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Spoilers May Be Below!
Page 69
Spoilers May Be Below!
From the HD Room
Blu-ray Hunts Public Enemies in December
October 13, 2009
excerpt
Michael Mann's latest theatrical effort, Public Enemies starring Christian Bale and Johnny Depp, has been assigned a December 8 release date for Blu-ray Disc and DVD by Universal Studios Home Entertainment.
From News Weekly
Inside Interview:Five minutes with... Johnny Depp
NW talks to Johnny Depp about living in France, shooting nude scenes and feeling like a real man
How would you compare your own fame with your character John Dillinger's?
Well, there are elements of life before (fame) that you miss, certainly, anonymity being one of them. To be able to wander the streets, to, well, just wander the streets in general and without being recognised would be fun. But to be able to take my kiddies to a store or a restaurant or Disneyland or something and not be looked upon as some kind of freak would be excellent. But now I don't go to Disneyland with my kids. If Daddy goes to Disneyland, things get weird.Could you imagine a world where you can walk without being recognised?
Um, yeah. [Laughs.] There's a little island in the Bahamas. I walk pretty good there.You live in France ?Ehow is it to be an American living in Europe, did it change your perspective? Are you going to stay there?
The fact is, though we do have a place in the south of France, or a place in France, the majority of our time is spent here because our kids go to school here. But what France has afforded me, the luxury it has afforded me, is to be able to enjoy a more simple life because we live in the country and your day is not spent getting calls from agents or executives, you know what I'm saying? It's an infinitely more simple life. We've been here basically the past two or three years almost nonstop aside from where I've been on location. It does do a person good to step outside where you come from, where you live and get some distance on it. It's given me monumental appreciation for not only this country, for the US, but for California, for Los Angeles.Apparently you shot around the area you grew up. What did you learn about yourself and about the history of the area and your family as well?
Dillinger was raised basically a farm boy in southern Indiana and I was born and raised in Owensboro, Kentucky. It's roughly 80 miles from where Dillinger was born and that clicked for me. He was not different from my grandfather who back in the 1930s also took the bull and ran with it. By day he drove a bus and by night he drove Moonshine into dry counties. And that is providing a service I think (laughs) so yeah, between that and my family and my step dad who had spent a couple of years studying at the Statesville Penitentiary in Illinois ?Ewith those ingredients, that's how I came to find John Dillinger.Music is important for you in every role?
Oh sure. In every conversation almost every day there's always some sort of soundtrack going, whether it's the beeping of horns outside or the shuffling of papers.You've been listening to Australian band, Augie March ?Ehow did you find them?
There's a friend of mine who works with me who turned me on to them. He played me a song and I was instantly hooked. I think they're one of the finest bands I've ever heard. Musically, lyrically, sonically, everything. I just think they're something special and I'm stupefied that a band with that much talent ?Emusicians with that much talent ?Ehaven't conquered the entire globe. I'm amazed by it. They're wonderful.Your co-star Marion Cotillard said you helped her a lot and that you were very patient with her, especially in the sex scene. How important do you think the love story is in this film?
I think the love story is everything in this film. At a certain point, what Dillinger does for a living almost becomes secondary and Billie was his primary focus and she was in his life. It was fire when they got together and they were perfect for one another. She says that I was patient with her but I thought she was patient with me. She's a very, very special actress, special girl.Marion said that during the research on Dillinger she read that he was, well, extremely well-endowed. Did you do some research too?
I did do some research as well. We're the same size. We're exactly the same size, Dillinger and me! [Laughs.]She also said she was frightened about the love scene?EBecause of that?!
No, because of being naked on screen. We heard you were a true gentleman and spoke to [director] Michael Mann to make sure the scene wouldn't be nude?
Well, it depends on the situation but most of the time, in the heat of the moment, the audience will instantly stop looking at the character and want to check out the broad's goods, or the guy's whatchamacallit. So yeah, I would have hated it if Marion was in a situation where she felt like if she didn't expose herself in some way she would be letting the movie down or Michael down, and it was important she was comfortable. Nobody needs to see anything to make this film better, to make the scene better. It is what it is. What's important is, I just wanted to make sure she was okay. If she had wanted me to I would have worn an Eskimo suit, parkas, I don't know.Back in Dilllinger's day, men were men. Do you feel like you're a real man?
I don't know that I am a man. Well, my sex change made me a man [laughs]. I mean, what makes me a man is, I'm not one to pat myself on the back but if I'm anything at all in life I'm first and foremost a father and I think by my kiddies' accounts a fairly decent father, and that's really all you can hope to be, all I can hope to be as a man. To yourself be true to those you love, be kind to people and be a good dad.
From XPress
Published: July 23, 2009, 09:21
Johnny Depp: Chameleon of charactersCNS
He’s played the good guy, the wacky guy, the funny guy, the weird guy and now in Public Enemies, releasing on Thursday, Johnny Depp’s having a go at the bad guy John Dillinger – a gangster who became a 1930s icon by robbing banks in depression-torn America
What is it about John Dillinger that got under your skin?
I got a sneaky suspicion that he was probably a very lovable character. His choice of occupation was potentially questionable, although during that period he was a man of the people.
The clothes in this movie are great. Did you enjoy wearing those clothes?
Back then it was sleek, there was a perfection in the style. And costume designer Colleen Atwood made it magnificent.
You dance the two step with Marion Cotillard in this movie – but she says you weren’t very good. . .
She’s absolutely correct. I have never danced in my life. I fail when it comes to dancing. I just do not want to dance, I don’t like it.
If John Dillinger were able to ask you to be in his gang – would you agree?
(Laughs) I would rob a bank with any one of those guys.
If you compared the real Dillinger to a rock star today – who would he be?
Boy, oh boy let’s see. I do think he was kind of a rock and roll star in a weird way. John Dillinger, 1933, 10 years in prison coming out… I think he was more like a punk rock star; and if he were anyone in today’s world, maybe Joe Strummer.
How do you ‘decompress’ after channelling a character for so long?
Well you just escape as quickly as possible, y’know? Wherever you can and wherever you’re allowed.
Just to go some place where you’re allowed to be normal. If you are in the situation where you are not allowed to be normal – in a way – or somehow you are not treated as normal, even though you are, you gotta go away and find a place to sit for a minute and try to make sense of stuff.Would you be interested in playing Captain Jack Sparrow again if there were a Pirates 4?
Pirates 1 had it’s own thing. 2 and 3 I suppose had their own thing. It got a little confusing here and there... I heard that. (laughs) I think, for me, because I love the character so much and I enjoyed playing the character so much, and people seem to like it, if there’s an opportunity to try it again... you know, it’s like going up to bat. You want to get back out there and try and try and try and see what you can do. I enjoy playing the character of Jack very much. At this point I’m trying to turn it into a Beckett play. It could be anything at this point. Jack could be in some geisha clothing. I don’t know. We could explore a lot of possibilities. What we’re trying to do is just get a script in order and make sure it’s the right thing to do. If we can get a great script it’d be a ball.
And, of course, you are reuniting with Tim Burton for Alice in Wonderland. What was it like playing the Mad Hatter?
After doing something like John Dillinger, a performance where it’s so restrained because of the responsibility you have to that guy, the Mad Hatter was like being fired out of a cannon. The Hatter was great fun and, again, it’s one of those things where you’re just amazed that I’m not fired. I truly am.
And what’s happening with Dark Shadows?
Dark Shadows is happening. Tim is working on Alice in Wonderland which is obviously quite a large piece of work there. We’ll probably attack it next year. It’s very exciting. It’s like a lifelong dream for me. I loved the show when I was a kid. I was obsessed with Barnabas Collins. I have photographs of me holding Barnabas Collins posters when I was five or six. I’m very excited to do it.
Who is the person you depend on to keep you balanced?
There’s actually probably a group of people. Certainly family, my family are a great support to me and then above and beyond certainly my kiddies y’know? Vanessa and the kiddies keep me grounded. But kiddies will keep you grounded no matter what.
My kiddies are getting bigger. My daughter is 10 and my boy is 7.
Do you have any regrets?
Perhaps the only regret is having seen a couple of the movies I did. I prefer to stay in as ignorant a state as possible about my work and anybody else’s work. CNS
PUBLIC ENEMY
Perfectionist director Michael Mann doffs his fedora to Depression-era bank robber John Dillinger in this beautifully-crafted biopic, starring Johnny Depp as the roguish gangster and Christian Bale as the cool FBI agent enlisted to hunt him down. It masterfully evokes the era with impeccable production design and costumes, while Mann’s loose shooting style invests the film with a nervous energy that builds in breathless action sequences.
From Teletext
Mann loves Depp's work
Public Enemies director Michael Mann has told me why he chose Johnny Depp for the title role."I love his work in The Libertine and Pirates and everything, so it was on a frontier to have Johnny do two things."
"One is to be a very tough guy and secondly is, I wanted to see Johnny do a performance that is openly emotional, and evocative." Let's hope this performance finally wins Depp an Oscar.
IGN Interview
From the TelegraphJohnny Depp interview for Public Enemies
The criminal past of Johnny Depp's family means he has always been fascinated by John Dillinger, the man he portrays in Michael Mann's new film Public Enemies.
By John Hiscock
Published: 12:44PM BST 25 Jun 2009The squeals and screams start even before the guest of honour begins to descend the stairs to the club floor where the partygoers have been awaiting his arrival for an hour.
By the time he reaches the bottom step the crowd has swelled to a heaving mass, everyone trying to get near him, touch him, take his picture and plead for autographs.
Johnny Depp, courteous and obliging, poses for photographs and graciously attempts to answer the questions and comments thrown at him before beating a retreat behind a phalanx of security guards who clear the way for him.
So is this is what it’s like to be Johnny Depp: unable to venture out in public without instantly drawing a near-fanatical crowd?
“It was really weird, wasn’t it?” he mused on the following day, recalling the events of the evening before. “Oh man, you don’t ever get used to that kind of thing. You just don’t. That’s why I hardly ever leave my house. I don’t go anywhere. I understand what it’s about and I appreciate it on a very profound level but there’s only so much of that sort of thing a human being can deal with.” We are talking in a suite at Chicago’s Peninsula Hotel the morning after the premiere and party for his latest film Public Enemies. Depp, who has been known to be chronically late for interviews---sometimes hours and even days---was two hours late for our appointment. He arrived, smiling broadly, looking dapper and thirties-style, wearing a grey vintage trilby hat, grey Armani waistcoat and baggy dark blue slacks.
“I can’t think of myself in terms of celebrity,” he said when I mentioned the fan fervour he had ignited among Chicago’s glitterati the night before.
“It’s just too weird. If the choice is between being constantly gawked at and sitting in a chair in a dark room, I prefer the dark room.” He is briefly back in the public eye to promote Public Enemies, director Michael Mann’s story of the audacious 1930s gangster John Dillinger, whose bank-robbing exploits captured the imagination of a Depression era-America and turned him into a folk hero. Depp stars as Dillinger and Christian Bale has the role of Melvin Purvis, the square-jawed FBI agent who tracked him.
“John Dillinger was that era’s rock and roll star,” said Depp. “He was a very charismatic man and he lived the way he wanted to and didn’t compromise. I feel he was a kind of a Robin Hood because he truly cared about people. He knew time was short and I believe he had found himself and was at peace with the fact that it wasn’t going to be a very long ride, but it was going to be a significant ride.”
The economic situation during Dillinger’s crime spree has its echoes in today’s financial meltdown. The cocky Dillinger and his gang, which included Baby Face Nelson, stole the equivalent of what would be three million pounds today during a one-year rampage in which he targeted the Midwestern banks who were foreclosing on properties and whose many failures had robbed people of their life savings. During that time Dillinger also escaped from two jails, eluded police traps and killed at least one police officer. It all came to and end on a sticky July night in 1934 when Dillinger came out of Chicago’s Biograph Theatre, where he had been watching Clark Gable in the film Manhattan Melodrama. Government agents had been tipped off and were waiting for him.
Ever since he was a boy the 46-year-old Depp has been fascinated by the John Dillinger legend, partly because he was born in Owensborough, Kentucky, 160 miles from the Indiana farm where Dillinger lived as a teenager and, more significantly, because Depp’s own grandfather and stepfather had operated on the wrong side of the law.
“It has to do with my family and my upbringing,” he explained. “My grandfather, who I was very close to as a kid, had run moonshine into dry counties like Robert Mitchum in that movie Thunder Road, and my stepfather also had been a bit of a rogue and done burglaries and robberies and had spent some time in Statesville Prison in Illinois where we ended up shooting some of the film. There was some kind of inherent connection I had.” While doing research for the role he discovered a mug shot of his stepfather, Robert Palmer, who died in 2000, in the files at the Statesvillemaximum security prison.
“My stepdad was an inspiration to me,” he said. “I knew about his past and I remember when I was growing up him referring to it as his college years. When I got older and asked him what college he had attended, he said it was Statesville Prison. So for me to be able to get that much closer to him now, especially since he’s passed on, was huge for me. He did what he did and I’m proud of him for doing what he had to do to survive. And he and my grandfather were great inspirations for me for Dillinger.”
Depp speaks quietly and intelligently and exudes an air of calm tranquility, fingering the brim of his hat as he talks. One of the few actors in Hollywood who genuinely did not crave stardom, he has, despite himself, become one of its most bankable stars, thanks in large part to his role as the decidedly eccentric Captain Jack Sparrow in the Pirates Of The Caribbean trilogy, which won him awards, an Oscar nomination and catapulted him into the ranks of the leading Hollywood money earners.
He received another Oscar nomination for his singing role in Sweeney Todd and with Public Enemies he turns in another intense performance that could well be remembered at Oscar time.
Like his ancestors, Depp has not always been scrupulously honest. “When I was 12 I wanted to learn how to play the guitar and I found a chord book in a shop and I stuffed it down my trousers,” he recalled. “And that’s how I learned to play the guitar.” It was his guitar playing that earned him his first money in showbusiness as the frontman for a band called The Kids that he formed in Florida, where he was then living with his mother and stepfather. When Florida became too small for their ambitions, the band changed their name to Six Gun Method and moved to Los Angeles where Depp began attending casting auditions. He landed a role as the heroine’s doomed boyfriend in A Nightmare on Elm Street in 1984, followed by other small parts.
His breakthrough came when he was cast as one of a unit of undercover cops working in schools in the television series 21 Jump Street. He became an overnight sensation and an extremely reluctant teen idol who was so uncomfortable with his unwanted star status that one night he was caught defacing his own image on a billboard.
His first truly original character was Edward Scissorshands in 1990, and throughout the 1990s he built a strong critical and art house following portraying societal outsiders and real-life characters such as the cross-dressing film director Ed Wood, the drug-addled writer Hunter S.
Thompson in Fear And Loathing In Las Vegas, Peter Pan author J.M. Barrie in Finding Neverland (another Oscar nomination) and drug trafficker George Jung in Blow.
He credits his ongoing eleven-year relationship with the French singer-actress Vanessa Paradis and their two children, Lily-Rose, ten, and seven-year-old Jack with providing him with a domesticity he had never previously known. They spend their time between homes in the south of France, Los Angeles and, when he really wants to get away from it all, on a 45-acre island he owns in the Caribbean and where he moors his 156-foot motor yacht.
“Like everything else in my life, it wasn’t planned, it just kind of happened,” he said with a shrug. “After I had done the first Pirates movie and Secret Window I went on vacation to escape with my kiddies and my girl and someone said that there was an island down the road for sale. I said, 'Oh well, let’s go see it.’ I looked at it, I walked on it and I was done.
It had to be. So I immediately called my business manager and said 'Please,’ and that was it.” He laughed. “It came at the perfect moment for me.
“The island can be perceived as a luxury and it certainly is, but it provides me with simplicity and somewhere I can go where no one is looking at me or pointing a camera or a finger at me. “I can just be: that’s the importance of it. When we’re there we do absolutely nothing. My kiddies don’t have any toys there and they build little houses out of shells.” While the island gives him privacy and relaxation his career provides him with the stimulation and challenges he is continually seeking.
Financially secure and with the knowledge that a fourth episode of Pirates Of the Caribbean is in the works, Depp is now looking to different roles, tending to veer towards projects that offer him a challenge rather than a big salary.
He has just finished filming The Rum Diaries in Puerto Rico and is soon to reteam with director Tim Burton for the seventh time, playing the Mad Hatter in Burton’s Alice In Wonderland. He is also waiting for a script to be completed for a movie about the Lone Ranger and Tonto, in which he wants to play Tonto.
Johnny Depp is the first to admit his career has been random and unplanned. “I’ve never felt particularly ambitious or driven, that’s for sure, although I like to create stuff, whether it’s a little doodle, a drawing , a small painting or a movie or a piece of music, so I suppose I’m driven by that,” he said. “Everything I’ve done has felt very natural and it’s happened because it’s happened. I’ve never done anything because I thought it would move my career forward or anything like that.
“I’m just an actor and if I can leave something behind that my kids will be proud of then that’s what I want. I don’t want my kids to be embarrassed by anything I’ve done.” Then, with a tip of his trilby and a wide grin, he sauntered out into the hotel lobby to brave the waiting crowds.
From QCTimes
Depp adept at playing grownup DillingerJohn Dillinger was a violent man who died a violent death.
In "Public Enemies," we learn the story of how he evaded the FBI - even escaping from prison - to become a nationally known bank robber and Public Enemy No. 1.
You probably won't like Dillinger much. This isn't the kind of guy you'd want your sister to bring home for a holiday dinner. That doesn't mean, however, that you won't be interested in him.
In a sense, Dillinger is the criminal version of a workaholic here. He tends to business, the business of robbing banks, and that's pretty much where his mind is focused. He's not afraid or sorry when he has to gun somebody down in the process. He's strict with his own gang and shows no mercy toward fools or for foul-ups.
Dillinger lived well as a criminal, but not ostentatiously. He had little time for frivolity. Johnny Depp plays him as a serious man with a certain charisma who earned loyalty from the friends he protected and those who were willing to protect him from the law.
He wants to remain invisible, and he very nearly is. There's a great scene, based on fact, in which he saunters into the Dillinger Bureau of the Chicago Police Department and asks the agents, all of whom are listening to the radio, how a baseball game is going.
His nemesis is Melvin Purvis (Christian Bale), the G-man appointed by J. Edgar Hoover (Billy Crudup) himself to bring Dillinger to justice. Purvis knows he's going to need some help.
Dillinger's "romance," if you can call it that, involves Billie Frechette (Marion Cotillard, "La Vie en Rose"). His wooing is straightforward, matter-of-fact and determined. Why would a woman such as Billie take up with someone like Dillinger? Well ... why not?
The show has an authentic feel, with its scenes centering around actual places - especially in the Midwest - and events that occurred in the 1930s, plus a soundtrack that helps establish the Great Depression time period. (You're liable to be humming "Bye Bye Blackbird" on your way home.)
Director Michael Mann is great at helming crime stories. He directed two of my favorites, "Manhunter" and "Heat." And here's another one, this time a historical drama, that's a serious film for serious viewers.
Daily Blog of the "Public Enemies" author Brian Burrough
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