Johnny Depp: "I never wanted to be a star"

Johnny Depp can't lose his pinup status, even if he keeps playing lost souls. He doesn't want to ground his life on his looks - there is no remedy against decay. Depp is clean - except for his self rolled cigarettes and vodka. And maybe a bit destructive. "Life is a ride with someone else behind the wheel."

BY AB VAN IEPEREN (VRIJ NEDERLAND, 19th May 2001 issue, The Netherlands)

If I hadn't been told that he just woke up, I would have believed that Johnny Depp has put hours of work into his bag lady disguise. The long hair with shades of blond seems not to have been in contact with comb or shampoo for a long time. The clothes put on at random show signs of extreme wear, the chains and charms he's wearing weigh one kilogram at least. And yet the effect is that Depp seems too beautiful to be true. Even if only a fraction of the stories about his life are right, at 38th he looks miraculously perfect and alive and kicking.
Depp's film roles are a continuous fight - with make-up, wigs, beards and glasses - against the pinup status that burst upon him when he played in the TV series 21 Jump Street. In vain: he remained a star. Not thanks to, but in spite of twenty wayward movies in which he played poetic or unworldly characters, especially at the margin of Hollywood, with European or independent filmmakers. Some of the movies were rewarded by the critics, none were box office successes. An exception was Sleepy Hollow, his third film with director Tim Burton. Depp refused Speed, Legends of the Fall and The Three Musketeers, roles which would make big stars of actors of his generation. Although he has an apartment in Paris, he moved into a hotel for the promotion of the five films he played in last year. The fairy-tale Chocolat with Juliette Binoche is already showing. Soon will follow Blow, The Man Who Cried, Before Night Falls and From Hell. It could have been six films, if The Man Who Killed Don Quixote, wherein he would play with his life companion Vanessa Paradis, wouldn't have been cancelled due to setbacks.
Maybe he is sleepy. In spite of the provoking outfit he seems especially shy. When he takes out his package of Drum tobacco, he asks whispering if that's allowed.

I don't think to have ever read an interview with you in which the first paragraph wasn't about smoking.

"They say that everything is okay as long as you do it with measure, but I have never been able to do anything with measure in my life. If people have something to say about my smoking behaviour in L.A. or New York, I think: my God! You don't protest against the air you are breathing, but you blame me to waste away your smog. What kind of brainwashing is that? I don't want to refrain from smoking till I have an acute lack of nicotine. Not that it makes any difference: if you just talk about smoking, you get a lecture. In France when you go somewhere they say right away: if you want to smoke, do as you please. That's what I call hospitality. I learned to go to another room when Vanessa was pregnant. And now that we have a daughter, we go outside to smoke. I stand there in the cold in front of the window looking at how she crawls on the carpet inside the room."

It seems that you have been more active since you have become a father: you made five movies last year.

"Is that so? My agent keeps telling me that I work too cheaply. It depends what you compare it to, but if you look at what other guys earn in Hollywood, I am a dummy.
In the past I said: there is no address to send scripts to, I'm on the road. It was so difficult to reach me that I was surprised if someone succeeded. Since I have a family, I have to make a living. Money gave me freedom, even if it was freedom to help others, now I also have to buy security. I am not a businessman, I never work only for the money and if I had enough money, I would not stop making movies. I have to keep my brains busy, but I also don't want to breathe movie sets every single day of my life. When I'm not working, I leave the Hollywood business as far as possible behind me. If you want to work - live - with dignity and integrity you have to keep a distant perspective. A filmstrike is coming, that's nice. For a while no dilemma if a part is worth leaving home for.
Vanessa and I agreed never to work simultaneously. We don't want other people to take care of Lily. So small parts that allow me not to be away for long are welcome. Evidently, the rumour spreads, all at once there are many small parts. It depends on the director whether I play them. I had known Julian Schnabel for years from New York, a witty guy, even if all his droll stories are about himself. He called and asked if I wanted to play a small part as a transvestite in Before Night Falls. I thought: easy enough, I only need to wear a bra and a dress, nice that he asks me. Till I went deeply into the real Bon Bon, who looked exaclty like Sophia Loren. I realized that I had to work real hard, it wasn't about falsies and a wig. Before Ed Wood (also a transvestite) I had no idea what women have to go through to look like they do. If you only think about walking on high heels without waddling like a duck, but graciously. Bra's, step-ins, stocking-suspenders, panties, so that you can hardly breath. I take off my hat to them, also to transvestites. To cover up the genitals with tape, that's painful. If you want to stand that, it isn't just a choice, but a vocation."

And yet you don't give the impression that good looks are a priority.

"Do you know who Serge Gainsbourg was? Of course you do. Vanessa made her second album with him. A good musician and songwriter, he always had beautiful women: Brigitte Bardot, Catherine Deneuve, Jane Birkin. His whole life the press wrote: good singer, good actor, but God, he is so ugly! This troubled him. Until at a given moment he said: okay, it's true, but it's better to be ugly than beautiful, ugliness lasts. Sooner or later gravity will get us all anyway, and if you ground your life on appearance you are fooled beforehand. If I had a choice, I would prefer my head to be a mask I could take off at the end of each day of shooting.
When I did the damned series I saw my face on every magazine and noticed that it gave me nothing positive. My own fault: I had done the audition and thoughtlessly put my signature on a piece of paper, without realizing that by doing this I had turned over all responsabilities for my actions. I was not an actor but a product, a fake personality. There are people who can manage being a star thing, I respect that. They think: if I play regularly in commercial films for my market value, I can also play roles which I really believe in. Or: while it lasts let them pay me a substantial sum. When they get weary of me I will be able to live comfortably. This doesn't motivate me. I'm allergic to formula movies. If I have to put words in my mouth that another person has repeated over and over again, I become sick. Television is a hundred percent prefab, you don't grow, you don't learn anything. The only thing I've learned is that I couldn't live like that, the only challenge was how long I could take it. I never wanted to be a star, since 1988 I haven't looked at a movie magazine. I don't need to know what they think about me, what's the blockbuster of the month, who won the Oscar or who could win it. From the moment I started acting I wanted to be a character player. To play a role you have to be in love with the character."

A question for the sake of asking: which are the characters you like the most?

"Damaged goods. It fascinates me how damaged individuals survive in this life, what is hiding behind their facade. This argument doesn't say much: there is not one person who isn't damaged. Me not the least. The weird thing is that you realize this if you can make a comparison. My parents had a bad marriage, they moved thirty times while I was young. I never understood why they always left, I think they didn't know themselves. I have not one single memory of all the houses I lived in. I never was in one place long enough to feel at home at school, to make friends. I didn't feel like an outsider - for this I had to know outside of what - but I knew that I was not an insider. When I was about fifteen I finally lived long enough somewhere so that I was able to go home with the boys from school. I then saw for the first time how others lived, how they sat around the table for dinner, that there was a sequence with starter, main course and dessert. Our family only sat together at Christmas. I spooned up the dessert which already was there as a starter, grabbed in the salad-bowl as if it was a dessert. Once or twice a year I noticed that my parents loved me, and as the youngest I had the idea that it was me who kept the family together. But when they eventually divorced, that also fell off.
Sometimes you end up imperceptibly thinking some things are normal. I was so used to be stared at and to paparazzi being on the look-out while I was eating somewhere, that I understood the insulting absurdity of it only when I was left in peace in France. For years I have lived on hamburgers, quick McDonald's in and out. Now I discover another quality of life, I dare to be adventurous in restaurants, to order dishes I have never heard of or that I wasn't interested in before. In hamburger joints you don't have pâté de fois gras on the menu. Americans think I'm a snob, but if you are used to French wine, the Napa Valley stuff is hardly drinkable. If you read Rimbaud and Verlaine, you want to taste absinth once. I had bought some cases, but never dared to have a go at them.
When I was in Prague filming From Hell I thought the time had come. I was lonely in the Czech Republic. But I think you can better drink kerosene. That stuff eats in no time everything inside. I stick to vodka."

You started as a pop musician.

"I always played guitar, on my own in the attic. In a band I discovered how I could function with others. I don't sing worse than others, but I never wanted to become a singer, to be out front. I was happy in the back-ground, in the shadow. Rock 'n' roll isn't exactly a healthy scene, but I'm sure that without the music I would have ended up badly. I would have drunk or shooted up myself to death, to fill the emptiness. Maybe I wouldn't have become a total junkie, I hadn't the talent for that. I have been clean for years, but there isn't a thing I haven't tried. Coke wasn't my thing, for example, but that had nothing to do with strength of character, only with luck. I came once on the verge of overdoses, during the shooting of What's Eating Gilbert Grape? I had just turned thirty, had a bad day that lasted for months. I sound like John Denver, but I read in books about peace of mind, I met people who had reached that. I thought thirty was the age to notice something of that, but I still had the same demons. And the movie was about a broken family, it brought up an old sore. I was a melancholy, recalcitrant shithead. Lasse Hallström is a magical director, with and endeless patience, but I was certain that he would be glad to be through with me after the wrap. So I was shocked and touched when he asked me again for Chocolat."

You never had acting lessons.

"Before I would do Don Juan DeMarco with him, Marlon Brando invited me to his place and said I had to go to the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art in London. American actors - he too, he thought - have bad schooling, don't have decent diction and grammer. There are exceptions, but if an American plays Shakespeare you better cover your ears. While you can learn de iambic pentameter, it is a profession. Marlon was right. If his advice had come at a moment I was feeling better, I surely would have followed it. At my age it's too late to go to school. I am a book-worm, I love beautiful language, but I can hardly express myself properly.
The term "serious acting" is an oxymoron. It's lying, pretending for a living, you should call it "serious lying". Only comedians are serious, every joke is grounded on pain and horror. Comedy is blown up tragedy.
What I know about acting I've learned by watching others. Long before I thought about becoming an actor myself, I was fascinated by actors from old or obscure movies, like the Hammer horror productions. In those films they played in a way that was on the verge of acceptable, but just right for those films. Later I discovered that those actors played Shakespeare and Marlowe in the theatre. It was terrific to play with them in Sleepy Hollow. My task as an actor is to make sure that my partners get the space they need to do their best. I saw Juliette Binoche in Les amants du Pont Neuf and John Turturro in The Big Lebowsky. I don't like that movie but I saw his scene twenty times, as close to a work of art that's possible in this profession. If they ask you to play with them you think: Jesus, this is a chance to experience and maybe contribute to thier showing again such beautiful things."

Lasse Hallström said that you must stop hiding behind eccentric characters. Are they the replacement of the mask that you can't take off?

"My first big role was Edward Scissorhands. On the last day of shooting I was in make-up, I saw that unfinished pale head in the mirror and realized I would never see him again. That made me very sad. To be so open and unprejudiced and free from cynicism, gave a strange feeling of safety, of freedom. I would have loved to stay that innocent.
Sometimes I feel homesick for roles I have played. For example for Raoul in Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas. I can only love characters who aren't like me, I don't like myself. Not to be yourself for two months gives a nice and sheltered feeling.
Maybe Lasse is right, maybe I am lazy or rather a coward. I can play a part like Ed Wood easily: playing weird with Martin Landau, every day whistling on the set. But if someone offered me a part with a big disappointed love, I would hesitate doing this to me. I played a straight man once in Nick of Time. It was hard. If you have to be normal all the time, you have to continuously think up all kinds of things if you don't want to become boring. Besides I don't consider normal what others do, the roles I choose are never weird to me.
If I look at the average macho film heros, I see characteristics that in daily life you only find in agressive bastards. I have no problem playing a bastard, but not with the intent that he gets cheered at the cinema.
When I learn a script I concentrate on the dialogue. I skip the director's instructions. I don't let others tell me on paper that I have to sit in a chair, if I haven't seen that chair or don't know where it is. I am an obstinate pain in the neck, otherwise I wouldn't have become an actor. Nobody can tell me how I must play, because nobody feels what I feel.
I rarely have problems with directors, I do have them with producers and studios. Then comes a fax on location: we saw the rushes, tell Depp not to carry on, otherwise we'll fire him. If I place myself in their position I can understand that, I hardly mean something for the box office. My career is essentially built on flops. When Sleepy Hollow became a success, I was sincerely confused, I thought: what went wrong?"

Movies with European directors, a César for your career in France, but no Oscar nominations. Was it predestined that you would settle in Europe?

"When I broke my TV contract I immediately took a plane to Paris, following the writers I admired. It felt like a liberation, I could breathe again, but it wasn't a feeling of coming home. Because of the way I was raised I had no conception of "home". I must not be pitiful about it, there are people who suffered worse than I did. And you get used to everything, including thirtyfive years of emptiness. It would never have come to my mind to go live in France if I hadn't met Vanessa. I have been in love before - less often then the tabloids suggest - but for the first time I found someone who wanted a child with me. Luckily, Vanessa comes from a good family, otherwise I wouldn't have dared to do it. I never learned how to raise a child, I only saw how you don't do it.
We didn't plan anything, I don't believe that you have an influence on what happens to you. Life is a ride with someone else behind the wheel. They say that you realize only afterwards that you have been happy, but during Vanessa's pregnancy I was very consciously very happy. I can sharply bring to mind every minute. Lily's birth caused one moment of panic, beacuse I thought we would have a son and I looked at her and thought: Oh God, there is something missing! Afterwards came the monumental revelation: the most pure, less egoistic moment of my life and this is the understatement of the century. All my past became negligible, everything that was necessary to lead to Lily. She is more than worth it.
The life we lead now looks like a normal life, as far as that is possible in our profession. I don't hate America, I nurse a beautiful feeling for what it once was or could have been, people in the Midwest who simply work and try to survive. But I hate the ambitions, the short-sightedness, the needless pain and violence in families. I feel an aversion to America like it has become. I almost became crazy there myself. I certainly won't expose my girl to it.
We now have a farm on the Côte, near a village where the only cinema was demolished years ago. The people there don't know who I am and if they do, they are not interested; they don't keep on bothering me about which films did get which box-office money in the weekend. We talk about the weather, about the state the fruit is in, we take a pastis in the bar. Maybe it will become a routine or rut, but I hope not. I live on clouds now. I know, I have become a walking cliché."

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