A full-blooded adaptation of Stephen Sondheim's celebrated stage musical, Tim Burton's Sweeney Todd: The Demon Barber of Fleet Street - available now to add to your list - sees the director collaborating with actor Johnny Depp for the sixth time. Focusing as much on the gore as the tunes, Burton's Golden Globe-winning musical is also an 18 certificate slasher flick, telling, as it does, the tale of a vengeful Victorian barber whose customers routinely end up as the filling in his neighbour Mrs Lovett's delicious meat pies.
"I can guarantee the closest shave you'll ever know," jeers Todd.
"I saw him as a sad character," says Burton of his latest screen creation, "more tragic than villainous." Adds Depp, "People don't want to admit to it, but we all have a dark side. I'm a big fan of revenge!"
While adapting the musical for the screen, although he kept much of the original score, Burton introduced an extra layer of horror movie styling. "What's interesting," he explains, "is what you can do in a movie that you can't do on stage - get up close to the actors. I always felt old actors like Peter Lorre, Lon Chaney or Boris Karloff had a way about them that's very unique to those styles of movies, and this material really lent itself to that kind of old horror-movie acting."
The Oscar-winning art direction of Sweeney Todd sees dramatic shades of grey frequently spattered with the blood of Sweeney's victims. "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."
"It was necessary to make the movie so bloody," adds Burton. "I've seen other productions of the musical where they tried to be a bit more politically correct and skimp on the red stuff but it really lost something. The show is based on old horror theatre melodramas, where they had buckets pouring out over the stage, so it felt true to the spirit of the show to make it over-the-top. The studio were cool about it and it was nice to be able to make something that was neither a musical nor a slasher film, but something new, a mixture of the two."
Besides the blending of two opposing genres, Burton also opted for the risky move of telling the movie entirely through song, much like Evita, only with more killing. "One of the things I liked about the musical was that you can listen to the soundtrack and it tells you the story," he explains. "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, sits with the music, which is quite lush and beautiful. It was something I'd not seen before and that was the reason I wanted to do it."
Prior to release, skeptics were wary of Burton casting actors with little to no singing experience. Surprisingly, the director admits he casted them before he even knew whether or not they could carry a tune. "I didn't do that on purpose," says Burton. "It just sort of happened that way, but I'm glad it did. Back when I asked Johnny to do it, and he said, 'Yeah, I think I can do it,' I didn't know if he could sing, but I knew him enough to know that if he didn't think he could do it, he wouldn't do it."
After Depp accepted the role, lured by the challenge of making a "punk rock Sweeney", he promised to send Burton a CD of him singing to prove he was up to the task. "It took a while to arrive," remembers the director. "I didn't hear anything from him for a while. He's very private. I let him go and do his thing and when he finally sent me a disk it exceeded my expectations."
"I did a musical once before" says Depp, "many years ago with John Waters, called Cry Baby. But - technically - it was only half me, as 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, and not just in a film - I've never even sung in the shower! Once I got over the initial fear, though, it was kind of enjoyable. Sondheim's melodies and lyrics are a real pleasure to trot around. It's really beautiful stuff."
Having worked previously with Depp on
Edward Scissorhands (1990),
Ed Wood (1994),
Sleepy Hollow (1999),
The Corpse Bride (2005) and
Charlie and the Chocolate Factory (2005), Burton waxes lyrical about his favourite leading man. "He just tries anything, you know? I mean, the fact is he's not a singer, but that didn't stop him from taking the lead in one of the hardest musicals ever. He's just willing to go out there and try different things and always achieve beyond my wildest expectations."
Depp is likewise enamoured with his director. "Tim's a swell guy," he says with a smile, concluding that he can't wait until their next collaboration. "When the phone rings, Tim won't even have to tell me what we're doing. I'll be there in a second."