Johnny Depp Interview

Johnny Depp just wants to sit alone in a darkened room and get away from the gawkers who crowd around him every time he goes outside. The morning after the premiere in Chicago of his new movie “Public Enemies”, where Depp plays the gangster John Dillinger, he is still about shocked by the hordes of people who thronged the streets of the city the night before, calling out his name.

“ Oh man, you don’t get used to that kind of thing,” he sighs.

“If you do get used to it, you’re insane, truly. I mean I appreciate it on a very profound level, but there’s only so much a human being can deal with and that’s why I don’t leave my house. I don’t go anywhere. I mean, why would you?”

Depp (46) is a warm and gracious interviewee, even if he is several hours late to talk to the Examiner. He is here to “do the business” for the new movie, dressed in a Borsalino vintage trilby, waistcoat and jeans, with a strong smell of whisky on his breath.

A somewhat reluctant star, he swears he hasn’t planned anything that has unfolded for him in his very successful career, but that luck has been a big factor in much of what has made him the huge box office draw he has become.

“ I’ve been very lucky, in the sense that just things arrived when they arrived. I didn’t sculpt anything. I just kind of did what I did and was very lucky to have had people like Tim Burton supporting me. Paramount Studions didn’t want to hire me for “Sleepy Hollow” and Tim fought for me and that was a big shift in my – I hate to call it “a career” - but my life”, he said.

It does not ring of false modesty, given the range of arthouse movies Depp has chosen, like “Ed Wood” or “Edward Scissorshands, when he could have opted for a plethora of highly paid, uncomplicated, heartthrob roles.

His is an untypical stat in many ways, with heroes like Hunter S Thompson and Marlon Brando, whose philosophies have greatly informed his own.

“ I think of Marlon often, I have him with me at all times. I think of him in every role, in every situation. I can remember him saying things to me like “don’t do too many movies, we only have so many faces.””

Playing Gonzo journalist Hunter S Thompson in “Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas” is one of the most interesting of the many iconoclastic characters Depp has inhabited on screen. He has just finished another Thompson project “Rum Diaries”, based on the novel of the same name. He and Thompson became close friends and to this day he wears a shark tooth necklace which Thompson gave him

“ What a pleasure to have been involved in that film. It took almost 17 years to make it happen. Hunter and I had talked about trying to get Bruch Robinson who directed “Withnail and I” to direct “Rum Diaries”. But Bruce was so traumatised by his last film and didn’t want to do it, but I badgered him for years to get him to come back. It was exhausting, but it was a great, great experience and I’m so happy and proud to have finished it for Hunter.”

When Depp is not making movies or out talking to the media about them, he spends most of his time blissfully ensconced in family life in France or on his island in the Bahamas with his partner Vanessa Paradis and their two children Lily Rose (10) and Jack (6). After long, tumultuous and more public relationships with Kate Moss and before that with Winona Ryder, Depp and Paradis ran into each other for the first time in France.

“ I was standing in the lobby of a hotel in Paris about eleven years ago and I saw this back, literally this back, and a neck. And it turned around and looked at me and I was done,” he smiles. “That was Vanessa and two kiddies and eleven years later, here we are all are.”

“ My kiddies are infinitely smarter than I am and when I do leave the house to go to their school functions and I witness their life in school with their friends, that’s the most sort of learning experience you could have. I learn so much just by watching them. When we go to Bahamas, there are no toys and they just build little houses out of shells. It’s perfect, just perfect.”

Depp has always had a punkish sensibility, as an artist and as a musician. A long time friend of both Shane McGowan and Iggy Pop, Depp also loves to play music and has a band called “P”. He confesses that the first thing he ever stole was a book of chords when he was twelve.

“ The age of 12 was a magical moment for me, because it was the age when I discovered the guitar. I don’t remember anything afterwards. I don’t remember puberty. I just locked myself in a room and played the guitar. I remember going into a store in Owensboro in Kentucky where I grew up, where I found a chord book by Mel Bay and I slipped it down my trousers and walked out of the store. And although that was criminal activity, that’s how I learned to play guitar.”

In “Public Enemies”, directed by Michael Mann and co-starring Christian Bale and Marion Cotillard, Depp plays the depression era Robin Hood, John Dillinger, a character with whom he tells me, he was fascinated with since childhood.

“ I can remember being about 10 years old and having a fascination with John Dillinger and I didn’t know why. The same kind of that I had with like Charlie Chaplin or Buster Keaton when I was a child and I don’t know why. But ultimately I think it has to do with has to do with my family. My grandfather, who I was very close with when I was a kid had run moonshine into dry counties and my stepfather also had been a bit of a rogue. He’d spent some time in Statesville Prison, and he was a great inspiration for Dillinger.”

It’s been a while since Depp went on the road with the Pogues in the early 90’s but both he and Shane McGowan are still firm friends and in regular contact.

“ Shane, that great poet! I had an email from him the other day for my birthday and he’s doing great. Yeah, I need to try to get back to Ireland again soon, it’s been ages.”
Talk of Depp’s legacy or comparisons to icons like James Dean, frankly baffle him.

“ I remember when I was coming up the ranks and them saying “oh, it’s the new James Dean,” kind of thing and I thought “my God, James Dean was 1955!” But they always have to give the product a name or a label. It there’s another guy coming up the ranks who can stomach what I have, I wish him luck.

“ And the notion of me leaving a legacy in the world? I can’t see myself in that sense. I mean, I’m just an actor. What I would like to leave behind is not to embarrass my kiddies with anything I did in terms of film or anything else.”