Title: Return of the Native
Author: Holly Grigg-Spall
Publication: Total Film
Issue: Summer 2013
Johnny Depp does not watch himself on screen. Ever. Something about preferring to be ignorant of the results of his work. That once it’s cut and locked, it’s none of his business. But he’s not ignorant to the fact that he’s raged against the machine on numerous projects. “Somebody once put together a reel of various bits of different films that I have done,” he admits in his trademark quiet drawl, while sipping a sneaky beer in Vegas. “When I saw all the characters lined up in a row like that, I thought it was amazing that I was able to get away with it. I still feel lucky to be in the game… well, to be in the game without having to play the game too awful much, you know?”
Getting away with it is something Depp has turned from a career reinvention (wilfully rejecting easy heartthrob fame in favour of the weird and wonderful wilderness) into a billion-dollar franchise cash cow. Cast as Jack Sparrow in Pirates Of The Caribbean back in 2003, Depp horrified studio bosses during filming with his decision to play Sparrow as a sozzled, seafaring Keith Richards replete with dreads and guyliner. (“I think it was Michael Eisner, the head of Disney at the time, who was quoted as saying, ‘He’s ruining the movie’,” Depp recalled gleefully in 2010.) The gamble paid off – the Pirates franchise has netted nearly $4bn to date – and Depp’s quirky approach to characterisation is what those same honchos now pay top dollar for. Want an outlaw to play an outlaw? Heeeere’s Johnny…
Which is why Total Film has braved the desert heat of Las Vegas to see a sneak peek of western romp The Lone Ranger at Caesars Palace and catch up with the cast and crew about the making of Disney’s big summer tentpole hope. “I get this picture of this Indian with a crow on his head and it came from Johnny,” recalls producer Jerry Bruckheimer, who never met a money-spinning franchise possibility he didn’t like and had been looking to reboot The Lone Ranger for a couple of years. “And I said, ‘well, who’s the actor? Who’s doing this?’ [Johnny said] ‘It’s me.’ I think that’s what attracted everybody, including Disney.”
Yep, Depp, with his battered trilby, ragged brown leather jacket and unassuming air may seem like the reluctant power player, but he’s the catalyst for this project -inspiring a corporation to put millions behind the revival of a dormant radio and TV cowboy and his loyal sidekick via his usual unorthodox methods. Take the pitch; director Gore Verbinski had turned down every version of the script shown to him by Bruckheimer – including several more supernaturally-inspired incarnations – over a four-year period. It was only when Depp presented Verbinski with a photo of himself in character with black and white stripes down his face and that dead black crow (Depp’s spirit guide, apparently), as they were hanging out on the beach while Verbinski directed Depp in Pirates 2, that the director decided to take another look. And to look at it from a more sympathetically ethnic perspective than previous incarnations where a Wild West ranger goes rogue in the pursuit of truth and justice while his subservient, clichéd and stereotypical ‘Indian’, Tonto, skivvies for him.
“Since cinema has been around, Native Americans have been treated very poorly by Hollywood,” says Depp. “What I wanted to do was play Tonto not as a sidekick – like ‘go fetch a soda for me, boy!” – but as a warrior with integrity and dignity. It’s my small sliver of a contribution to try to right the wrongs of the past.” Plus, for Depp, this time it’s personal. “I’m probably one sixteenth Native American, but of course that’s hard to trace. Basically that means it’s likely that, somewhere along the line, you were a product of rape.”
“No one had heard the Lone Ranger story from Tonto’s perspective,” Verbinski tells TF enthusiastically, dismissing the ’40s and ’50s TV series as ‘squaresville and very cheesy’. “This film, it could be called ‘Tonto and the Masked Man’. We kept all the archetypes – the white hat, the silver bullet, the white horse, but we created them through the thread of Tonto.” He rubs his beard and furrows his brow, “This is an origin story and it was Tonto that created the Lone Ranger. That’s what made this project interesting to me.”
That origin story sees Texas Ranger John Reid rescued by Tonto after baddie Butch Cavendish kills five ranger colleagues, including Reid’s own brother. “The Lone Ranger believes in the laws of man and Tonto believes in the laws of Nature. Their worlds are colliding as the Transcontinental railroad makes its way through Indian territory and the cavalry and Comanche fight over the land,” describes Verbinski. “We take the Native American and the cop and force them together, have them make a pact for justice when they each have their own idea of what that means. It makes for good buddy movie math and it’s an opportunity to tell an epic tale.” Essentially, what Verbinski envisioned was giving Depp the chance to play Sancho Panza to the Lone Ranger’s Don Quixote, a role he had taken on for Terry Gilliam’s ill-fated The Man Who Killed Don Quixote.
Bringing on Revolutionary Road writer Justin Haythe to update the script, both Depp and Verbinski were keen not to merely repeat their previous success with the fantastical but not necessarily critic-endorsed Pirates movies. “The Lone Ranger deals with more gravitas,” Verbinski insists. “You’re talking about the plight of the Native American. It’s called The Lone Ranger because six of the seven rangers are killed, including his own brother. The characters are borne out of tragic events and you don’t want to be cavalier about that.”
While Depp immersed himself in Comanche culture in preparation for the role – even getting ‘adopted’ by Native American activist LaDonna Harris and welcomed into the Comanche Nation – Verbinski sought his ranger, a partner to Tonto but also an actor who could match Depp on screen while wearing a mask most of the time. Bruckheimer, Verbinski and Depp all agreed on the statuesque Armie Hammer (“Armie has this great, blind optimism – we needed someone who you could believe could have old-fashioned ideas,” says Bruckheimer) and he wasn’t about to turn down the franchise power trifecta.
“Gore, Johnny and Jerry – if you have the opportunity to work with the dream team, you do it,” smiles Hammer. Though the 6ft 5in 26-year-old actor had worked on prestigious projects (Fincher’s The Social Network and Eastwood’s J. Edgar), this was his BIG movie – big-ass budget, huge location sets in Albuquerque, massive stunts and set-pieces… Hammer had to try hard not to compete with the size of what was going on around him and believe in himself as that masked man. “Just because the set-pieces are big doesn’t mean your acting should be,” he explains earnestly. “There’s a constant streamer in my head going, ‘What are you doing here? This is their job not yours. Why should you be here?'” He looks up, lets out a kind of frustrated ‘bleurgh’ sound, and then laughs; “I had to just think that I’m obviously here because they want me to be. I’ll do the best I can and if they don’t like it they can fire me and I’ll do something else.”
Part of Hammer’s discomfort, he admits, served the banter between Tonto and the Lone Ranger. “A lot of the humour is situational and based off the difference in world view or difference in opinion of how a situation should be handled. There’s a lot of rub in the relationship – how do they live together? How do they stay buddies and work together? What’s their process? You don’t see that in the TV show.”
“It’s nice to take a character who believes in right and wrong and throw him in a soup that’s all grey and he can’t find purchase in that soup,” laughs Verbinski. “Westerns have had relationship movies like Butch Cassidy And The Sundance Kid and this is just a much more dysfunctional one!”
So maverick characters all at sea – figuratively against a period backdrop, a sprinkling of comedy, big set-pieces and the real possibilities of this being a set-up for further Tonto and Ranger adventures, but definitely not Pirates, right? “The Pirates movie is based on an amusement park ride – it’s fanciful and it’s supernatural,” Hammer says firmly. “This movie is none of that as it’s grounded in reality and it is supposed to feel like that.”
But that’s not to say ‘event movie’ is a dirty word. “We’re just gonna give you a big, expansive experience,” promises Depp. “Which is what I wanted when I was a kid – to go to a summer movie that really enthralled me, excited me and moved me, and that’s what The Lone Ranger does.” He pauses, looks over his glasses and smiles conspiratorially. “And well, outlaws are fun,” he grins. “They get to do things that we can’t, y’know? Yeah, they break the rules. So there is that vicarious thrill.” Well, he would know…
