Telegraph (UK) June 25th
2009
Johnny Depp interview for Public
Enemies
The criminal past
of Johnny Depp's family means he has always been fascinated by
John Dillinger, the man he portrays in Michael Mann's new film
Public Enemies.
By John Hiscock
The squeals and screams start
even before the guest of honour begins to descend the stairs
to the club floor where the partygoers have been awaiting his
arrival for an hour. By the time he reaches the bottom step
the crowd has swelled to a heaving mass, everyone trying to
get near him, touch him, take his picture and plead for
autographs.
Johnny Depp,
courteous and obliging, poses for photographs and graciously
attempts to answer the questions and comments thrown at him
before beating a retreat behind a phalanx of security guards
who clear the way for him.
So is
this is what it’s like to be Johnny Depp: unable to venture
out in public without instantly drawing a near-fanatical
crowd?
“It was
really weird, wasn’t it?” he mused on the following day,
recalling the events of the evening before. “Oh man, you don’t
ever get used to that kind of thing. You just don’t. That’s
why I hardly ever leave my house. I don’t go anywhere. I
understand what it’s about and I appreciate it on a very
profound level but there’s only so much of that sort of thing
a human being can deal with.” We are talking in a suite at
Chicago’s Peninsula Hotel the morning after the premiere and
party for his latest film Public Enemies. Depp, who has been
known to be chronically late for interviews---sometimes hours
and even days---was two hours late for our appointment. He
arrived, smiling broadly, looking dapper and thirties-style,
wearing a grey vintage trilby hat, grey Armani waistcoat and
baggy dark blue slacks.
“I can’t
think of myself in terms of celebrity,” he said when I
mentioned the fan fervour he had ignited among Chicago’s
glitterati the night before.
“It’s
just too weird. If the choice is between being constantly
gawked at and sitting in a chair in a dark room, I prefer the
dark room.” He is briefly back in the public eye to promote
Public Enemies, director Michael Mann’s story of the audacious
1930s gangster John Dillinger, whose bank-robbing exploits
captured the imagination of a Depression era-America and
turned him into a folk hero. Depp stars as Dillinger and
Christian Bale has the role of Melvin Purvis, the square-jawed
FBI agent who tracked him.
“John
Dillinger was that era’s rock and roll star,” said Depp. “He
was a very charismatic man and he lived the way he wanted to
and didn’t compromise. I feel he was a kind of a Robin Hood
because he truly cared about people. He knew time was short
and I believe he had found himself and was at peace with the
fact that it wasn’t going to be a very long ride, but it was
going to be a significant ride.”
The
economic situation during Dillinger’s crime spree has its
echoes in today’s financial meltdown. The cocky Dillinger and
his gang, which included Baby Face Nelson, stole the
equivalent of what would be three million pounds today during
a one-year rampage in which he targeted the Midwestern banks
who were foreclosing on properties and whose many failures had
robbed people of their life savings. During that time
Dillinger also escaped from two jails, eluded police traps and
killed at least one police officer. It all came to and end on
a sticky July night in 1934 when Dillinger came out of
Chicago’s Biograph Theatre, where he had been watching Clark
Gable in the film Manhattan Melodrama. Government agents had
been tipped off and were waiting for him.
Ever
since he was a boy the 46-year-old Depp has been fascinated by
the John Dillinger legend, partly because he was born in
Owensborough, Kentucky, 160 miles from the Indiana farm where
Dillinger lived as a teenager and, more significantly, because
Depp’s own grandfather and stepfather had operated on the
wrong side of the law.
“It has
to do with my family and my upbringing,” he explained. “My
grandfather, who I was very close to as a kid, had run
moonshine into dry counties like Robert Mitchum in that movie
Thunder Road, and my stepfather also had been a bit of a rogue
and done burglaries and robberies and had spent some time in
Statesville Prison in Illinois where we ended up shooting some
of the film. There was some kind of inherent connection I
had.” While doing research for the role he discovered a mug
shot of his stepfather, Robert Palmer, who died in 2000, in
the files at the Statesvillemaximum security prison.
“My
stepdad was an inspiration to me,” he said. “I knew about his
past and I remember when I was growing up him referring to it
as his college years. When I got older and asked him what
college he had attended, he said it was Statesville Prison. So
for me to be able to get that much closer to him now,
especially since he’s passed on, was huge for me. He did what
he did and I’m proud of him for doing what he had to do to
survive. And he and my grandfather were great inspirations for
me for Dillinger.”
Depp
speaks quietly and intelligently and exudes an air of calm
tranquility, fingering the brim of his hat as he talks. One of
the few actors in Hollywood who genuinely did not crave
stardom, he has, despite himself, become one of its most
bankable stars, thanks in large part to his role as the
decidedly eccentric Captain Jack Sparrow in the Pirates Of The
Caribbean trilogy, which won him awards, an Oscar nomination
and catapulted him into the ranks of the leading Hollywood
money earners.
He
received another Oscar nomination for his singing role in
Sweeney Todd and with Public Enemies he turns in another
intense performance that could well be remembered at Oscar
time.
Like his
ancestors, Depp has not always been scrupulously honest. “When
I was 12 I wanted to learn how to play the guitar and I found
a chord book in a shop and I stuffed it down my trousers,” he
recalled. “And that’s how I learned to play the guitar.” It
was his guitar playing that earned him his first money in
showbusiness as the frontman for a band called The Kids that
he formed in Florida, where he was then living with his mother
and stepfather. When Florida became too small for their
ambitions, the band changed their name to Six Gun Method and
moved to Los Angeles where Depp began attending casting
auditions. He landed a role as the heroine’s doomed boyfriend
in A Nightmare on Elm Street in 1984, followed by other small
parts.
His
breakthrough came when he was cast as one of a unit of
undercover cops working in schools in the television series 21
Jump Street. He became an overnight sensation and an extremely
reluctant teen idol who was so uncomfortable with his unwanted
star status that one night he was caught defacing his own
image on a billboard.
His
first truly original character was Edward Scissorshands in
1990, and throughout the 1990s he built a strong critical and
art house following portraying societal outsiders and
real-life characters such as the cross-dressing film director
Ed Wood, the drug-addled writer Hunter S.
Thompson
in Fear And Loathing In Las Vegas, Peter Pan author J.M.
Barrie in Finding Neverland (another Oscar nomination) and
drug trafficker George Jung in Blow.
He
credits his ongoing eleven-year relationship with the French
singer-actress Vanessa Paradis and their two children,
Lily-Rose, ten, and seven-year-old Jack with providing him
with a domesticity he had never previously known. They spend
their time between homes in the south of France, Los Angeles
and, when he really wants to get away from it all, on a
45-acre island he owns in the Caribbean and where he moors his
156-foot motor yacht.
“Like
everything else in my life, it wasn’t planned, it just kind of
happened,” he said with a shrug. “After I had done the first
Pirates movie and Secret Window I went on vacation to escape
with my kiddies and my girl and someone said that there was an
island down the road for sale. I said, 'Oh well, let’s go see
it.’ I looked at it, I walked on it and I was done.
It had
to be. So I immediately called my business manager and said
'Please,’ and that was it.” He laughed. “It came at the
perfect moment for me.
“The
island can be perceived as a luxury and it certainly is, but
it provides me with simplicity and somewhere I can go where no
one is looking at me or pointing a camera or a finger at me.
“I can just be: that’s the importance of it. When we’re there
we do absolutely nothing. My kiddies don’t have any toys there
and they build little houses out of shells.” While the island
gives him privacy and relaxation his career provides him with
the stimulation and challenges he is continually seeking.
Financially secure and with the knowledge that
a fourth episode of Pirates Of the Caribbean is in the works,
Depp is now looking to different roles, tending to veer
towards projects that offer him a challenge rather than a big
salary.
He has
just finished filming The Rum Diaries in Puerto Rico and is
soon to reteam with director Tim Burton for the seventh time,
playing the Mad Hatter in Burton’s Alice In Wonderland. He is
also waiting for a script to be completed for a movie about
the Lone Ranger and Tonto, in which he wants to play Tonto.
Johnny
Depp is the first to admit his career has been random and
unplanned. “I’ve never felt particularly ambitious or driven,
that’s for sure, although I like to create stuff, whether it’s
a little doodle, a drawing , a small painting or a movie or a
piece of music, so I suppose I’m driven by that,” he said.
“Everything I’ve done has felt very natural and it’s happened
because it’s happened. I’ve never done anything because I
thought it would move my career forward or anything like that.
“I’m
just an actor and if I can leave something behind that my kids
will be proud of then that’s what I want. I don’t want my kids
to be embarrassed by anything I’ve done.” Then, with a tip of
his trilby and a wide grin, he sauntered out into the hotel
lobby to brave the waiting crowds.
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