Willy Wonka. And Sweeney would be his darkest role yet — a serial killer who swears revenge on the Judge (Alan Rickman) who deported him to Australia on a trumped-up charge, in order to steal his wife and daughter. But Depp was committed to star in Shantaram, an adaptation of Gregory David Roberts’ book about a heroin addict who reinvents himself as a doctor in the slums of Bombay. When that, too, went belly-up, Depp was suddenly available. Not that Burton knew whether his star could sing or not. “I knew he was musical.” says Burton “But it was just a feeling I had”. Depp, who played guitar and contributed hacking vocals in Florida-based band The Kids in the ’80s, wasn’t exactly sure himself. “The answer I gave him was. ‘I don’t know’ he recalls, sat in his trailer one afternoon near the end of the Sweeney shoot. “I didn’t know if I could hit a note to be honest, but I wanted to make sure I could do it for Tim.” And so while shooting Pirates Of The Caribbean: At Worlds End, Depp learned all of Sweeney’s songs and went to an LA studio with his old friend Bruce Wilkin – former bassist for both The Kids and Adam Ant – to record, Sweeney show-stopper ‘My Friends’.
But even before anyone, be it Burton or the studio — had heard Depp sing a single note, Sweeney was officially greenlit; sets were under construction, millions of dollars being spent… “I suppose they had some blind faith in me,” says Depp, “or were so assured that even if I sung I million bad notes, technology would put them into place: you could always tune it.” As it turns out, Depp can sing, bringing a punk rock quality to Sweeney, with a hint of David Bowie in there, too.” What’s great,” says Burton, “is he takes something that’s kind of old-fashioned and gives it a modern quality.”
My bloody valentine
While Sweeney’s name is the one in the title, it’s Mrs. Lovett who has the most – and the most lyrically complex – songs. Long before Burton had officially signed on to direct, he’d painted a watercolour sketch of Sweeney and Mrs. Lovett. Pinned to the wall of his office, the two look remarkably like Depp and Burton’s off-screen partner Helena Bonham Carter, who’d starred in Planet Of the Apes and had smaller roles in Big Fish and Charlie And The Chocolate Factory. Burton was concerned about how it would look if he cast his other half, particularly as she wasn’t a singer, either. (In fact, only one member of the cast, veteran musical actress Laura Michelle Kelly – as the Beggar Woman is a professional singer.) “I was very nervous about it because you don’t want to be perceived as casting your girlfriend,” he says. “I knew she looked right for it. I could see those two together, but I felt I had to go through the process of seeing other people”
Not that Bonham Carter was going to be put off trying. “I wanted to be part of it because Sondheim is my hero.” she says. “But I don’t want to be given favours, I want to earn it. So I went to this amazing singing teacher, Ian Adam, from June to September, sang every day, did all these exercises, and learned the entire score because I was very, very keen.” In the meantime, Burton auditioned several other actresses, both in the UK and America, but after much deliberation, choose Bonham Carter. Even then, the final decision actually fell to Sondheim, who had casting approval over the roles of Todd and Mrs. Lovett, and who picked Bonham Carter without knowing Burton’s decision.
To create their Sweeney, Depp and Burton looked to the past, to the likes of Lon Chaney Sr. Boris Karloff and Peter Loire. “Because we always talk about old horror movie stars, we thought it would be fun to do something that taps into that kind of acting style. This had it.” Burton reveals. “Those kind of actors, in those kind of movies, had a certain acting 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’s fun to watch”
The old horror movie feel he was after also extended to the film’s look and design, with Burton opting for an image of 19th century London that was more fantasy than historically accurate. “He said. *I want to do a London that’s a little bit like an old black-and-white Hollywood movie” says legendary Italian production designer Dante Feiretti (Gangs Of New York), who’d previously worked with Burton on Ripley. “Not too many details; like black and white in colour. Very graphic.”
Burton initially planned to shoot his actors using green screens and minimal props, adding the rest in post-production, a la Sin City. “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. And at the end of the day, people are singing. And singing on a green screen would have been a nightmare”
In Sondheim’s original stage production, blood was both a vital and free flowing ingredient, shocking audiences more used to gentler, kinder, less sanguine soaked fare. Burton was steadfast in his determination that his Sweeney wouldn’t shy away from the red stuff and told the studio from the get-go that there was going to be blood; Lots of blood. But the emphasis is definitely more Hammer Horror than slasher movie. “It’s not overly graphic,” he insists. “I had seen several stage productions where they toned down the blood, but you can’t be politically correct with this: it’s a story about a serial killer and they cook people in pies. So it just fell like that was true to the spirit of the show. It’s more of an emotional release.”
A few weeks prior to filming the bakehouse climax. Burton is shooting a scene of “emotional release” in Sweeney’s barbershop, in which Todd slices the throat of customer who settles down for a shave. Burton, the camera and crew are wrapped in plastic waterproofs to protect from the bloody spray. The playback begins and Depp – singing ‘Johanna’, a beautiful ballad about his estranged daughter — slowly draws the blade across his victim’s throat. Blood erupts in a crimson arc and keeps on pumping until Burton calls cut. There’s applause from the crew, then the briefest of pauses, before Burton calls for another take, a smile playing across his lips.
