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Interview sent in by Rebecca
Finding Neverland

Now 41, the ever youthful Johnny Depp adopts an effortless Scottish accent and steps into the role of JM Barrie, the playwright who created the archetypal eternal child Peter Pan, in Finding Neverland. Could this be the one that brings Depp Oscar glory?

Finding Neverland celebrates the imagination. Is there room for fantasy today?

If you turn on the television and see the horrors that are happening to people in the world right now, I think there's no better time to strive to have some kind of hope through imagination. I think it's a time to close your eyes and try to make a change, or at least hope to make a change, or we're going to explode.

Would you like to stay young forever like Peter Pan?

I suppose nowadays it's all a question of surgery, isn't it? Of course the notion is beautiful, the idea of staying a boy and a child forever, and I think you can. I have known plenty of people who, in their later years, had the energy of children and the kind of curiosity and fascination with things like little children. I think we can keep that, and I think it's important to keep that part of staying young. But I also think it's great fun growing old.

Grown men have been crying at screenings of this film. Was there that kind of emotion on the set, too?

On a film you start to get closer and closer with the people you're working with, and it becomes like this circus act or this travelling family. I remember on the last day of the shoot, being with the boys, and especially Freddie [Highmore, who plays Peter] - my pal Freddie - we were sort of saying goodbye, see you later, and not able to look each other in the eye because you just start welling up. Especially something like this with little kids - emotions are sort of ricocheting all over the place. So it was really heavy.

The scene near the end of the film where you and Freddie are on the park bench is profoundly moving. Was it tough to do?

It was very rough. We had done about a dozen takes or something, with Freddie having to refuel and let go each time, and then we found out there had been a problem with the remote-control camera so we had to go back and reshoot it. I remember Marc [Forster] approaching Freddie and saying, "I'm really sorry, but I think we have to do this again. Is it OK?" Freddie was really happy. He said, "Great, I don't think I did it so good first time." But doing a scene with a kid like that, you really have to try to hold back the waterworks. My job at that point was just to let Freddie do his thing, because if you start flooding a scene it becomes real messy.

What are you working on at the moment?

At the moment I'm working on Charlie And The Chocolate Factory, with Freddie Highmore actually, and Tim Burton directing. Before that I completed The Libertine, with Samantha Morton and John Malkovich, and then I guess after we finish Charlie And The Chocolate Factory I will do the sequel to Pirates Of The Caribbean. So yeah, they got me hammering away pretty steady.

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