Jean Lynch Reports on the Golden Globe Winning
Sweeney Todd The Demon Barber of Fleet Street
Feature Interview
Having once been on the trail of one of London’s real life Victorian villains, Jack the Ripper, in From Hell, Johnny Depp seems to have developed a somewhat bloodthirsty taste for penny dreadful characters as he returns to our screens this week as the Golden Globe winning Sweeney Todd The Demon Barber of Fleet Street, directed by Depp’s regular cohort, Tim Burton.
In the film, Sweeney Todd is a man wronged. His wife and child cruelly snatched from him and he then wrongly convicted and sent away, barber Benjamin Barker returns to Victorian London hell bent on revenge. Changing his name, he teams up with the wily Mrs Lovett (Helena Bonham Carter), who comes up with a most effective little recycling scheme that would put most local councils to shame. As Sweeney Todd keeps the local population in check Mrs Lovett’s perfect pies are flavour of the month – until someone looks a little too closely...
“I saw him as a sad character. He’s not a villain – it’s tragic” says Burton of his latest screen creation. “Basically, when you meet him he’s a dead person really, the only thing that’s keeping him going is one single-minded thing, which is tragic.”
“People don’t want to admit to it, but we all have something” says Depp. “I’m a big fan of revenge.”
Based on the famous Stephen Sondheim stage musical of the same name, Sweeny Todd, Demon Barber of Fleet Street, has not only the dubious honour of being an 18 certificate musical, it has just been awarded this year’s Golden Globe for it’s trouble, along with the Best Actor award going to its leading man. Both Johnny Depp and Tim Burton, and a considerable entourage that included most the cast members, were in London last week to talk about the film.
“What you gonna do?” Says Johnny Depp, when asked about his thoughts on the Golden Globes being affected by the Writer’s Strike. “Everyone’s going to do what they want to do and are willing to hang on for it. It’s thrown the entire industry. It’s not just the awards, there’s a lot of individuals in the industry who depend on work to survive.”
Burton nods agreement. “It’s complicated, because things are changing,” he says. “Whilst the strike is going on, and people aren’t working, and things aren’t being done, people just go and watch YouTube, so in some ways some things should be worked out quickly because some of the things they worry about are going to happen anyway. I just find it very complicated and I really don’t know what to make of it all.”
Would they have gone to the awards ceremony had it taken place? “Probably, yeah”, they agree. “I haven’t spent much time there [LA]; I’m hanging about at the moment here, so I’m not really in tune with what’s happening” adds Burton. He concedes that one of the things that worries him is that awards ceremonies can bring different films or those that fall into strange categories “such as this one” to the cinema-going public’s attention. “It probably helps awareness of films. That’s the sad part about it, that maybe films that are different won’t reach as many people but other than that, I don’t really know.”
Although Burton, Depp and producer Richard D. Zanuck, who memorably greenlit The Sound of Music and, less memorably, Hello Dolly, Star! and Dr Dolittle – “it did little” he quips – have been denied their red carpet moment of glory, having to await the arrival of their awards through the post this year, it’s highly unlikely that Sweeney Todd is going to pass audiences by. Burton and his muse, Depp, are a winning combination, and ever since the announcement that they would be working their dark magic on the project fans have been salivating with delight.
After his three flops, Zanuck said: “I vowed I would never go near a musical again until Tim said he would do Sweeney Todd. When I heard Tim was passionately involved in it and wanted to do it, that was enough for me. He was the only director I ever wanted to do this picture.”
It’s hard to disagree that the shock-haired Burton – the man behind Edward Scissorhands, Sleepy Hollow, The Nightmare Before Christmas and The Corpse Bride – was the natural choice but what about his leading man? Sondheim’s musical is acknowledged as being one of the most difficult to perform and Johnny Depp, by his own admission, was too mortified to even sing in the shower. During initial discussions, it was thought that 50% of the work would be done before they even stepped on to the set, recording in advance and then lipsyncing, but that’s not quite how it worked out, and the most practical way was for the cast to actually sing along on set too.
“I did do a musical before” says Depp, “many years ago with John Waters, called Cry Baby. But – technically – it was only half of me; it wasn’t me singing. Tim’s the only person brave enough to let me try to sing. It was the first time I’ve sung – I’ve never even sang in the shower.” Luckily it got better. “Once I got over the initial fear, it was kind of enjoyable. Sondheim’s melodies and lyrics are a real pleasure to trot around, it’s really beautiful stuff.”
But, the man whose singing voice has been likened to Bowie’s (something Depp, a huge fan, quickly and humbly refutes), would he do it again? Although the answer is an emphatic “No”, don’t bet too much on it as Burton is quick to throw a number of new ideas into the ring. “We’re going to be doing the Village People story next. It’s a ballet. With an edge. Johnny will play each and every one of them. The indian, the cowboy, the whole crew...” He also says they’re about to embark on a production of ‘Cats’. Jokes, of course, but you can’t help but wonder that now the seed is sown in that dark, imaginative mind how it might take root, twist and grow and finally bear fruit.
It’s Burton’s very pronounced idiosyncrasies that set him apart from anyone else currently working in Hollywood (despite the independent sensibilities, his films are distributed by Warners, and they don’t come much bigger than that). His is a unique view of the world that transfers to the films he makes. On Sweeney Todd, he says: “I saw it as a light-hearted comedy musical! I thought it was quite funny.” It’s even a role he’d quite like himself. “You don’t have to talk... you just look out the window, and brood, and be angry. Wow! That’s a great job.”
“It’s actually a portrait of our home life.” So says Mrs Lovett herself, Burton’s real-life partner, Helena Bonham Carter who, it has to be said, is astonishingly beautiful in the flesh (as, incidentally and unbelievably, is Mr Depp). The unconventional couple famously keep separate homes, joined by a door, something both were grateful for when Helena was practising for her role. Burton jokes that he got the door soundproofed. Having met on Burton’s arguably least popular film, Planet of the Apes, Ms Bonham Carter has since took Burton’s direction in The Corpse Bride and Charlie and the Chocolate Factory. Adding Sweeney Todd to that roster, does it make it easier or harder having her other half calling the shots?
“It made it much harder” She says. “He told me ‘look, you look right for it, you’re potentially very right for it, but we have no idea if you can sing. I said I’ll go and try and learn, and he said it’d be good for you to have some lessons.
“For my sake, I wouldn’t want to feel I got it just because I slept with him! At the end of the day, Stephen Sondheim had final say – and I definitely didn’t sleep with him.”
The question remains, despite its deserved success at the Globes, will audiences now embrace Sweeney Todd the movie in the same way they have flocked to the stage show over the years. The screen musical route is notoriously precarious and for every Grease there’s a Xanadu, every Chicago, A Chorus Line. The movie adaptation of Phantom of the Opera didn’t quite set the screen alight as much as one might have expected, and Alan Parker’s Evita shone because it had Madonna in the role she was probably born to play. Would it have been safer, perhaps, if Burton had told the story with dialogue, punctuated with the occasional song. He shakes his head.
“One of the things I liked about the musical was that you can listen to the soundtrack and it tells you the story... it felt like a silent movie, with music. The music lets [the characters] express their feelings. That was the structure we used for it. The imagery, which is quite dark and harsh, sat with the music, which is quite lush and beautiful. It was something I’d not seen before and was the reason I wanted to do it.”
The art direction of Sweeney Todd is the height of gothic, with luminous, dramatic shades of grey, frequently spattered with blood. Lots of blood. It takes quite some doing, in fact, for a film to be awarded an 18 certificate based on it’s gore factor these days but Sweeney Todd achieves it with aplomb.
“The blood was our own special recipe” says Depp. “Very sticky, Very sweet, and very dry. It took a couple of weeks to get it out of your underwear.” Sweeney, who enjoys a slightly unsettlingly erotic relationship with his murder weapons, the cut-throat razors, could well have been to the same school of cinema as Tarantino, so deft is he at extracting gallons of the gushing red stuff. However, lathering up and shaving people “freaked me out” says Depp.
“I asked him to give me a Brazillian but he wouldn’t” sighs Timothy Spall, who plays the weasly Beadle, the right-hand man of Judge Turpin, played by Alan Rickman. It probably doesn’t give too much away to say that the character is one of many who fall foul of the Demon Barber but, unlike most of the graphic depictions, Beadle’s demise isn’t shown on screen. Did the actor feel cheated?
“There’s a nice shot of me shooting down [through the floor underneath Sweeney’s specially constructed barber’s chair] and my head smashes against the ground, and my brain comes out – I didn’t feel too bad, I didn’t feel left out. I supplied my own brain.”
This dark humour, and affection for their less than savoury (pie) characters, is what flavours the production. On Judge Turpin, the man who wronged Benjamin Barker all those years ago and whose death would be the pinnacle of Sweeney Todd’s career, Alan Rickman says: “I think he’s a sweetheart. You know, I don’t chop anybody up and eat them.”
Now, with two Golden Globes to its name and the Oscars just arround the corner, the strange but wonderful Sweeney Todd The Demon Barber of Fleet Street is about to be unleashed on the British public. As a nation that has always embraced the strange and eccentric, it can only be that the film the critics are calling Burton’s masterpiece will be taken to its collective bosom.
“This is one of the best casts I have ever worked with,” says Burton. “All of these people are not – they may beg to differ – professional singers and to do a musical like this, which is one of the most difficult musicals – and they all went for it. Every day on the set was a very, very special thing for me because – hearing those guys sing...
“I don’t know if I can ever have an experience like that again.”
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