Source: BluntReview.com,
2003
Bluntly
Speaking | Johnny Depp
an Emily Blunt interview
Bluntly speaking? This was one
interview I was looking forward to. No disappointments: Johnny
Depp shows up to our Hollywood encounter with a cap pulled
over blonde hair dressed in standard
"any-struggling-actor-retro-grunge." Flashing his gold-capped
teeth, left over from the recent pirate role, and extending
his hand in salutation he glides into a seat beside me. He's
just cool. Always has been.
His ability to give grandiose and surreal
characters soul is proof of his heapin' helpin' of pure uncut
manly talent and frankly he's one slice of grade A mansteak
this rovering reporter wouldn't mind
tenderizing….
Depp
decided he'd tap into the ultimate in bad boy rock and roll
legends for his latest character, pirate Capt. Jack Sparrow.
Wildly inappropriate really, considering it was for Disney
Studios! Their first PG 13 film for families actually. But,
Depp doesn't give a damn about Disney's glimmering and prudent
history - he was hired to deliver, and deliver he does. Depp
style.
Dipping into
the depths of his exquisite mind to discover his version of a
pirate, buried beneath Hunter S. Thompson and several Edwards
he found, Keith Richards as his inspiration. He shared his
love of Keef.
.................................... 
Emily: You really seemed like you had a ball on
this film!
Johnny: It was almost like a crime to have so much
fun.
Emily:
I'm a HUGE Keith Richards fan and I am curious as to how you
came up with Keith Richards as your inspiration for Capt. Jack
Sparrow?
Johnny: I thought of Keith because I was trying to
figure out what pirates might have been like, their lifestyle
back in the 18th century, and I thought, oh man, they were the
rock and roll stars of the era. On the road to some degree,
freedom, adventure, women, outlaw behavior, all of that stuff.
And you see the greatest rock and roll star of all time, there
are so many options, but to me it's Keith Richards hands down.
So I went in that direction and then got a couple of other
ideas, like Pepe Le Pew was also a character that I thought
would work. There's something about Pepe Le Pew that I always
thought was really beautiful. The idea of this guy who
absolutely had blinders on to reality, and just believed what
he thought.
He was always very, very happy. He was
always really in a good mood no matter what was going on
around him. No matter what the reality of the situation was;
he always saw it his way; absolutely his way. Every episode,
he was falling in love with this one cat and the cat just
despised him, absolutely hated him and he always interpreted
it as, 'Oh, she's playing hard to get, she's shy,' or
something like that, and so, I don't know. I thought that it
worked for the character. I always thought Pepe Le Pew was
really interesting. I also kind of thought of Jack Sparrow as
a sort of a constantly moving organism who would shape himself
to whatever situation, however he needed to be shaped, he
would mold himself into that; this organism with a perpetual
martini glass.
Emily: Yeah, Sparrow's swagger had that Foster
Brooks/Dean Martin-ish look. Like Jack, underneath the
swagger, Keith Richards is also a very intelligent
man.
Johnny:
Oh yeah. Part of it was that Keith was the sage, the wise,
unbelievably smart guy. It's kind of like Hunter Thompson, who
is a brilliant writer and a great man, I've seen it happen
where people, because they look at Hunter and they think he's
out of it, so they just assume that he's just burnt and he's
not lucid, and they've been kind of disrespectful in a very
round about way, and Hunter being incredibly smart, he'll
pin-point, and I've see him just level them verbally, just
decimate them, and I think Keith is similar. Yeah, people just
assume Keith Richards - oh yeah, the junkie years in the '70s,
and he's out of it and all the stuff, but no, no, no, he's one
of the most well read, brilliant people I've ever come into
contact with. He knows everything about everything - a history
buff, history to the letter. It wasn't an imitation of Keith
or anything like that. It was just like a salute to him, and
beyond the fact that I think that he's the greatest rock and
roll star of all times, I also think that he's an incredibly
interesting man beyond the rock and roll, beyond The Stones.
He's unbelievably wise. He's really a wise man, a sage, a
Buddha or something.
Emily: And you brought that intelligence
through to Jack, bravo. There's a lot of comedy in Sparrow.
Did you help create that, or was it all in the
script?
Johnny: Those guys had written something so beautiful
and such a great character, and what they had written was so
inspiring that I couldn't help but to just spew - it would
either come out on paper, I would write it all down and run it
by them to make sure they were okay with it, most of the time
they were great about it, they were fine with it. Either that
or it would just happen during a scene, which I prefer. It's
always better to just be in the situation and burn it all out.
Let it go.
Emily: You've got this character that's living
on the outside.
Johnny: Yeah, but he doesn't know that. [He
winks]
Emily:
In that sense you two are alike - I mean because you revel
living on the outside.
Johnny: I've always been interested in… I
guess fringe may be a way of putting it. The people that I've
always admired in whatever the arena, whether it's art or
film, whatever, music, have always been the people who came in
from the outside, who didn't just - I prefer Daniel Johnston
to Mariah Carey. You know what I mean? Really by far; like
really. A Daniel Johnston, I admire very much. I don't know.
It's the kind of people I've always been drawn
to.
Emily:
With Daniel Johnston, he puts let's say - to be nice - more of
his personality in his work versus Mariah
Carey.
Johnny: [laughter] That's so foreign to me [Mariah
Carey] that I - [laughter]
Emily: Thankfully you've always picked the
more, shall we say, off beat roles - they can't really
pigeonhole you.
Johnny: I think that the second that you get
pigeonholed, one of two things happens. You either get really
rich, really successful or game over. I mean, if you find an
arena that you're good at or whatever, a thing that you can
do, and to some degree, it becomes a kind of shtick and you do
that each time out of the gate, it's not particularly
satisfying, I think, as an actor. I don't think that it's fair
to the audience. I think that it's important to want to
surprise the audience, to want to surprise yourself and I
think that it's important, each time out of the gate to go,
'This may be the one where I lose big. This may be the one
where it's too much or not enough.' I think that it's
important as an actor.
Emily: Despite the fact that you play a huge
array of characters, we seem to get something of you in each
of them.
Johnny: There's no character that you can play where
part of you, whether it's a great big portion or even a little
portion, part of you doesn't slip in. It's always there, it's
got to come from someplace of truth. It's like growing up I
never felt, I don't know that I felt so much like an outsider
really, really far away from the king and queen of the prom, I
definitely never felt like an insider - ever. The way I live
my life today is pretty consistent of the way I lived it back
then, I just wanted to do whatever I wanted to do. I remember
being 13, 14 years old, and just skipping certain classes and
sneaking into the guitar room, and hiding out and playing in
the music room.
Emily: Was there a point when you ever wanted
to be a member of the club?
Johnny: No, I was always happy with that.
I never got it. There were times where I remember being
really, really well liked around, um, 12 years old, it was
1974 or 1975, something like that, long hair, certainly not
one of the jock kids or anything like that, and I fell madly
in love with the most popular cheerleader in the school. And
it was like this - it was beyond Romeo and Juliet. I was like,
'This is never going to work. The formula doesn't exist.' And
then coming to terms with that.
Emily: Have we not all been right
there? [laughter]. I heard that you directed this film called
The Brave with Marlon Brando - what happened to
that?
Johnny:
Nothing. [A sad grin]
Emily: How did you enjoy the process of being a
director?
Johnny: It was a pretty interesting education. I like
the process, I would like the process way more if I didn't
have to be in it, that was really the drag for me, because not
only had I come to do all that work, but I'd written the thing
with my brother and I'm acting in it, and I'm directing it. It
was too many hats, and directing and acting are two completely
opposing things. As a director you have to be totally aware of
everything going on, as an actor you don't want to be aware of
anything except that moment. I do like the process of it, but
I don't think I could do it again if I were in it. Plus I had
to watch myself in dailies, which was
devastating.
Emily: You don't watch yourself
now?
Johnny:
Oh I hate it, I can't stand it.
Emily: But you do watch your
movies?
Johnny: Only when I have to, only when I'm forced
to.
Emily: Is
that because you'll critique yourself and therefore not be in
the moment?
Johnny: Yeah, you get self-conscious, so at a certain
point I just stopped watching dailies, I knew there were a
couple of things that I wanted to print to see what they were
going to be like, and then I would ask my DP, my cameraman,
'Tell the script girl what you want to print, because I can't
be objective anymore.'
Emily: What was your input on the Jack Sparrow
look? On the hair, on the braided beard
etc.?
Johnny:
That all happened in one day. We were sitting around the
make-up trailer, and I knew that I wanted to have the dreds,
and I wanted a lot of things tied into my hair, like stuff
that I'd picked up on voyages and what not, just tie it into
my hair, kind of like Keith, because Keith has little coins
and beads - I wanted all that stuff tied into my hair, and
then the little braids and the little dingles. I wanted that.
And the kohl came from, you know how athletes where black here
for reflection, I started thinking about the tribes of
northern Africa, and the Bergers which they have been doing
for thousands of years, using kohl under the eyes, which is
medicinal in a way, and protects the eyes from sand and
sun.
Emily:
The gold teeth. I heard when you showed up the 1st day they
were ALL gold? True?
Johnny: [laughter] No, not all of them, but quite a
few. I sat down with Jerry [Bruckheimer] and a couple of other
people, and I had two more gold teeth. One on the front there,
and one I think over here, and they felt that the way it
looked on film was a little too much, but there were other
things. They wanted me to take off the dingles and they wanted
me to calm things down and everything. So, I figured if that
was my only compromise, taking out two gold teeth? After I
took those two off, I added on over here. I never told them
that.
Emily:
So I'm sensing you kind of like the
look.
Johnny:
It's funny, because most of the time I do! I can remember
going to Disneyland with my kids, with my daughter and we went
into the princess store and I bought her a little princess
dress kind of thing and the lady behind the counter, I smiled
and said thank you or something, and she looked at me as if to
say, 'I have a really good dentist.' She seemed so upset about
my dental dilemma.
Emily: You and Geoffrey Rush seemed to have a
strong relationship that transcended the film. Did you talk
about a "back story" for the
characters?
Johnny: We did. We joked around about our back-story.
Here he is, this fierce pirate, Barbossa, who at one time had
been my first mate, and all of a sudden he's taken over my
ship, and I thought the greatest secret that Barbossa would
want hidden, I knew it. And I was going to actually add it
into the film, but once you start getting into sword fights
and things like that, you run out of time. I thought his
greatest secret was that his first name was
Hector.
Emily:
How did he react when you told
him?
Johnny:
He laughed. I'd come up to set and he'd be standing there, and
I'd say, 'Good morning, Hector.' [He laughs] It was really
good.
Emily: Has having children [He has
a girl and boy] changed Johnny
Depp?
Johnny:
Oh yeah. I would say that the kiddies give you strength. The
kiddies give you strength and perspective and you understand
stuff. Things that would've made me sort of upset or angry
before, or things about Hollywood, things in magazines or
paparazzi or stuff like that, now you can sort of really go,
'Oh, piss off. I'm just going to play Barbie's with my
daughter,'
Emily: I loved Lost in La Mancha and the
bravery your friend Terry Gilliam showed. Can you remark on
the film?
Johnny: I thought it was great and really lucky for us
that they were there to document it, because no one would have
ever believed this. That weather, that happened in five
minutes. It was incredible. One minute there was blue sky and
boiling sun, and then the next thing you know torrential
downpour, hail, everything's floating away. Terry, bless his
heart, is still very enthusiastic about picking it up. There's
talk of it. I really hope that we can get it going again.
They're very enthusiastic about it, and I really hope so. I
just think that it could be such a great film. It was going to
be great. It was going to be like Terry Gilliam's greatest
hits. We'll see. God, I hope so because God, it was really a
blast.
Emily:
Your wife is a big star in France isn't she? Is that as
intrusive as in America?
Johnny: Yeah, yeah, Vanessa [Paradis] gets
a lot of attention over there, but we get the occasional
paparazzi, but you know, I figure it this way, if you're going
to get me, just bring a really long lens, just make sure that
you're really far away because if I'm able to get my hands on
them, it could get ugly, and I only say that because I don't
care if they take my photograph. I don't know why anyone needs
another photograph of me, there are plenty out there, and so,
I don't care if they take my photograph. I don't care if they
take Vanessa's photograph, we're adults and all of that stuff,
but when they start taking photographs of my kids and putting
them in their magazines, that I can't support and that's why
they should have the long lens because if I catch them I'll
swallow their nose. I'll bit their nose off and swallow
it.
Emily:
[laughter] I actually believe you…well good luck with the wee
drunk and the little princess, and the film is
great.
Depp:
Thank you, thanks that was fun.
....................................
Johnny Depp has always been one of my
favorites, and I'm certainly not alone in this undying
adoration. I own absolutely everything [Okay, there's no '21
Jump Street' tapes - but film-wise] that the guy's done. Why?
Because he's just always a talented treat. Ed Wood, Edward
Scissorhands, From Hell, Blow, Chocolat, Sleepy Hollow, Before
Night Falls [a mansteak extravaganza film that included Javier
- slurp - Bardem!] Benny and Joon - the list goes on for about
six pages and each time Depp emerges as a completely different
being….or Hunter S. Thompson [as he played in my personal fave
Depp film, Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas]! So this was
exceptionally fun...He looked kind of tired as he swaggered to
more lurking press folk.
Pirates of the Caribbean: Legend of the
Black Pearl is truly incredible. Not only does Depp do what he
does so well in character creation, but the film around him is
simply spectacular! Get out and see this mates - it's a
classic!
BluntReview.com,
2003
