page 2
Articles
about Johnny Depp in
Rango
page 2
Articles
about Johnny Depp in
Rango
From emma a synopsis of the storyline:
RangoWhile traveling out West with his family, a pet chameleon named Rango (Johnny Depp) is accidentally stranded in an old western town called Dirt. Surrounded by a slew of crazy locals, Rango goes on an exciting journey to discover the hero within himself in this big-screen animated adventure.
From MTV
Johnny Depp, His ‘Pirates’ Director, And The Secret Movie You’ll Never See
Published by Larry Carroll on Monday, March 23, 2009 at 11:06 am.Johnny DeppThe good news is that Johnny Depp has been in town lately, once again stepping in front of the camera for his “Pirates of the Caribbean” director as they collaborate on a brand-new blockbuster. The bad news? You’ll most likely never see it.
“Gore Verbinski, the guy who directed all the ‘Pirates’ movies, is doing an animated film,” revealed “Office Space” star Stephen Root recently, tipping us off on the top-secret project. “But he wanted everyone to come in and shoot the film.”
Wait a minute: “Shoot” an animated film? Yep, you read that right.
“All of us played animals,” Root said of the head-scratching project. “Johnny Depp played a lizard, Isla Fisher played a lizard, I played a drunk rabbit and a banker owl.”
“We actually rented a soundstage on the Universal lot and shot the whole film, 8 pages a day,” Root said of the movie, which had Depp running around a vacant stage, pretending he had bug-eyes and green scales.
“We used no makeup, but some costumes and some sketch scenery and props,” he continued. “We’d shoot a scene, then go over to another part of the stage and record the lines clean for the animation. We’ll continue to do that for the next two years. It was interesting, because we were filming an animated movie.”
This unprecedented process will eventually yield “Rango,” a March 2011 film about a household pet convinced he’s a cowboy.
“It’s a Western in the sense that these animals are in a desert town, and the story takes place in an Arizona desert town,” Root explained of the film. “It’s now, but once you’re out in the desert it might as well be 1850. I play the drunk rabbit Doc, and Mr. Merrymac the Owl Banker. I also do a porcupine, a minor character. But that was the fun part about doing it with Gore – we’d get to the porcupine and he’d say “There’s a character with three lines, who’d be good at that? You!”
“Obviously, his films have made a couple of bucks, so they gave him the leeway to do this,” Root explained of Verbisnki’s unusual shoot. “Gore wanted to see our movements, our expressions, what camera angles he wants [the animators] to use…It was huge that Johnny would come in and do this for him.”
“It was fun. Everybody played the script, so it was pretty contained, but there was some improv-ing going on,” explained Root, who stars in this week’s new film “Bob Funk” with Rachael Leigh Cook. “I hope Gore got a lot out of it. I guess we’ll see later on in the process.”
Although Root – a longtime veteran of “King of the Hill” — is accustomed to altering his voice for cartoon characters, he revealed that Depp’s lizard Rango will retain the star’s familiar tones. “Johnny played it pretty straight, but with the drawl you’d expect from a Western lizard,” he explained. “None of us had ever heard of anything like [this shoot], which is why we thought it would be tremendous fun to do.”
In a few years, we’ll see whether the “Rango” animators were helped by Depp and the others pretending they were four-legged creatures. “I just hope some of this makes it into the DVD afterwards,” Root laughed, remembering the shoot. “Seeing Johnny Depp and me on workhorses with saddles on them, pretending we’re on real horses? That’s pretty funny stuff.”
