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Emmanuel Itier
Film Editor
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Emmanuel Itier: What do
the words “gangsters” and “justice” inspire in you? Do you think
we have justice in our world today?
Johnny Depp: Wow!
Great question… Well, the gangsters of today aren’t the ones from
the ’30s. In the ’30s, gangsters were a little bit like Robin Hood
in Chicago, because the people rooted for them, pretty much, and
they were good with people. They only attacked banks and the
government. But of course they were violent, and that is
condemnable. As far as justice…in the ’30s, the justice system was
definitely crooked, and this is why they changed laws — to be able
to arrest these criminals. Now, in the sense of universal justice,
I don’t think there is a lot of justice in many parts of the
world, and people are revolting, as you can see, like lately in
Iran or other countries where the notion of freedom and justice
are not so granted to the people.
EI: What do we need
to do to get to a new level of justice and peace in the
world?
JD: In America, we finally got rid of the bad
people and elected a great man — a generous man who finally makes
America look better. I want the rest of the world to love America
so we can, together, build a new united planet. We need our
governments from various countries to work together and to make
sense of the new challenges we’re facing, especially economical
challenges right now…
EI: Speaking of challenge, what
was the main one for you in Public Enemies?
JD: Any
time you’re playing someone who existed, it’s a real challenge to
be trustful to what he was, how he spoke, how he walked… So I
truly did lots of research to figure out the real John Dillinger.
It wasn’t easy, but I got clues, like for his tone of voice, I
listened to his dad’s voice. There were no other recordings
available with Dillinger’s voice. And of course, the tough job was
left to Michael Mann to be faithful to the ’30s and bring back the
true emotion of the times. It really was a bad time for America
due to the ravages caused by the 1929 financial crash. I think
Michael did a great job and I’m thankful for it.
EI:
When I was watching your movie, I had to think about what I would
like to rob or attack — a place, somebody…? I thought about
robbing the Vatican to find out the truth about Christ and all
these great stories… What about you? What would you like to
rob?
JD: I’m with you on that one! I’d love to get into
the vaults of the Vatican and figure out what they indeed must
have about Christ, about the original work from Dante — you know,
“Dante’s Inferno.” This is definitely a place that must hold lots
of responses to lots of question. No doubt, let’s go and rob the
Vatican!
EI: What makes the outlaws — Jesse James,
Dillinger, etc. — so appealing?
JD: They get away with
things that we don’t get away with, especially Jesse James, back
in that era. He was the sort of precursor to John Dillinger, in a
way. John Dillinger, in 1933, when the banks were the enemies and
the government was… I mean, J. Edgar Hoover was teetering on
criminal himself. So John Dillinger as the common man stood up and
said, “No, I’m not gonna take it. I’m gonna get what I believe is
mine.” [Laughs] Am I done? [Laughs] I don’t know. Should I say
anything else?
EI: The scene where Dillinger just
walked into the police station without being noticed and he was
one of the most wanted criminals that time, is it the truth
or…?
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JD: That’s the
truth.
EI: You, being one of the most wanted actors
in the world…
JD: Really?
EI:
[Laughs] Yes. If you had the opportunity to just walk into
whatever without being noticed, where would you
go?
JD: Ooh wow! God, that’s a very good question.
Off the top of my head, where I could walk and be completely
anonymous? I’d walk through Disneyland with my kids. That’s what
I’d do. I’d go in every ride and I’d walk through Disneyland with
my kids and let them experience that. They don’t get to get daddy…
When daddy walks through Disneyland with them, things get weird
[laughs] at the moment. [Laughs]
EI: You’ve talked
before about hats and how much you appreciate them and they’ve
become friends. You’ve gotten the opportunity to wear a lot of
them in this movie. Have you made any new friends?
JD:
I have made some new friends –- new hat friends,
yeah.
EI: Which one was your favorite?
JD: Oh
man, there were so many nice ones. There was a guy in Chicago
making these things for us and he was such a great, great artist.
I think the thing about hats, coats, suits, ties — that whole
thing — what I appreciate about it is, I suppose, what it
represents. Everyone made an effort then. Times were so different.
There was still a kind of innocence. There were still
possibilities and everyone made an effort –- hats coats, and ties.
I’ve always felt like I probably should have been born in that
era. But apparently I wasn’t, but not far, actually.
[Laughs]
EI: In the movie, Dillinger seems very
comfortable with being a celebrity.
JD: The thing I’m
infinitely more comfortable with is the process and the effort of
making the character and the collaborative process in making the
movie, basically. Then there’s this other stuff that goes along
with it that I don’t think I will ever understand, which is that —
but I do appreciate it as a part of the gig, which is certain
amount of attention that goes along with it. The alternative is
the drag. The real drag is that if there’s no attention, then the
job goes away, doesn’t it?
John Dillinger, I think, just
like any red-blooded American, was handed the ball and he ran with
it, and that’s not any different than what happened to me a very
long time ago. You’re handed the ball, and you go as far as you
can go until somebody says, “All right, kid, you’re done. Get off
the ride,” and I think that’s what Dillinger was doing, although
Dillinger, obviously, knew the clock was ticking. His situation
was infinitely more grave than mine. He knew he had a very short
period of time to deal with and he made peace with that, so that’s
what he was doing. He was kind of the ultimate existentialist,
figuratively; he’d move forward constantly and never went back.
EI: Regarding Alice in Wonderland, what kind of
influence did you bring to your character? Did you go straight to
the book in order to create him, or did you bring any external
work and your own signature to the character? What should we
expect?
JD: Certainly the book — the book has a basis
for everything. There are little mysteries, little clues in the
book that I found fascinating, that were keys to at least my
understanding of the Mad Hatter, like him saying, “I’m
investigating things that begin with the letter M.” That was huge
for me because, when you do a little digging, you realize you’re
talking about a hatter — a man who made hats, and you go back and
look at some of the history –- hatters –- there’s the term that
this guy or that guy is “mad as a hatter.”
There was
reason for that, and the reason for that was mercury poisoning. So
I found out what the “M” was and why they went nuts. So that
became a huge thing. And then it was just what I saw, what I
thought the guy should look like, and I made my weird little
drawings and watercolors and brought them to Tim [Burton] and he
brought me his weird little drawings and watercolors and they were
not dissimilar. [Laughs] I mean, you could put them right together
and they’re…
EI: What’s so special about your
relationship with Tim? He likes to do whatever you
please?
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JD: The most special
thing is that he, very luckily, has given me about seven jobs.
That’s the most amazing thing. I’m looking forward to the eighth
and the ninth. I don’t know…there’s no real definition other than
there is some kind of connection, some sort of understanding that
Tim and I have that is, at most times, unspoken.
Most
people, when they hear Tim giving me direction while we’re talking
about the characters or something on the set, people are baffled,
completely befuddled. They don’t know what we’re talking about. A
guy actually came to me one time after watching Tim and I talk for
ten minutes and said, “I didn’t understand a word you guys were
saying.” So I don’t know. It’s one of those things you don’t
question, but I sure love him, you know.
EI: Have you
ever fantasized about being a Robin Hood kind of person, taking
from the rich, giving to the poor?
JD: That’s what I’ve
been doing for 25 years. [Laughs] It’s true. When I started out, I
printed, I silk-screened t-shirts, I sold ink pens, I worked
construction, I worked at a gas station, pumped gas, I was a
mechanic for a little bit, I went down into sewer lines… I had a
lot of somewhat unpleasant gigs for a time there. And ever since,
I suppose somewhere in 1986, I started to take from the rich.
[Laughs]
EI: You stated before that the area that
Dillinger lived in was an area where men had still been real men.
What do you mean by that?
JD: Not necessary the area,
but that time –- the ’20s, ’30s, ’40s, all the way… Whether you’re
talking about fashion or work and art, in any case, whatever guys
did, whatever women…there was a very strong sense of who was who,
what was what. I suppose the easiest way to say this is they were
individuals back then, and today it seems like people are a lot
less individual than they were. Most kids dress like the other
kid. Today, you’ve got the odd one out — you’ve got Tom Waits, you
had Hunter Thompson and you’ve got a Bob Dylan. But today, they’re
infinitely more few and far between.
EI: I’m quite
surprised you’ve been living in France for that long and you
haven’t done a movie yet there. Do you have any plan to do
something, and do you participate where you leave some kind of art
or some paintings that people would recognize?
JD: As I
was saying earlier, my dance card is a little bit thick at the
moment. It’s a little full. But I do have plans one day to do more
work in France. I did do a film that I refer to as the
“Unpronounceable” by a guy named Yvan Attal, with Charlotte
Gainsbourg, and I had a bit part in there, and that was great fun
doing scenes in French. In terms of the community where we live,
we do bits around the area and whatnot or whatever we can,
whatever helps, but for the most part, I’ve been on location for
so long now that I don’t know what time zone I’m on, truly. I
could be in Puerto Rico at the moment. [Laughs]
EI: You
are very comfortable in the era of John Dillinger. Do you think
that, conversely, you would be all right in this day and age, or a
duck out of water?
JD: I think I’d
probably run screaming. [Laughs] I truly do. It’s so wide a world
now, and think I’m shocked at things that I see. I’m shocked at
things that are available on the Internet. I’m shocked
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at what technology is
promising in the next couple of years. There’s great and then
there’s unbelievably scary, the possibilities. It’s like,
somewhere in the back of your mind, you hear Albert Einstein
saying, “I don’t know how World War III will be fought, but I know
how World War IV will be fought — with sticks and stones.” So
yeah, I’d think he’d run away.
EI: You played John
Dillinger as a man with a sense of humor. Was it written in the
script, or was he really a man with a sense of humor, or you added
it?
JD: He
definitely was a man with a sense of humor, and I just happened to
be a sucker for humor, so anywhere I can sneak in something that I
find potentially interesting or funny… It goes far with this
little brownie automatic camera, hands it to a cop and says,
“Would you take my girlfriend a nice photograph?” [Laughs] That’s
a guy with a sense of humor. [Laughs] And also a guy who, at the
same time, has some sort of great, wonderful outlook. Like I said,
he knew the clock was ticking, he knew his time was up, he knew
there wasn’t much more to go, and he was gonna make the best of it
in any case. Pretty amazing.
EI:
I would want to know if you could talk about working with the HD
cameras, which is I think a new thing for you. And also Dark
Shadows — what’s the status?
JD: Dark Shadows is
happening. Tim is working on Alice in Wonderland, which is
obviously quite a large piece of work there. So when Tim is done
with Alice and we get the script — the script is very, very close
— we get the script in order, we’ll probably attack it next year,
which is very exciting, like a lifelong dream for
me.
EI: You own the rights — you’ve been fascinated with
it your whole life…?
JD: Oh I’ve always… I loved the
show when I was a kid. I was obsessed with Barnabas Collins and I
have photographs of me holding Barnabas Collins posters when I was
five or six or something. I’m very excited to do it.
EI: And what about HD?
JD: I did a film with
Robert Rodriguez a few years back called Once Upon a Time in
Mexico, and that was all HD. That was my first experience with it,
and the one thing I will say is that I suppose if you push it,
there is the danger of a digital noise or something.
The
quality is quite good — requires a lot less light, so there’s a
lot to be said for it. There’s a lot of good, and also it’s a
52-minute tape so you can kind of just keep going. Nobody has to
say “cut.” You can just invent until you fall asleep. [Laughs] So
all that’s good, but I still love that texture of cinema. I still
love the layers of cinema, whether it’s 35mm or a 16mm or 8 —
super 8, which I love. I love the grain, I love… If I had my
druthers, I’d film everything in Kodachrome.
EI:
Dillinger was sort of a sign of his time with the Great
Depression, and we’re now in a deep recession again. Do you feel
there is a time or a place for somebody like Dillinger again, like
an outlaw that becomes sort of a heroic status? And, as a
Hollywood star, do you feel the recession, and how, if
so?
JD: Most definitely. It will definitely find its
way into your world. Sure, I’ve been able to witness it on a lot
of levels, but I’m very, very privileged. I feel very
lucky.
EI: What about a place for somebody like
Dillinger…?
JD:
I don’t know if we make that same species of individual truly
anymore…because I don’t believe he went out there to kill anyone.
I think he just went out there to get what he felt was rightfully
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his. He wanted payback,
and I think, today, we’ve gone so far technologically and also
emotionally, psychologically…there’s a lot of crime out there and
there’s a lot of stuff going on and people don’t care if they’re
going to go to prison.
They couldn’t give a rats about the
repercussions. They go out and they do what they do and they don’t
care about hurting anyone out there, so it’s a very different
time. There must be someone out there who wants to stand up and
take a shot, but I don’t know if we, as a species, are the same as
we were then.
EI: About the mercury, I wasn’t quite sure
— was that like a disease that affected hatters?
JD:
Mercury poisoning, because there was mercury in the glue, so they
start to go a little sideways. [Laughs]
EI: Pirates 4 –
is that happening?
JD: It’s looking very good. What
we’re trying to do is just get the script in order, make sure it’s
the right thing to do. If we get a great script, it would be a
ball.
EI: Megan Fox says she wants to be your
wife.
JD: Who said that?
EI: Megan
Fox.
JD: Oh, really? [Laughs] Where is she? That’s very
sweet.
