Chicago Tribune, June 29th
2009
Johnny Depp: An outlaw
outlook
'Public
Enemies' role a kindred spirit for the 46-year-old Hollywood
actor
By
Rachel Abramowitz
LOS ANGELES -- Johnny Depp has
fond memories of his first machine gun. He was just a kid
growing up in Owensboro, Ky., but somewhere around age 5 or 6,
he began shooting .22s, then moved on to .38s, .44s and .45s.
And then he got his hands on a relative's Thompson machine
gun.
"I
butted it up against the tree 'cause it tends to ride up on
you," says the 46-year-old actor, who relives the moment,
complete with shooting sounds. He begins clapping his hand on
the top of his imaginary gun. "My pop came in and grabbed it,
so it didn't go anywhere." He laughs.
Guns
are certainly a topic of conversation today for Depp, given
that the superstar is talking about his new film, "Public
Enemies" (opening in Chicago on Wednesday), the Michael Mann
gangster epic in which Depp plays famed 1930s bank robber John
Dillinger. But firearms crop up in other ways too, such as in
the story about the first time Depp met his longtime friend,
the late Hunter Thompson. Depp -- who played the author in the
1998 film version of "Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas" and
recently finished work on an adaptation of "The Rum Diary" --
went to Thompson's house in Colorado, where he complimented
the writer on a beautiful 12-gauge shotgun hanging on the
wall.
Accent
on experience, as Cotillard prepared to play Dillinger's girl
"He said, 'Oh, yeah, wanna fire it?' " recalls Depp, relishing
the memory. Then Thompson told him to hold onto a couple of
small propane tanks. "I got a cigarette hanging in my mouth,
and he starts handing me these little matchbox-shaped square
bits and told me to tape them to the sides of the tanks. I
said 'What is this we are taping to the side of this propane
tank?' And he said, 'Nitroglycerin.' "
Depp
opens his black eyes wide and wears a look of horror. "I
chucked my cigarette in the sink!"
Later,
he shot the tanks in Thompson's backyard, and "there was an
80-foot fireball. I think that was my test," he says,
laughing.
It's
hard to imagine that Depp wouldn't ace any sort of exam that
tests the limits of the free spirit. He's perhaps the most
eccentric of all the major male movie stars. Ironically enough
-- given his actual background with guns -- he's practically
the only one who didn't ascend to Hollywood superstardom with
shoot-'em-up roles in action movies. Depp's certainly done
more than almost any other actor in Hollywood to expand the
onscreen concept of masculinity, bringing "guyliner" to
mainstream America well before Adam Lambert ever appeared on
"American Idol," as well as a vision of male heterosexuality
that still maintains an element of the feminine and tons of
real rebelliousness.
He
certainly seems his sui-generis self at all times. He arrives
for the interview dressed with addled panache in a fitted blue
pinstripe vest, with a pressed green bandanna hanging just so
out of his jeans pocket. His hair flops to the side like a
'20s style banker who neglected to slick back his locks, and
he sports facial scruff where a more traditional beard might
have grown. He comes across both courtly and fey, immediately
apologizing for his jet-lagged state.
After
finishing "Rum Diary" in Puerto Rico, he flew to L.A. to pick
up his "kiddies" (7-year-old son and 10-year-old daughter with
longtime love Vanessa Paradis), accompanied them to France
where they have a second home, then flew to Chicago for the
first "Public Enemies" premiere, and then back to California
for a second red-carpet screening in L.A.
Sitting
in a Beverly Hills hotel room, he recalls this itinerary with
a voice that seems almost unrecognizable at first. He both
drawls and plucks his words precisely, and it sounds as if the
tenor is slightly aerated. It's strange to hear, because in
the last decade or so, he's rarely used his actual speaking
voice on film.
Depp
has appeared in almost 50 movies, but for much of his early
career -- the "What's Eating Gilbert Grape" portion -- he
seemed like a bohemian artist, intensely wary of the major
stardom that could easily be his, given his natural onscreen
charisma. More recently, he seems to have made peace with his
mantle by embracing the medium's mythic and mythmaking
potential.
Lately
Depp hasn't played many ordinary citizens, jobbing in
suburbia, grinding through everyday existence. He seems to
prefer portraying an androgynous eye-lined pirate ("The
Pirates of the Caribbean" trilogy), the slightly creepy candy
impresario with the Prince Valiant haircut ("Charlie and the
Chocolate Factory"), the dreamy, gentle creator of Peter Pan
("Finding Neverland") and the Mad Hatter from the upcoming Tim
Burton version of "Alice in Wonderland," a creature with
tangerine orange eyebrows, hair that seems to jet out of his
head, spooky lime-green eyes and a hat that appears
constructed out of feathers and lace.
Much of
the vivid look of his alter egos sprouts from Depp's own
fertile imagination. "You get these strong images in your
head, and you can't shake them," he explains. One of the first
things he does when preparing for a role is to sketch out the
character, or paint him in watercolor, as he did for Willy
Wonka, the Mad Hatter and even Dillinger, allowing his brain
to bounce along its own idiosyncratic metaphorical path. Jack
Sparrow's famed coal-rimmed eyes weren't inspired by glam-rock
but by Berber nomads who lined their orbs to protect them from
the sun.
"I
always do [sketches]" says Depp. "Don't know why. Just to kind
of get an eyeball on the guy first."
Disney
recently released early images from "Alice in Wonderland," and
Depp's Hatter, of course, looks more than a little mad (some
believe that hatters frequently suffered from mercury
poisoning as mercury was once used to cure felt). "The
orange-hair thing was very important. I think he was poisoned,
very, very poisoned, and it was coming out through his hair,
through his fingernails and eyes," says Depp, who later
discovered happily that director Burton had done strikingly
similar drawings of the character.
Dillinger fits perfectly into Depp's personal
canon of larger-than-life rebels and outsiders. The outlaw
also holds almost sentimental appeal for the star, whose
Kentucky hometown is three hours from the famed gangster's
birthplace in Mooresville, Ind. Dillinger was just a
wisecracking punk when he was sentenced to nine years in the
penitentiary for his part in a drunken mugging (he didn't have
a lawyer); he emerged a hardened criminal, led a gang on a
dozen bank robberies (hauling away $300,000, the equivalent of
$4.8 million today), escaped from prison a couple of times,
had a vicious shootout with the FBI and finally went down in a
hail of bullets outside a Chicago movie theater.
While
researching his role, Depp searched madly for a voice
recording of the outlaw but couldn't find one, although a
recording of Dillinger's father turned out to be unexpectedly
revelatory. "Hearing Dillinger's pop ... these are guys I
know. I knew him then," says Depp, "I wanted to salute my
grandfather through Dillinger and salute Dillinger through my
grandfather. You know, my grandfather drove a bus by day back
in the '30s and ran moonshine by night."
Depp
says he felt an instant connection to Dillinger, the
bold-yet-humble bank robber who lived in old films that Depp
watched for hours on his family's black-and-white,
rabbit-eared TV.
That
was in Florida, where his parents ultimately moved and split
up. Young Depp was enthralled with Dillinger as well as such
silent-film stars as Charlie Chaplin and Buster
Keaton.
Undeniably, Dillinger the myth remains bigger
than Dillinger the man, even though "Public Enemies" is based
on Bryan Burrough's non-fiction book.
"The
title of the film is 'Public Enemies,' but I don't see John
Dillinger as an enemy of the public," adds Depp. He points out
that Dillinger's prime antagonist, J. Edgar Hoover, wreaked
more havoc and misery during his 40-year tenure atop the FBI
than Dillinger did during his 18-month crime spree. "I mean,
who's the real criminal?" Depp asks. The movie is "bloody and
brutal," but it takes place during the height of the
Depression, during a wave of foreclosures and bank failures.
"People at certain points just had to take up arms, did they
not?"
Still,
even in these troubled economic times, it's hard to imagine
the public romanticizing the illegal activities of a similar
outlaw figure. Most people today are craving stability and
order. But for Depp, the real difference is the corrosive
media attention.
"Today,
if there was a Robin Hood-type guy out there -- we are in an
age where we sell our privacy to television. Everyone out
there has a camera, and a cell phone and a BlackBerry, and in
less then 10 seconds it's on the Internet. So he would have
been sold out just like that today," he says, snapping his
fingers.
Accent
on experience, as Cotillard prepared to play Dillinger's girl
Depp, like most actors, has his issues with the media; reports
of purported friction between Mann, known for his maniacal
attention to detail, and Depp have been well publicized.
Today, Depp says it was all part of the process.
"He's
intense, and as long as you sort of walk into the ring ready
for that, it's all fine," Depp explains, noting that Mann "is
painting the picture, and that's the one thing that takes a
bit of getting used to. I'm definitely not good at just being
a color on the palette, you know."
And
then, as if he can't quite restrain himself, he adds: "I need
a brush in my hand sometimes."
"I will
tell you there were scenes and moments it was complete and
total rapport, and other times I'm seeing it one way and we're
butting heads a little bit," says Mann in a separate
interview.
At some
point toward the end of the interview, Depp's publicist
arrives to whisk him away.
Depp
pauses when asked if there's anything he wants to add, thinks
for a moment and offers, "I hope it's good." He's referring to
"Public Enemies." He begins to laugh again. "I hear it's
good."
The
actor hasn't seen "Public Enemies." He hasn't seen most of his
recent films -- the last two "Pirate" films, "Charlie and the
Chocolate Factory," "Sweeney Todd."
"Once
you see it, maybe you have to admit it is product or
something," he says. He doesn't like the idea of a monetary
tag being placed either on himself or the artistic
process.
"Having
done it, lived it ... I like the idea of just walking away
with the experience."
rachel.abramowitz@latimes.com
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