Johnny Depp

[SHADOWVEIL]

Skip Magazine

Gini Brenner exclusively interviewed Johnny Depp at the film festival in Venice.
Translated by CillyCK

SKIP: Johnny, you are wearing a new hat! What happened to the old one without which you have barely been seen in the last couple of years? Did you throw it away?
JOHNNY: No, it is just resting. I sent it on holiday, so to speak – it really did look kinda worn out. Now I have this one. It’s wonderful. Not surprisingly, it is a real Borsalino.
SKIP: Where does your fascination for hats come from?
JOHNNY: You know, that is my personal homage to the 30s and 40s where men used to wear hats, suits and neckties all the time, out of principle. I think we should revive that style.
SKIP: Speaking of fashion: in “Once upon a time in Mexico” you are wearing a collection of the probably most genius-impossible t-shirts that have ever run over a movie screen. Did you pick them out all by yourself?
JOHNNY: Sure (laughs). When I was talking about the role with the director Robert Rodriguez, we both thought that agent Sands is something like an eternal tourist. And that’s the way I wanted to be dressed. Therefore I called a couple of people and asked them to send me the most impossible t-shirts they could find. For example, I got the great “I’m with stupid”-shirt from my sister, that’s one of my favorites.
SKIP: Even though your role is almost as big as Antonio Bandera’s, only nine days of shooting seemed to be enough for you …
JOHNNY: I just say High Definition Digital Video. This technology is just incredibly fast. Robert uses that brand-new HDDV-camera, and I was more than once surprised how easily and flexibly you can work with it. Robert has always been anything but a punctilious person but with this camera he can shoot more setups in one day than other directors do in their whole life! To be honest, it was almost a little bit too fast for myself. When I was finished with my scenes I didn’t want to leave – so Robert kindly wrote me another mini-role, I play a priest in the confessional (rolls himself a cigarette and puts it in his mouth, hesitates). Do you mind if I smoke?
SKIP: No, of course not. We are in Europe.
JOHNNY: Oh yes, that’s right (laughs). Somewhen I even said in an interview that I only moved to France to be able to smoke in peace again (grins). Of course, that wasn’t the point. But I really enjoy living in Europe.
SKIP: Don’t you miss your old home L.A. at all?
JOHNNY: Well, I still have an apartment there and commute between the continents. That is a big privilege, that I have, and a possibility to keep learning new things.
SKIP: Where are you children going to grow up?
JOHNNY: In France. In my opinion L.A. is not a good place to be a child. Everything is too fast, there is too much of everything and that way too early, and you grow up way to soon. We are kids for such a short time only anyways. I want my children to be able to live that time as long and as intensively as possible.
SKIP: Do you think it is dangerous to grow up in L.A.?
JOHNNY: The whole world is dangerous.
SKIP: What do you miss of L.A. when you are in France?
JOHNNY: Pink’s hot dogs (laughs). And of course my friends and family. But I don’t want to live at a place anymore where everything is just about movies, where everybody exclusively talks about who is shooting with whom and how much it is gonna gross. I want to talk about goats, about books and paintings.
SKIP: Why about goats?
JOHNNY: Oh, I love goats (laughs).
SKIP: Do you have pets?
JOHNNY: We have a few wild boars – although they had been there even before we moved in. Also there are some ponies, a lot of dogs and some semi-wild cats. And lots and lots of insects.
SKIP: What do you do when you are not working?
JOHNNY: I spend time with my children. Or they with me – with lock, stock and barrel (laughs). They demand a lot of attention, but in a nice kind of way, they just always want to be with mommy and daddy.
SKIP: When you play with them do you profit from you experience as an actor?
JOHNNY: Maybe (laughs). My daughter loves to play with Barbies with me. Every single Barbie has another personality.
SKIP: Are you Ken?
JOHNNY: Oh no, I only play women’s roles. I mean, I have already done that in my job as well (grins).
SKIP: Did your life actually change after your huge success with “Pirates of the Caribbean”?
JOHNNY: Not yet, maybe that will still come. I am still completely shocked that a movie which I was part of, made a whole lot of money – I am not used to that (laughs). And I am very thankful, that thousands of kids went to see my movie. When such a little kid approaches me on the street and screams: “Hey, you are that Captain Jack Sparrow!” then I am always deeply touched. It can’t get any better.

[SHADOWVEIL]

Johnny Depp, 40, has made more than 30 films including Edward Scissorhands, Sleepy Hollow, Chocolat and Pirates of the Caribbean. He lives in the French countryside with his partner, singer Vanessa Paradis and their children, Lily-Rose, four, and Jack, two.

Q. Tell me about your new film.
J. It's called Once Upon a Time in Mexico and it's a second part to a trilogy by Robert Rodriguez - the first was Desperado - which is a salute to the Spaghetti westerns made by the director Sergio Leone. I was very pleased to be in it because I'm a huge fan of Leone. I think he made amazing films. They are as close as a film can get to art.

Q. You don't exactly play the hero do you?
J. Not exactly. I play a CIA agent who's an unhappy person, really not a nice guy. In fact, he's very bad, nasty. Ugly guy, very damaged.

Q. How do you choose your roles?
J. Well, I haven't been working for the money, that's for sure! Most of the films I've been involved with have been outside the Hollywood structure. I haven't done many films with lots of action and explosions and people in jeopardy - except for Pirates of the Caribbean, of course. Usually, I just make films that I think are right for me and that I hope the audience will find interesting. So far it seems to be working.

Q. Do you worry about being "in" or "out" in Hollywood terms?
J. I'm happy to say that I know nothing at all about who's in or out, or anything about the Hollywood scene. I don't watch contemporary films. I watch animated Disney films - which I adore - which I watch with my daughter, and Humphrey Bogart or old French films, and I don't read trade magazines, I just don't know who's doing what, or who's a failure and who's a success. And that's fine - ignorance is bliss.

Q. Who is you role model?
J. Marlon Brando. He has been a great hero, mentor, friend and teacher as well as one of the funniest people I've ever met.

Q. Describe a normal day in your life when you are not making films.
J. It's amazing. I get up and make a bottle of milk up for my son and then breakfast for my girls. Then we wander out into the countryside - we live in the middle of nowhere. We might come back to the house and paint and play in the sand box or on the swings. And in the evening I drink wine, drink coffee and go to sleep. That's my day and I love it.

Q. How has family life changed you?
J. It's given me a life. I feel better about everything. For many years I was confused about all sorts of things: life, growing up, not knowing what was right or wrong. Now I know because Vanessa and my children have taught me, that the only thing that matters in life is being a good parent. I can't say the darkness has completely gone. It's still there, but I've never been closer to the light then I am these days.

Q. What was your childhood like?
J. Not very secure. My parents were not very happily married, and they split up when I was about 15. It was something I'd seen coming for years. As young as seven or eight. I remember looking at them and thinking, "Come on, this is torture. Just split up." When they finally did, I thought it was the right thing for them to do. Then my mother became ill and the focus was on getting her better. It wasn't till later that I realised, I'd never mourned the loss of my family.

Q. When did you come to terms with it?
J. When I met Vanessa. She's been a kind of miracle in my life. I feel very blessed to have her beside me.

Q. What is your favourite song?
J. "Keep your lamp trimmed and burning." It's a spiritual, sung by a guy called Billie Willie Johnson. Who was a blues singer with an amazing talent. He was also a preacher and this is a religious song. It's completely pure and raw and honest and true. It makes me cry. Mind you - I cry at the drop of a hat - I'm a real sap.

Q. What message would you like to leave behind through your work?
J. I'm not sure I'm capable of leaving behind a message. But if I did, I hope it would be that it's OK to be different from the crowd. In fact it's really good to be different from the crowd, and that we should really question ourselves before we pass judgment on someone who is different to us. And if I could I would like to continue on even the minute level - John Lennon's message that we should try not to hate each other. That would be a real biggie.

[SHADOWVEIL]

Details Magazine
May 1993
by Chris Heath
(Transcript by Langley)

Johnny Depp - Portrait of the oddest as a young man

Over breakfast in a Berlin hotel, Johnny Depp, actor, brandishes with pride some local confections. They are a small, rectangular white candy with irregular yellow stains in the middle. Verpisste Windeln. "Piss diapers," he helpfully translates. We are barely a minute into our first conversation. I had been told Johnny Depp is shy. Perhaps this is his way of breaking the ice.

Johnny: A man gave them to me yesterday.
Me: Why did he think you would like them?
Johnny: I don't know. (smiles) I'm kind of frightened.
Me: But you do like them? What does that say about you?
Johnny: There's something wrong with me?
Me: What else do you like along those lines?
Johnny: (shrugs) I don't know. I have this strange thing, when someone begins to choke it kills me. Like if a piece of meat gets jammed in their windpipe, it floors me.
Me: You'll start laughing?
Johnny: Yeah. I don't want to, but I just do.
Me: You sick *******. Why is that funny?
Johnny: I think it's that initial panic that registers on the face. That kind of...(He makes an extreme gagging sound. The diners at the next table look around, alarmed, and he apologizes to them.) I think it's that there's nothing you can do that gets me. But I'm scared at the same time. I don't want anybody to be hurt.
Me: Can you remember the first time you saw someone choke?
Johnny: Yeah. It was me. I was five or six. A piece of steak. I didn't chew it properly, I guess, and it got jammed in my windpipe.
Me: Did you think that was funny?
Johnny: (laughs) Yeah. I was scared, then my mother sort of hit me on the back and it just vaulted across the room, and I remember thinking how funny it was. It's terrible. One of my good friends in L.A., he was eating a club sandwich and I hear this ...(the same gagging sound)...and he was streching his neck out and then he started almost convulsing, and I began to cackle and I couldn't stop. He was almost blue, everyone was trying to help him, and I was on the floor laughing.
Me: I guess you can't help what you find funny.
Johnny: (nodding) Another thing...if someone were to fall from a building - a large, tall building - what is the first thing they do? (I convey my ignorance) They flap their arms!
He roars with laughter and so do I. They flap their arms! Over scrambled eggs with Johnny Depp in Berlin, this seems funnier than almost anything else in the world.

But for Johnny Depp this isn't just affected silliness. It means something. It matters. Later we will try to pick apart why such things can be funny and he will say this: "There's something about how honest it is, you know? Like when someone trips. It's really funny, but at the same time it's really heartbreaking. Because it's honest. It's not made up at all."
Johnny Depp is here for the screening of one of his forthcoming films, Arizona Dream, the first American film by Time of the Gypsies director Emir Kusturica, at the Berlin Film Festival. The day before we meet they show the movie - all flying fishes, heady dreams, magical realist flourishes, and Depp having sex with Faye Dunaway - and afterward there is a press conference.
You might think people would have things to ask Depp. After all, enough has been asked before now. The historical questions, about how a Florida youth who wanted to play guitar found himself in the movies. The teen questions, about his four-year stint as a high school narc in 21 Jump Street, a program Depp will refer to only as "that show." The love 'n' romance questions, about his relationship with Winona Ryder. The film career questions, about how he slipped into adult role respectability after parodying his teen credentials in Cry Baby. The spiritual questions, about the niche in which he seems to have found himself, playing lost souls in films like Edward Scissorhands, Arizona Dream and Benny and Joon. And the big question: Is he just a doe-eyed actor with cheekbones and a knack for playing frail victims, or the great talent of his generation? And does he care?
But they don't ask any of this. These people are interested in another story, a potentially sharp human-interest sound bit, and so they direct most of their questions to Kusturica: What are the links between the film and the events in his homeland of the former Yugoslavia? Never mind that there seem to be few. At one gruesome moment an American restates the question, demanding "a little bit of emotion, please." Kusturica stares in his direction. "You want me to cry?"
As this unpleasant charade is acted out Depp chews gum, smokes Marlboros, and occasionally flashes Kusturica a conspiratorial glance. When someone finally asks him about the difference between American and European films, he shrugs, "There's more guns and explosions in American films. More Lycra bathing suits." His hair is shaggy and red from What's Eating Gilbert Grape?, which he just filmed in Austin, Texas. Last night he tried to dye his hair back to his usual dark brown with some stuff from the hotel's hair salon, but it didn't work.
"I guess I gotta go back to Miss Clairol and do it right," he shrugs when we meet the next morning. He dyed his hair red because the character in Gilbert Grape reminded him of a guy called Bones he knew when he was young.
Bones saved his life once, when he was about thirteen. They were trying to blow fire. Like circus freaks. Or the guy from Kiss. They wrapped a gasoline-soaked T-shirt around a pole and then lit it and blew gasoline from their mouths. It looked impressive until Johnny's face caught fire, and he began to run - an action that he would later find ludicrous and very funny. It was Bones who knew what to do. He dragged his hands down Johnny's face to extinguish the flames. His eyelashes and some of his hair were burnt. You can still see a little scarring on the right of his face, just below the outside of his smile.
Depp. Berliners will never tire of reminding him that Depp means "village idiot" in German. An English journalist will tell him about the Van Morrison song, "Village Idiot," in which the idiot is praised for actually knowing more than everyone else, at which Depp will smile and quietly say, "It's a lie." When the "village idiot" visits Germany he will pick up a few lines of the local lingo. "Ich bin eine Wassermelone," he will announce to anyone who will listen. "Mein Vater ist ein Stierkampfer." I am a watermelon. My father is a bullfighter.
John Christopher Depp I was a civil engineer. He still works down south, "director of public works or something." John Christopher Depp II, the youngest of four children, never asked his father why he wanted his son to have his name. He did ask one time whether he was an accident. His parents insisted he wasn't.
He was born in Kentucky, though his family moved to Miramar, Florida, when he was seven. There was Cherokee blood on both sides of the family, but mostly his mother's. His great-grandmother, Minnie, was a full-blooded Cherokee. "She died when she was 102," he recalls. "She chewed tobacco until the day she died. I think she had a Coke and a pickle every morning, too." This heritage was the inspiration for Tattoo Number One (upper right arm): an Indian. It was done in Long Beach, on a trip to California, when he was about seventeen. It's based on an Indian picture used as a TV test pattern in the '50s.
When he was about fifteen his parents split up. It was a strange time because just as Johnny's father left, his mother got ill, and Johnny was too busy trying to make sure she was O.K. to think about the other stuff. A journalist will ask him, perhaps a little insensitively, how that time was, and he will answer, "It was a real weird thing. It always is when you've been with someone for twenty years and then suddenly it's over. That would certainly put a damper on the day."
It drove him closer to his mother. She is the inspiration for Tattoo Number Two (left upper arm): BETTY SUE. He was messing around at the house of a tattoo artist friend one day and they came up with the design. When he showed his mother, she got teary-eyed. They're close. He speaks to her all the time. "Somewhere along the line my mom became more like a real good friend," he will say, and then when pressed for the psychological significance he will scoff, "I haven't had sex with her," and talk about how noted serial killer Ed Gein "as the story goes, was found dancing wearing pieces of his mother."
A rapproachement was eventually reached with his father but for a while after the split Johnny blamed him. It didn't help that each week he had to go round to his father's office and collect the family support money.

We are interrupted by a man with gray hair and too much suntan, wearing a grotesque colored leather jacket featuring many of the more blinding flags of the world. His name is Folkert. He wants to talk to Johnny about being on his talk show. Then he presents a more immediate request. He explains - sweat breaking out on his brow - that, wherever he is, Jaguar provides him with a car. He has one such outside, and he would like Johnny to be photographed with it.
"O.K.," says Johnny, promising to oblige after breakfast. He is lying. Folkert leaves.
"When he started to perspire," hoots Johnny, "I thought he was going to hack us up." Then he wanders back to our discussions. "When I was a little kid...Oh, I can't tell you this..."
"Go on..."
"When I was about four or five...I was absolutely positive that I was going to be...the first white Harlem Globe Trotter!"
As we laugh Folkert returns. He now wants, as an even more immediate favor, to be photographed at the table with Johnny. Johnny acquiesces, then asks, his tone polite and inquiring, "Where did you get that jacket?"
"From San Francissco. If you like I can try to get one for..."
"No," Johnny speedily demurs.
Folkert leaves and Johnny shows me the video camera he bought in Paris earlier in the week. I watch his travelogue through the viewfinder. Most of it is wandering around a restaurant kitchen in Lilles. He zooms in on the kitchen clock. Around the circumference, instead of numbers, are twelve different vegetables. Out in the street the lens follows a French cyclist, a bicycle wheel strapped to his back.
Folkert, clearly insecure about the Jaguar arrangement, returns again. On this visit Johnny asks him to sing into the video camera, and he treats us to "He's Got the Whole World in His Hands." "I like people all over the world," he explains to the camera after his performance. "Why not? Life is short."
"That was profound," praises Johnny.
Folkert arranges to meet Johnny in five minutes outside the hotel, and leaves.
"O.K.," says Johnny, once he's out of sight. "Let's get the **** out of here." We use the back stairs.

Johnny Depp says he always had an idea he was going to be something different. Not a movie star - "in Florida that just didn't exist." But guitar heroes did. There was one at his high school, a guy named John Rock. "You couldn't get a cooler name in the '70s than that." So Johnny decided to become a famous guitar player. For the girls. And to make a place in this world. "You've got to have some kind of identity," he says. "We weren't jocks, we weren't rednecks - we were probably considered burnouts, although we weren't fully burnouts. So we decided to be rock stars instead."
Good thing, too. Johnny was going nowhere in high school. He had no credits for anything much. He would skip a lot. One day, late, walking down the hall with a friend, the two simply looked at each other and knew. They turned around, walked out. A few weeks later Johnny Depp changed his mind. He went to see the administration and said he wanted to come back. They didn't think it was a good idea. So Johnny worked for awhile printing T-shirts, then at a garage, first pumping gas then aligning wheels and stuff. It was around this time he read Catcher in the Rye and On the Road, with the usual consequences.
And he played in the band. They had all sorts of names. Flame. Bad Boys (he's fairly embarrassed by this one). ***** (he's very embarrassed about this one). They settled on the Kids, and were soon supporting name bands from out of town. Iggy Pop. The Pretenders. The Ramones. Chuck Berry. A Flock of Seagulls. A Flock of Seagulls! Johnny couldn't believe it, but that guy really had that flammable hair.

Johnny Depp has a morning of German TV interviews. He tells me he hates doing this stuff and insists he's not very good at it. But I watch, and he's not so bad. He graces them with an effective spaced-out, "Wow! Yeah?" demeanor, but it's cleverly managed. Each interviewer asks him about his dreams, and each time he considers the question as though he truly has never thought about this before. It is a long morning...
Interview Number One. He interrupts a dull question to say, "Wow! Those are great socks!" At the end they ask him to do something silly with a microphone that has a big red foam bubble with their station's name. "I don't know what to do," he demurs. "I'm awful at that kind of thing. I can't do promos. I'm not a good salesman. Even for myself."
Interview Number Two. They set up their cameras then ask him to wear a baseball cap festooned with their logo. He asks them how to say "I need a monkey" in German. They insist there is no way to say that. "What if you do need a monkey in Germany?" he asks with concern. Then he gets to work. He tells them his missing talent is speech: "I'm not a good talker. Someone else's sentences, that's O.K. It's my own that are difficult." He tells them his favorite actors are Robert Mitchum, Robert DeNiro, Alan Arkin, Marlon Brando, and Buster Keaton. He tells them about his next film, the Tim Burton-directed story of C-movie director and noted cross-dresser Ed Wood. "Who?" the interviewer asks. "Ed Wood," he repeats. A flash of recognition. "Edward Scissorhands!" proclaims the interviewer triumphantly. "No," he deadpans, "I've already done that one." The final question is whether he is a vegetarian. "No," he says. "I rip meat apart with my hands, raw." There is a pause. "Are you?" he inquires. "Yes," says the interviewer.
Interview Number Three. A print journalist starts out earnest and conceptual. Johnny obliges: "The art of being fake, it's kind of an obtuse job...I've had all the obvious labels - the bad boy, the teen idol, James Dean - and I do anything to fight them..." Then the interviwer gets nosy. Is Johnny still with Winona Ryder? "Yeah." She gave you a star in the sky? "Yeah." What is its name? "I don't want to go into it," he says. Has he seen Dracula? "No." The photographer asks him to bare his tattoos, but he refuses. "I don't want to pose. You need a beefcake guy for that. I'm not a lumberjack type."
Interview Number Four. The interviewer has brought an interpreter. "Her sister is twelve," explains the interpreter, "and she's all excited about you." "I'm all excited about her, says Johnny. "What?" snaps the interpreter. "Just a joke," he smiles painfully. He tells Interviewer Number Four that he hates watching his own films. "Arizona Dream was the first time I watched myself where I didn't feel sick." He chats about the self-financed short film he directed then pulled after one showing. "I went for a cheese effect," he explains, "but I didn't have any specific cheese in mind. It came out sharp cheddar." He considers for a moment. "Or Jarlsberg."
As he finishes up, I grab a word with the disheveled, unshaven Kusturica, who speaks halting English in a manic tone. He said he knew Depp had something when he heard him play guitar. "That is more important than how good an actor he is. Acting, who cares? Everyone could be an actor." He tells me how rich Johnny is spiritually and that "he has a certain self-destructive side which I like very much." His most intriguing comment is this: "He's one of the great young actors, in that he has a rich mythological eruptive internal life. In America I stopped seeing people with secrets. They just become part of the CNN global system. He has secrets, and secrets are the main sign of human existence. It's beautiful to have a guy who was not eaten by TV civilization, who is still human in its shadow."
It's over. The Germans in the anteroom tell him that a man in a strange flag-festooned leather jacket had been trying to find him, but has gone. Johnny picks up his backpack and Butthole Surfers tape in his room and leaves for the airport. We arrange to meet in New York in a few days. "Call me at the hotel," he says. "Mr. Stench."

When Johnny Depp told his parents that he was going to be a rock star, "they thought I was nuts." But they had greater worries than this flight of fancy. Their youngest child seemed...strange. For a while they even considered professional help. "I used to make weird noises," Johnny explains. "And I used to do everything twice."
Me: Like what?
Johnny: If you shut off a light, shut it off twice.
Me: Well, that means it's back on.
Johnny: No. I'd go off...on...off. I still catch myself doing that sometimes.
Me: Was it just a silly affectation?
Johnny: Oh, no. It was something I had to do. Just like if you were walking down the street and you pass a telephone pole and you get a hundred yards and suddenly the thought hits you: I have to go back and go around that phone pole. And I would do it.
Me: And the noises...?
Johnny: (sighs) Yeah, I made some noises.
Me: Why would you make them?
Johnny: It was happiness. I can remember being so happy that I made noises.
Me: Do you still do that?
Johnny: Maybe, if I'm in a good mood. (he smiles to himself) It might have been some form of Tourette's syndrome.
Me: What's that?
Johnny: (enthusiastically) Tourette's is one of my favorite things. It's a person who can't control certain things. It's like if I was walking down the street and suddenly went, "**** me! **** me! ****!" It's an actual disease. I've seen it on Geraldo or something.

Several days later he tells me a story. A few years ago he was sitting in the first-class cabin of an airplane, heading off to Vancouver to record more episodes of "that show." That was a part of his life when he wasn't so happy. Suddenly a thought came into his head and he couldn't drive it out. There was something he wanted to say. He had to say it. So he said it.
"I **** animals!" he blurted.
He can remember the reactions of his fellow passengers: The heads snapping round toward him and then carefully turning back again. Taking it in. He ****s animals. It was the man next to him, an accountant, who finally broke the silence. He had a question.
"What kind?"

The Kids drove from Florida to Los Angeles, changing their name to Six Gun Method because they weren't kids anymore, to search for a record deal. It never came, but in his new home Johnny got married for a couple of years. He also got to know an actor named Nicolas Cage - Cage went out with Johnny's ex-wife in a hiatus before she and Depp got married. They would hang out. "We were walking down the street one day," Johnny remembers, "and I was looking for a job, and he said, 'You ought to meet my agent.' It didn't register as anything other than, 'Maybe I could get extra work.'"
The agent just talked to him, then sent him to meet the director Wes Craven. He read opposite Craven's daughter, who was reportedly taken with him, and he was given one of the lead roles in Craven's next horror film, A Nightmare on Elm Street. Simple as that. "I was kind of excited," he recalls. "The possibility of being in a movie. The thought was miles away from anything I had ever dreamed of."
His first appearance on film, at the beginning of Nightmare, is walking to school, laughing uneasily at a penis joke. Two-thirds through the film he is sucked into his bed while watching TV and regurgitated as blood. He got paid scale. It seemed like a fortune.
After that he would audition for parts, but he still wanted to be a rock star. This was just a cool way to finance it. His second film was called Private Resort. It was a "teen kind of exploitation, **** and *** and basic filthiness. What the **** did I care? I had no aspirations." Not yet. But then his band self-destructed, and he took a look at what he had left. "It seemed I'd fallen into this thing, or it had fallen into me." He decided it was time to take it seriously. He began to study, first at the Loft Studio, then with a private coach. When he appeared in a Showtime movie called Slow Burn with Eric Roberts and Beverly D'Angelo, he finally felt something happen. After that, Oliver Stone cast him in Platoon, and even though most of his scenes ended up on the cutting room floor, it was another step.
Nevertheless, when he returned to Los Angeles he still formed another band, the Rock City Angels. Then he was cast in "that show," 21 Jump Street. He was Tom Hanson, under-cover school cop. He knew it was a mistake before the first show aired. The show's people wanted him to do these interviews with magazines with names like Sixteen and Big Bopper. They wanted him to pose for photos in these geeky clothes. One night he was sitting in his Vancouver hotel room and a commercial came on TV. Not just for 21 Jump Street, but for him. A Johnny Depp commercial. "This awful, slow-motion montage of me. I was scared to death," he remembers. The usual teen star pattern is to move from anonymity to the thrill of being celebrated, and, only after some time, to rue the limitations this sort of celebrity places on both your current life and future prospects. But Depp missed out on the happy stage. He didn't want to be celebrated. Not like this, anyway.
And so he slowly suffered. He had unwittingly signed a six-year contract, expecting the show to run a single thirteen-week course and be forgotten. Over the next four years he would try everything to get out of that contract. He even offered to work a season for free if they would let him go at the end, but they refused. Instead, he entered teen-zine hyperspace. He is a Gemini! He was a wild kid, doing drugs in his teens but clean now! (Today he laughs at this, the most repeated of all Depp details; the idea that the last time he took a drug was as a teenager is "absolutely a lie.") He was a bad boy who dropped out of school! He once got green beans stuck in his teeth! He's frightened by clowns!
He could have got into the merchandise himself, made some big money, but instead he did everything he could to stop it. He even vetoed the Depp doll. After a couple of seasons they asked him to film a promo advising kids to stick with education. Didn't they read the press they so keenly ggenerated? He was a bad boy who dropped out of school!
He tried to keep himself human by adapting Hanson's dialogue for his own pleasure. In one show one line was something like "This is a great place, Doug, this is like your other place." Depp changed it to "Nice digs, Doug, you dog - I dig 'em."
He got out after four years. They were supposed to renew his contract by a certain date and they messed up. His agent called him on the set of Edward Scissorhands. You're free, she said. He remembers it well. "My posture changed. Suddenly everything got bright. It was like Nelson Mandela, man."

Mr. Stench (I think there's a beauty," he will tell me, "in people having to ask for Mr. Stench") is asleep when I call. He just flew in from Paris and isn't feeling well. He blames it on walking around with wet hair in the chilly French air. We discuss what we should do. "Maybe we could go to the hospital," he suggests, "and I could get my lungs pumped."
Instead we decide to eat. We walk up to a delicatessen on Fifty-seventh Street. Johnny's hair is still orange, and no one stops him. He stops himself twice, though. The first time is to stare at a driver asleep inside his car, with the TV on. He likes that. The second is to watch a pigeon feeding on a splatter of vomit on the sidewalk. He likes that even more.
He has the Reuben and we talk about filming John Waters's subtly depraved Cry-Baby, which he made during a hiatus from 21 Jump Street. He played the title role--Mr. Baby, as Depp will have it. It was the perfect meeting of minds. Waters, who had spotted Depp in teen magazines, loved that he was a teen star. Depp himself hated it. The film exploited both emotions and deftly allowed Depp to make his statement without resorting to disfigurement or unnecessary facial hair.
Baltimore's Depp fans couldn't believe their luck at finding him in their midst. And not all of them would settle for an autograph. Some hid under his trailer and asked a Teamster whether they could purchase Depp's waste products. There was also the letter. He had signed an autograph for this girl earlier in the day, and later she slipped a message under the door. "Hi, Johnny," it began. "I met you on the set. Jeez, it was real nice taking to you. You're a really good conversationalist..."--he loved that bit! And then, no warning---"...by the way, I can suck a bowling ball through a garden hose. If you're interested, here's my number..."
Depp and Waters are still in touch. They exchange gifts. Waters gave Depp a book of medical and surgical oddities, photographs like a bowl with amputated feet in it. On the set Depp gave Waters a Father's Day card, and now he occasionally clips and sends good Weekly World News articles: $10,000 BIRD SINGS UNRECORDED BEATLES SONGS! These days, though, Depp is hard to find. "I always joke, Where shall I send letters: A Movie Star, A Bench, L.A...." says Waters.
Except for the one he bought for his mother, Johnny Depp owns no houses. He rents one in the Hollywood Hills. He tries not to answer the phone even though he has two lines and sometimes they never stop ringing. He hates that. His current answering-machine message was provided by a friend from an LP offering breast enlargement instruction for women. Your breasts are starting to tingle now. You can feel your breasts starting to tingle. A sensation of growth is taking place. His mother heard this. "I think I dropped you on your head when you were small," she said.

It was the heartbreaking, pseudo-autistic fable of Edward Scissorhands that was the making of Johnny Depp. When he met with Tim Burton in a coffee shop, he had few expectations. "I was just this ****ing guy on a series." The meeting went well, but he was told Tom Cruise was getting the part. But Cruise passed--the rumor was that he insisted that Scissorhands end up with boyish good looks--and Depp was in.
Burton says he'd wanted Depp from that first meeting. It was his eyes. "His eyes are incredible. They have the feeling of having been around for a long time, being older than his years." (When I convey this ocular appreciation to Depp, he says, clearly embarrassed, "I'm glad. I'm a big fan of his eyes, too.")
Playing someone as tragically misunderstood as Edward Scissorhands came easily. "A lot of people grow up being perceived as something that they're not," says Burton. "Johnny looks the way he does, and people see him as something he's not. There's always a little sadness that comes with that."
Later I mention this to Johnny.
"I do feel very lost at times, and very confused about everything," Depp says quietly, "whether anything means nothing." Recently he's realized that there are things he notices that some other people simply don't. "It sounds stupid, but you see that woman sitting over there, eating? There's something sad about that. You look a little closer, and you see the way she's cutting her meat. And the way she puts the fork into the food and takes a bite. And the way she's chewing.. You know? Normal, everyday things. But I see that...and I could cry my eyes out."
Why? What are you seeing?
"Some kind of loneliness." He shrugs. "She could have a hundred people waiting for her in the car. And it can destroy me. Just the honesty. The need for it."
I telephone one of Johnny's best friends in Los Angeles, a musician called Chuck E. Weiss. Chuck tells me about how Johnny likes '30s Viper music, and how he thinks Johnny is happiest watching an old Warner Bros. cartoon. "I would say he's one of those people who doesn't fit in this era. His standards and integrity are different. He's sort of a backlash to technology." But he differs from those he plays in the movies "because he doesn't think of himself as a victim. He would be the champion of victims, but he's in the position to do something about it, and he does." Weiss doesn't expand on this, but I hear tales of Depp's largesse: privately buying plane tickets for the family of a dying girl, and so on. The last thing Weiss says to me is, "If I were to describe him, I would simply say that he sits on the toilet and pees like a woman."

The giant pickles sitting at our table have been troubling us for the several hours we have sat here. They look so disgusting, and it seems inconceivable that anyone would ever eat one of them. In their midst is one single gnarled pickled green tomato. We have been casually daring each other to indulge. Suddenly, while evading a question about his early sexual experiences, Depp demands, "How much for you to eat it?"
How much are you offering? I ask.
"A hundred dollars."
Are you serious?
"Are you?"
I take the tomato and bite. It is genuinely disgusting. We collapse into hysterics, myself trying not to choke on the bitter putrid flesh. Slowly, I finish it. He hands over the money. I protest, but he won't accept it back, so eventually I take Johnny Depp's virgin twenties and press them into my pocket.

I ask Johnny Depp when he first knew he was good-looking. I am being mischievous. He is mortified and, more convincingly than most in his position, insists that it is a notion that he has never internalized. He tells me a story that means a lot more to him. Just after his family had moved to Florida, he was standing outside elementary school waiting for his dad to pick him up. This guy walked by and--he still thinks this is awful--stopped, looked at Johnny, said, "God! What an ugly kid!" then continued on his way.
"I'll never forget that," he mutters. "He ****ed with me really bad. Even if I was an ugly kid I couldn't figure out how somebody could be so..." He doesn't find the word, just shakes his head. "Still can't."
Johnny Depp first had sex in his "early teens" on the shag carpet in the back of the van his band used to carry themselves and their gear. By the time he was twenty he was married. It lasted until he was twenty-two. When I ask him about it he says, "Oh, I can't talk about this stuff."
Me: (persisting) Do you remember it as a big mistake, or a small thing that happened?
Johnny: It was definitely a big thing.
Me: Did you believe in it completely at the time?
Johnny: I really don't know. I wanted to believe in it, and the whole institution of marriage. I mean, you don't ever know what's going to happen at any time.
Me: It makes sense, except that you're the man whose tattoo reads WINONA FOREVER. It seems to run against it.
Johnny: (quietly) It doesn't run against it at all. I consider all my tattoos as specific moments in my life. My body is a journal in a way. It's like what sailors used to do, where every tattoo meant something, a specific time in your life where you make a mark on yourself, whether you do it to yourself with a knife or with a professional tattoo artist.
Me: Have you marked yourself with a knife?
Johnny: Sure.
Me: Where?
Johnny: (He rolls up his sleeve. On his left forearm are a series of seven or eight scars.)
Me: (trying to hide my shock) Wow. You did that yourself? (He nods.) What kind of things do they mark?
Johnny: Just...moments.
Me: Some people would think that was slightly psychotic--to draw your own blood.
Johnny: Really? You're not at liberty to judge after you've eaten that pickled tomato that has been sitting rancid in this deli for months.

There is another theme that is a staple of the Johnny Depp article. It is the portrait of the actor as the compulsive engager. Depp had engagements of sorts with Sherilyn Fenn and Jennifer Grey before Winona Ryder. This made him, in some eyes, a figure of fun. His jeans, they said, were frayed at the knees from all the times he'd knelt to propose. There was, it was claimed, a bumper sticker: HONK IF YOU HAVEN'T BEEN ENGAGED TO JOHNNY DEPP. It will, I suspect, not be his favorite subject.
Me: Why do actors go out with actresses?
Johnny: (shrugs) Why does anyone go out with anyone? You have a connection...I gotta get my hair dyed soon.
Me: Before you've answered my question?
Johnny: (smiles) There's a lot of actors who date actresses and I don't see it's anybody's business, really. It's not like I've done anything abnormal. If people want to sit around and talk about who I've dated, then I'd say they have a lot of spare time and should consider other topics, or masturbation.

Tattoo Number Three (top of right shoulder, above the Indian) is WINONA FOREVER. They started dating not long after their eyes locked at the Great Balls of Fire premiere: Soon after, there was an engagement ring and public proclamations of the depth of their love for each other. The two of them went to a Los Angeles tattoo parlor together. We talk about it some more. "If Winona dumped me tomorrow, it doesn't mean that I would run to some surgeon to shave skin off my *** to cover it or anything. It's a section of my life."
Me: Why do you assume it'd be she who would drop you?
Johnny: Well, either way. Either way.
Me: When you started "dating," (he winces) or whatever word you prefer...
Johnny: (smiles) "Courting."
Me: When you started courting, it was all very public.
Johnny: (nods) We made the mistake of talking about it in interviews. It became sick. Suddenly every interview became about that. So we decided to stop talking about it, and instantly rumors started that we broke up. Really disgusting. And, you know, when you're in the bathroom with your **** in your hand, taking a pee, and some ****ing yuppie who has just had his first six-pack comes in and says, "Hey! How's Winona?" you want to eat his nose. You want to kill him. When it reaches that level I'd rather sit in an interview and lie.
Me: Have you lied today?
Johnny: (shakes his head) But it's always an option.

In the bar of the Paramount Hotel, Johnny Depp tosses a coin to decide whether to have a rum- or vodka-based drink. He catches the coin, inspects it, frowns, and throws again. "Best of three." He tosses it twice more, and frowns again. "Best of five," he laughs. It says vodka. He chooses rum anyway, a strawberry daiquiri. Midway through the conversation, I visit the bathroom. Later, when I listen to my tapes, I find that Johnny has filled the time by reciting, mantralike into my microphone, "Chris Heath makes pee...Chris Heath makes pee...Chris Heath makes pee..."

Nominally Johnny has been spending time with me to promote Benny and Joon. On my final day with him I am to see a screening. He hasn't seen it yet and seems a little apprehensive. We have an agreement that, should I hate the film, I will spare us both mutual embarrassment by simply disappearing into the ether. But it's fine. Depp plays Sam, an almost autistic, angelic boy-man who wears old-fashioned clothes and can do old Chaplin and Keaton routines. This character turns up in the lives of Benny (Aidan Quinn) and his sister June (Mary Stuart Masterson), who is mentally ill. A typical piece of dialogue: Sam, upon being told "You're out of your tree," misses a beat, then evenly replies, "It's not my tree."
The Johnny Depp in this film, with his pauses and gazes and untamable flights of imagination, is the closest I've seen on-screen to the Johnny Depp I've met. When I tell him this, he is silent, and I can't tell whether he feels that it's his personality or his acting ability that has been insulted.
He has one burning question about the film, and when he finds out the answer he is extremely disappointed. Sam and June contrive a tryst of sorts, and afterward they hold each other in silence, a silence that Sam breaks with one line. Depp begged them to use his version, and they filmed both. Even though Johnny's was more in keeping with the off-kilter magic to which the film aspires, his words were in vain.
Their version: "I love you." Depp's version: "June, I'm a bed wetter."

[SHADOWVEIL]

Movieline Magazine
April 1993
by Stephen Rebello
(Transcript by Langley)

Johnny Depp Lets Down His Hair

"So, you're in a bar and you go to the bathroom to take a pee, right?" says Johnny Depp, spewing smoke from a cigarette at our table in a Melrose Avenue breakfast joint, "and you're standing at the urinal with your **** in your hand and some guy comes up to you and goes, 'Hey, so how are you and Winona doing?' I mean, Jesus Christ." Glamorously pallid in hip rags, faint violet circles ringing his eyes, locks shoved under a baseball cap, Depp squints, lets fly a deep, amused chortle and adds, "What I call 'The Display-Case Syndrome' has got to be dealt with, because, after all, if you're in the public eye, that kind of stuff...well, it just goes with the territory, ya know? But man, in a public restroom?" After a beat, he mutters, "Ooops, gotta take a pee," excuses himself, and cuts across the joint, where, every few tables, he reciprocates boisterous greetings from black-clad, sunglass-wearing, many-earringed habitués. The room is his.
I'm wondering whether I ought to follow Depp, then stride up beside him at the urinal and ask how are he and Winona doing? I mean, I've interviewed this guy before and one of the things I know about him is that he loves a good goof. After all, isn't his "Are-they-or-are-they-not-a-couple?" status with Ryder one of those need-to-know Depp essentials? Just then, though, a leggy waitress sidles over, refills Depp's coffee mug while purring to me, "Johnny's the real kind of cool, cool for life." Before I can say anything, she adds, "Not like Richard Grieco, who comes in here acting like King ****!"
These days, the former 21 Jump Street rave has a thing or two to feel cool about. By the time he's finished up a new flick in Texas, a total of three Depp movies will be theater-ready, his first since Cry-Baby and Edward Scissorhands, if we don't count his cameo in the last A Nightmare on Elm Street (and we don't). First up is the oddball Benny & Joon, featuring Mary Stuart Masterson as Depp's schizophrenic girlfriend and Aidan Quinn as her domineering brother. Then comes the oddball Gilbert Grape, which director Lasse Hallstrom (My Life as a Dog) made from Peter Hedges's novel about an emotionally shut-down guy who tries to break free from a fabulous assortment of small-town loons. And later there will be the oddball Arizona Dream (a.k.a. The Arrowtooth Waltz), from the set of which art-house director Emir Kusturica bolted - then, months later, returned - in which Depp beds Faye Dunaway and out-quirks both Jerry Lewis and Lili Taylor. Admirably, there's not a high concept, nor a low-brainer, in the pack.
Unlike the trying-too-hard-to-be-bad-to-be-really-bad guy I met and interviewed for Movieline a few years ago, the current-model Depp shapes up as more than just someone with whom the camera wants to pick out sofa beds. He's speedier, edgier, more limber. The former teen pinup looks ready to play grifters, sociopaths, doomed romantics, sexy flotsam, saints.
While he shambles back to our table, I calculate where exactly to jump back in.
I realize I could take the high road with my questions, but where's the fun in that? "How are you and Winona doing?" He laughs, torches a cigarette, and replies, "At a certain point, that stuff is really no one else's business. There's certain things you just don't want to talk about. I have to partly blame myself for the situation, all these rumors. Let's say that my mistake, from the beginning, was thinking I could do interviews, talk about it and be fairly open. But my doing that started a whole chain of events that were kind of disturbing. It somehow gave people in the street - total strangers - the key to open up my little treasure-chest box. I know this sounds whiny, and I don't mean it to, but it can be real unfair to the people involved."
Not whiny exactly, Johnny, just evasive. He shrugs, grins, and says, "Everything's, you know, fine. To the public or to the people in Hollywood, it doesn't appear like we are together sometimes because she's working there while I'm here or I'm somewhere else working while she's here. We don't go to a whole lot of functions. I went to a function one time when she was out of town and, with the press, it turned into, like, some junior high-school thing. I mean, I would never walk up to another actor or anybody and say, 'How's your romance?' or, 'When was the last time you two . . . ?'"
So what's all this about Ryder's recently "buying" him a celestial body and having it named for him? He breaks up in a happy cackle. "Oh, the star thing, yeah. It's true. Romantic, isn't it? I didn't know it was coming. I was completely surprised. I'd like to see it through a telescope. Get to know it. From what I know, it looks exactly like me. Same nostrils and all. It's amazing."
I'm curious to know what sort of hand Depp thinks the press has dealt him since, hell, even I've knocked him in print in the past and yet here he sits again, obviously game for another go-round. I tell him that I've heard that he recently did an Us interview, even though they've given him a hard time in the past as one of tinseltown's worst-dressed young actors. He laughs. "They also voted me one of the worst actors for Edward Scissorhands, but, considering some of the 'Best' and 'Worst' stuff they've done on everybody in the past, I took that as a very high compliment. As far as being one of the worst dressed, I was proud. My goal is to be number one worst dressed. Press stuff just rolls off me."
The waitress comes along to refill our coffee cups and, when she's retreated, Depp suddenly declares, "There are definite disadvantages to not having been breast-fed." Excuse me? Seeing a blank look on my face, he waves his smoking cigarette through the air, and says, "I wasn't breast-fed. But then, that'd be pretty obvious, considering my smoking. I got addicted to these in Paris. I tried going back to Marlboros, but they tasted like apricots." Depp leans back in the booth, then says, "Breast deprivation can also lead to a fondness for alcohol, to a certain extent. I figure that there's got to be a balance, another advantage-type side to the whole breast question. And there is: breast-feeding and, yes, breasts, are back in. Not that they've ever been out. But now women are taking pride in them, and men are taking pleasure in them - whether they're real or not. Breasts are just nice things that help me get through the day. They're classic, right?"
While pondering the deeper implications of Depp's mamarian rhapsody, I ask whether there's any truth to the stories that he deliberately shies away from doing parts like Keanu Reeves's role in Bram Stoker's Dracula, the Billy Baldwin part in Backdraft, the Christian Slater roles in Mobsters and Robin Hood: Prince of Thieves, and Brad Pitt's part in Thelma & Louise. He shifts in his seat, clearly less than comfortable with this topic. "Maybe one of those guys who actually did those movies - and I'm not saying I could have done them, either - thinks he got the offer first, you know?" he says. "Then he reads this interview and, all of a sudden, it destroys his whole thing. I pretty much know the people who are going to get a shot at a role before me and I definitely know who's going to get it after me." I persist. "Okay, on one of those movies you mentioned," he says, "I thought about the era it was set in, the cool cars, the pinstriped-and-double-breasted suits - " I'm guessing we're talking about Mobsters here, whaddya think? " - On the other hand," he continues, "I thought about the piles of money they were just willing to put into my hand, and I smelled something wrong. The more I thought about that, I just couldn't bring myself to do it. It's amazing how easy it is to get on a big money trip of doing the routine stuff that comes your way."
But has he been choosing off-kilter stuff - movies that aren't necessarily the hot tickets at mall theaters - by design or by default? "Cry-Baby wasn't this esoteric thing," he points out. "It had plenty of cool jokes - ones that apparently no one got - and plenty of music. The people putting the movie out sold me, and John Waters, out for Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, which destroyed us that first weekend. At least I can say, 'It's not my fault nobody saw Cry-Baby, because there was this really sick turtle-karate-judo thing going on.' But when that happened, I thought, 'If this is how it's going to be, better just keep making movies I like.' It's not really my goal to become that Tom Cruise thing, being one of the biggest box-office stars in the world. But it's not like I’m allergic to commercial success, either."
Still, it hasn't escaped Depp that Cruise rakes in a zillion dollars a movie, boasts his own production deal, and can pretty much call his own shots. Depp's quote reportedly weighs in at a couple of million, but his deal at Fox, proffered him around the time of Scissorhands, is kaput. "No disrespect to [former Fox bosses] Joe Roth or Roger Birnbaum, really good guys, but basically, it boiled down to I'd bring them projects and they would go, 'I don't think so,' and they would bring me so-called commercial things and I'd go, 'I'm so not into that.' Most of the things I like and want to be involved in aren't big-budget things. We've all read formula stuff over and over again, so I can't help responding when I read something that really makes me cackle, stays in my memory, makes me feel."
The mere suggestion that he glam up for a big, fat commercial movie again - just for the hell of it - conjures up memories of his cover-boy 21 Jump Street days as a national adolescent pastime. "The image of me that was being catapulted into people's guts made me sick. I'm sure it must have made a lot of people sick. Once I realized I had no control over what they were doing, which was, like, selling this product, I also realized, 'These people will drain your blood and ****ing leave you by the side of the road.' I knew that I had to fight real hard and had to go completely against the grain, against their expectations. The amazing thing is that, since then, I've so far been able to do what I've really wanted to do. I don't know how long anyone gets to do that. I just hope that people will keep giving me jobs."
Which is another way of saying that he's hip to the perils of making too many outlaw movies, a strategy that nowadays can often pave the road to outlaw cable-TV movies. "It's dangerous," he admits, drumming the table's edge. "It can be a little frightening at times. I don't want to sound like some pompous actor ******* telling you he only wants to do 'important' stuff. I mean, some of the things I've been offered were not so bad. Not bad at all, even. They were just things I didn't really feel like I wanted to do. Or couldn't see myself doing. That could be a very big mistake at times because, it's just like anything: you have to keep a balance. I'm not going to be able to do the things I want to do if I don't do a certain amount of - whatever you want to call that stuff - to stay up in the eyes of the studio people."
That might help explain the hot and heavy rumors that Depp will soon do a quintessential studio package, a Three Musketeers movie for Jeremiah Chechik, his Benny & Joon director, playing D'Artagnan, perhaps to Winona Ryder's wicked Milady de Winter, swashing and buckling with a bunch of other doll-face swordsmen. "At first, I liked the idea," Depp admits, sounding almost sheepish, "because I'd like to do that book, that period and because Jeremiah's got a real good notion about making it brilliant and rich with guys in long hair, goatees, sword-fighting and leaping over each other." Fine, so what's the "but" I detect in his voice? He laughs, "But...it started to smell like Young Guns in Tights, you know? Like Guess? Jeans boys flashing swords. If that's what somebody else wants to do, great. For me, though, no - I got real nervous. Right now," he says, gesturing his hand in a fifty-fifty sign, "it's exactly in the middle for me. I couldn't make a movie until I know exactly who else is going to be in it. How's it going to be done? What's it boil down to?"
Whether or not he decides to step into those Musketeers tights, it's clear that Depp prefers more unconventional stuff. Ask how he and director Lasse Hallstrom are getting along while making Gilbert Grape and the response is pure, unadulterated Depp. "My character's uneasy with people so, like, if something gets too serious on the set, like if I'm feeling, 'God, I'm doing a scene,' Lasse automatically starts talking about radishes to get me back into how uncomfortable my character is. Lasse says stuff like, 'If a radish were up your butt, how far would it be? All the way in? Halfway? Just entering?' A radish is a pretty solid image, you know? So, that's how he communicates. He's allergic to ********."
If the Gilbert Grape chat suggests they're not making a movie for Hollywood suits, it also remains to be seen what the suits will make of Depp in Arizona Dream. All Depp's certain of is that he's "thrilled to have made it with Emir Kusturica," whom he met three years ago when the Yugoslavian director was riding a wave of international acclaim for Time of the Gypsies. Observes Depp, "Emir was wide-eyed and sort of shocked by everything he was seeing in L.A. At the time, I was really miserable doing the TV series. It was a great combination." The director surrounded Depp, reportedly the only actor he wanted for the role, with hellacious co-stars: the legendary Faye Dunaway, Jerry Lewis, supermodel Paulina Porizkova, and, to round things out, Lili Taylor. Rumors flew: Language barriers, on-set tantrums, hand-wringing producers. Then, the movie, already months into production, shut down.
Putting the best face on what some might recall as a nightmarish career-staller, Depp says, "Emir got sick because he had never made a film in the states and had no idea, really, about the merging of commerce and art. He doesn't think about money. Giving someone like Emir all kinds of rules about budget, schedules, timing, things that are really stifling, was a shock to the system. Look, I can't even say that he's a great filmmaker; he's just an amazing guy with nothing but talent and this gift for just inventing scenes."
Depp is more forthcoming about working with Faye Dunaway, who he calls "the last of her kind, a real old-time movie star," someone who's "all extremes, like a fire that never stops moving." So what's it like being around a woman aflame? "She'll take no **** and compromise nothing, which I really admire," he asserts. "Hers is a very specific way of working, which isn't necessarily a way for me. Sometimes, when we were working, it could get, uhhmm, interesting, but the result is staggering. I'd be doing a scene with her, watching her the whole time, and only later, watching it on-screen, could I see what she was actually doing. I enjoyed everything I could get from her: sweetness, anger, sadness. We have some good, good fire together. Sometimes, I couldn't get over the fact that, you know - 'I'm making love with Bonnie Parker.'"
What happened to this chummy little dysfunctional moviemaking family when their surrogate father stormed off the movie, leaving them stranded? "The whole thing was really weird," Depp admits, pulverizing a cigarette butt. "But, after loving this guy's work, getting close to him during the shooting, I just had to go as far as he wanted to go. In fact, everybody made a sort of pact and said, 'All right, it's going to take as long as it's going to take.'" Which meant that although Depp in the meantime met such directors as Francis Coppola, to talk over the role Reeves got in Dracula, and Richard Attenborough, to discuss his playing Chaplin, he knew he wouldn't necessarily be free to accept offers that came his way. "I met with Attenborough," Depp says, "knowing all the while that I was totally wrong to play Chaplin. I just wanted the chance to meet him, to say hi. With Francis, that possibility came up just when Arizona Dream heated up again, so off I went to finish it."
The shooting of Benny & Joon, in which Depp plays a hapless guy who meets up with a schizy girl and her brother, was no waterslide, either. Early on, MGM brought suit against Woody Harrelson for ditching the role of the brother when Indecent Proposal came his way. Then, co-star Laura Dern defected. Sighing at the memory, Depp says, "I'd gone through the whole mess I usually go through when I'm about to start a movie, and then there was this strange thing with Woody, who actually lives down the road from me. To be honest, I wasn't familiar with his work. I'd never seen 'Cheers.' I was in France doing voice-overs for Emir and I'm hearing all this kind of weirdness, like, 'Woody's out,' then, 'Laura Dern's out because Woody's out,' then, 'Woody's in.' On and on. I was shocked by the whole thing."
More shocks lay in store once Depp realized director Chechik, best known for National Lampoon's Christmas Vacation, was "like a guy who jumps behind the wheel of a semi truck with bombs strapped to the sides, who says, 'I think I'll drive this thing cross-country 'cause it might be fun!'" On the other hand, Depp strews verbal rose petals before the feet of his co-stars Mary Stuart Masterson and Aidan Quinn. "Hearing it was to be Aidan Quinn in the part, not Woody, really made me happy; I didn't know how happy until I started hanging out with the guy, who's so strong, smart, centered. The movie's kind of a weird triangle, so I'm falling in love with her and, in a way, I'm also falling in love with him, because he's this guy I can never be like."
But Depp’s main kick came from playing a character "who's Buster Keaton-like, and Keaton is truly one of my all-time heroes." The mere mention of the silent movie genius causes Depp to break out in symptoms of an advanced case of film-geekese. He's suddenly spouting from memory - hell, practically acting out for me - a slew of connoisseur's moments from such lesser-known Keaton films as Seven Chances and The Playhouse, stuff that holds a sacred place in his home library of virtually impossible-to-find videos. When I mention that there's more than a nod to the Great Stoneface in his Edward Scissorhands performance, he just beams.
"Stuff that Keaton did in movies 60-odd years ago is shocking, so brilliant. He did stunts without wires and head spins that - and man, I know, because I've tried to do them again and again - cannot be done by a human being. Unless you're Keaton. Or, maybe, a 12-year-old Russian gymnast."
I ask Depp who he most would have wanted to work for if he'd been around in the '20s and '30s, and he answers, "Tod Browning!" The man who directed such shockers as The Unholy Three and Freaks, the latter of which starred real-life sideshow attractions, is another cultural hero. "I love his movies, especially that last sequence in the rain in Freaks, where the entire freak show chases the *****y blonde woman who has mistreated them, surrounds her and turns her into one of them. Whew, man! I definitely would have connected with Browning." And, to prove just how much he would have connected, he starts filling me in on his prized collection of dead bugs and animals that, mounted and prominently displayed, adorns his rented Hollywood home. "When I was a little kid, like seven years old, living in Florida," he says, explaining the origins of his fixation, "I used to go out and catch lizards. I was sure I was 'The Lizard Trainer' and I'd take one of my lizards, touch its head and command him, 'Stay.' Idiot, I thought I'd trained him because he would stay put. Now my house has lots of cool stuff I've collected, like I've got the most beautiful bat you can imagine. I also bought a bunch of these lacquered piranhas."
Not exactly Home Shopping Club items, so where exactly does one find such treasures? "Various places," confides Depp in a so-glad-you-asked tone. "For instance, there's an amazing bug store I go to in Paris, which is also where I got my pigeon skeleton." Wait. Is he telling me he actually condones the mass slaughter of little birdies so their carcasses can serve as tchotchkes? "It's an old-age pigeon," he assures me, laughing, adding that ferrying such treasures through customs "can be a *****, really. It's the kind of thing that, depending on your next answer, could determine whether they pull an ounce of coke out of your pocket. I bought a bunch of cool stuff and was coming back through Miami and the customs man goes, 'So, what do we have in the bag?' And I said, 'Well, I've got some books, clothes, dead piranhas and a bat.' At that point, they searched every nook and cranny." After a beat, he adds, laughing, "It was hell, but hey - at least I didn't have to pay duty."
Suddenly, up to our table saunters local rock-scene holy man Chuck E. Weiss, who slowly slips off enormous black shades, and - looking every inch the lizardy Romeo about whom Rickie Lee Jones gargled "Chuck E's in Love" - introduces himself. After Weiss shambles off, Depp says he borrowed some of Weiss's authentic zoot suits to wear for his Movieline photo shoot.
"He turned me on recently to a movie that flipped me out beyond belief called Stormy Weather. It's got Fats Waller and Cab Calloway. I'm obsessed by that whole era. Amazing." When I say I, too, like Calloway, Depp insists, "You've gotta hear this!" and routes me outside to visit his Porsche, which looks as if he'd driven it through the Dust Bowl. Etched by a finger into the layers upon lawyers of grunge powdering the hood and fenders are such catchy slogans as "Pee-Pee" and "I'm Pee-Pee, You?" Depp explains such custom features as, "the only way I can stand driving something so ... so ...you know what I mean?"
We wedge ourselves into the car's cockpit, though it's piled high with a fishing rod, paperback books, funky threads and lumpy brown bags. Depp keeps muttering, "You gotta dig this, man," while foraging through a spangly, psychedelic-hued stashbag. Finally, he yanks out a cassette, jams it into the player, and cranks it up. Cab Calloway, sounding like this planet's hippest, highest, down-est dude, wails a rare, growly take of his signature song, "Minnie the Moocher." Depp rasps, delightedly, "I started picking up on the things he was singing about, like that 'Minnie' loved a guy though he was 'cokey' and about how he showed her how to 'kick the gong around.' And 'jump' and 'jive' and talking about 'getting your steady groove.'"
While we're grooving to the hot, righteous music, we talk about where Depp is heading. "I'm not that outspoken or aggressive," he answers when I ask whether he's ever tried doing something really out there to land a role. "But I did steal a script off someone's desk, a Neal Jimenez script called It Only Rains at Night. I read it and couldn't help thinking, 'If I could only do this and never anything else, I wouldn't care,'" he says about the gloriously weird screenplay about a government executioner and his beloved decapitated head. Yet, as if to prove his reticence, he adds, "It took me years to get the balls to call Neal and tell him: 'I've really got to do this.'"
Once he polishes off Gilbert Grape and - maybe - The Three Musketeers, Depp and Lili Taylor plan on doing Kusturica's modern-day version of Crime and Punishment. He also hopes to take on Anthony Burgess's One Hand Clapping, in which Jennifer Jason Leigh would kill him when he goes psycho after winning a fortune on a TV game show. He wouldn't mind another fling with Tim Burton or John Waters, the latter of whom, thanks to Depp, is available between pictures to perform marriage ceremonies. "I'm very proud of how, for just $60 and some help from my lawyers," Depp says, grinning, "he became Reverend John Waters." The idea behind it all was that Waters would then preside over his and Ryder's nuptials; instead, Waters baptized former porn star Traci Lords before her marriage to his own nephew, who served as a role model for the sexy greaser that Depp played in Cry-Baby.
Historians of pop culture, Depp says, can make of his career what they will. But he observes, "I hope they can say, 'He's still alive.' Just so long as I'm not remembered as a TV showboat." If he could choose his own epitaph, Depp says that nothing would be cooler than a couple of lines from blues empress Bessie Smith's theme song. Doing his bad-boy smile, he recites, "'Give me a pigfoot and a bottle of beer, lay me 'cause I don't care,' and, 'Give me a reefer and a gang of gin, slay me 'cause I'm in my sin' - two of the greatest lines I've ever heard." Personally, though, I'd suggest the words of wisdom droned by a quack hypnotist on Depp's answering-machine tape: "Your breasts are starting to tingle now ... You can feel your breasts starting to tingle ... A sensation of growth is taking place!"

[SHADOWVEIL]

I’m attracted to the extreme light and the extreme dark. I’m interested in the human condition and what makes people tick. I’m interested in the things people try to hide.




The Scotsman interview, January 2002

[SHADOWVEIL]

Live and Kicking-1995

DEPPLY DIPPY

Hollywood boy babes don't come more rock 'n' roll than Johnny Depp. The 31-year-old movie star not only owns the notorious Viper Room nightclub in Los Angeles but has also appeared on Top of the Pops alongside his mate Shane McGowan and played bass guitar in 16 different bands before making it as an actor! These days, despite having vast quantities of rock connections, Johnny's actual music-making has been put on a back burner.

"I could never really go back to music as a profession," he says, just after having completed filming Ed Wood and Don Juan, "so I just play with friends now and again. But somehow I still love music more than anything else."

As a child, he'd play in front of the mirror, practise encores and take bows. And he often needed a costume too.

"Sometimes I'd wear my mom's shirts with French cut sleeves and her bell bottoms," he chuckles. Which brings us neatly to his latest role.

Ed Wood is the true story of the 190s film director, who's been called the worst director in history. His movies like Plan 9 From Outer Space received horrendous reviews and Wood was laughed at and called a weirdo for women's clothes in his spare time.

"I met Ed's widow-Cathy," Johnny recalls. "It was incredible! I was standing there with lipstick smeared all over my face, a tilted wig and she didn't even bat an eyelid! She said I really looked like Eddie. She's a real doll and she helped me out a lot."

Johnny's already played two majorly bonkers characters, Edward Scissorhands and Sam in Benny and Joon, so it's pretty surprising that he decided to add yet another to his list.

"I decided it was a great opportunity to try and clean off the dirt that had been thrown over Ed Wood's name", he says. "To say that someone is the worst director of all time or that his movies are bad is wrong. Ed Wood followed his own artistic vision and remained true to that. Besides, I actually enjoy his movies!"

Is there a little of Ed Wood in you, in that you don't really mind whether your films are good or bad as long as they're different?

"Well I don't want to consciously do anything bad, it's just that so many films, so many characters, have already been done so many times. Most films today are just lots of explosions and young women in bikinis! I'd rather do something a bit different."

'Different' is just the word. Here's Johnny, in Ed Wood, all dolled up in ladies' clothing.

"It's always easier to find the character when you lose more of yourself by putting on different clothes or whatever," he explains, attempting to account for his unusual attire. "Like, for this movie, I also wore some false bottom teeth which changed my whole face and gave me this insane Cheshire cat smile!" But back to the frocks, they're hardly your everyday Hollywood boy babe outfit…

"I actually had no idea what women have to go through until now!" he laughs. "I mean, the skirt, the bra, the lipstick…I mean, I have a much more intense respect for women now!"

What about the angora sweater, a favourite of Ed's, that you wear in the movie?

"Well, I've always loved angora. It feels so good when someone's wearing an angora sweater- you can't take your hands off it. However, I learned that when you're wearing a sweater like this, you can't breathe because of the fur balls. I think I inhaled more fur than air! I'm a little afraid of it now, actually!"

Something Deppo isn't afraid of though is wearing yet another odd cozzie for his next flick. Yep, surprise, surprise, Johnny sports a cape, sword and mask in Don Juan DeMarco and The Centrefold, the story of a bloke who thinks he's Spanish hero Don Juan. He fancies loads of women and eventually gets himself committed to an institution, where he tells his whole amazing story to a psychiatrist played by film biggie Marlon Brando.

Next on the list is a black and white western called Dead Man so, for the moment, Johnny is pretty much booked up. It's surprising in fact that he ever gets to spend any time with his girlf, model Kate Moss. But the pair are often caught out on the razz, at this party or that, and the papers can't get enough of them.

Towards the end of last year, the papers had a field day with a story about JD having a huge barny with Kate and trashing a hotel room in the process.

"What hotel?" he laughs. "Well, I'll tell you what happened. I'm sitting on the couch and this really big daschund dog just jumped out of the closet at me! So I felt it was my duty to retrieve this animal for the hotel. I chased it for a good 20 minutes but it just wouldn't co-operate."

Yeahright, so what really happened?

"Basically, I'm human, just like anybody else and I'm capable of emotion. I can be just as sensitive as anyone else. In my opinion the incident wasn't particularly newsworthy. I didn't think it deserved equal billing to the invasion of Haiti! But saying that, I'm fascinated by the tabloid press. I mean, if Demi Moore gets diarrhoea, I want to read about it. I'm sorry, but I do. If Schwarzenegger gets a boil on his rear end, I want to read about that too. But the idea that someone would be fascinated with the private life of someone like me who tells fibs for a living, that's pretty fascinating in itself, isn't it?!"

Throughout our interview, Johnny toys with his two rings.

"One was a birthday present from Kate," he says, "and the other, which has a skull head on it, is a daily reminder to me that the only thing certain in life is death. It kind of reminds me to keep things on the straight and narrow."

This is all getting a bit morbid, surely life ain't that bad for you at the moment?

"No this is actually a great time for me- one of the best times I've had. I have a girl who I'm in love with, we have a good, solid relationship and we're having a great time. My family's alive, everyone's OK. I've just finished a film with Marlon Brando, so no, this is definitely a very good time!"

[SHADOWVEIL]

One week you’re on the list, and then you’re off, and then you’re back on and then you’re off, and all that stuff. So… I’ve experienced many, many bumps in the road and I know that if the road is smooth for the moment, cool. That’s fine, I’ll take the ride. It’ll get bumpy again. That’s OK too.








Film 2003 interview, September 2003

[SHADOWVEIL]

“I think people like Johnny Depp are an exception. He is the current model of what an actor should be. His body of work speaks volumes. He was so under-rated for so long, but he will have longevity -- and it is such a gratifying thrill to see he is finally getting the recognition he deserves."

Dustin Hoffman, Jam Movies interview October 2003

[mintymalone]

I just saw the cover of People hailing Johnny Depp as the Sexiest Man Alive. What a smart choice.

[arashiyuki]

Originally posted by mintymalone
I just saw the cover of People hailing Johnny Depp as the Sexiest Man Alive. What a smart choice.

I agree! Can't wait to have a copy! I've been a fan of the deppster for so long! I'm glad he made a remarkable comeback this year. He really is an incredible actor and so damn hot. Definitely THE Sexiest Man Alive.

[arashiyuki]

It's about time the Deppster be voted THE Sexiest Man Alive! God, I'm such a huge fan of this guy. He's really a remarkable actor, not to mention extremely gorgeous. Can't wait to have a copy!

[SHADOWVEIL]

no matter what happens to the academy blah blah, depp will always be the only best actor for his fans you know...and i was lucky enough to catch ed wood on wowow last sat...less than a month to go before "secret window, secret garden"

[tattooedred]

yeah me too, I watched Ed Wood on wowow. I can still remember I used to buy magazines such as Teeny Bopper, 16 etc. back in the 80's coz there's articles about him.

For me Johnny is AGELESS!

[arashiyuki]

I also saw Ed Wood on wowow. Ganda talaga ng movie na yon. But I have to admit na mas na-enjoy ko ang performance ni Martin Landau as Bela Lugosi. No wonder he won Best Supporting Actor at the Oscars for that role. Pero syempre galing ni Johnny. Yup, kahit hindi manalo ng kahit anong award si Johnny for his acting, it still wont erase the fact that he's a good actor. For his fans, he's a god.

[jeffer]

savvy!!!

i juz love Johnny!!!! when he acts, he's totally in character!

there's also this most beautiful people poll, i think, and Johnny placed second to Viggo Mortensen...

i don't mind, really...those two are my best actors~!

[naturecrawler]

Exclusive: Johnny Depp, Vanessa Paradis Had "Blazing Fights" Before Breakup


http://www.usmagazine.com/celebrity-...breakup-201247

[naturecrawler]

Johnny Depp in the upcoming Lone Ranger Movie

[JobyBryant24]