Johnny Depp Lets Down His Hair

What happened to this chummy little dysfunctional moviemaking family when their surrogate father stormed off the movie, leaving them stranded? "The whole thing was really weird," Depp admits, pulverizing a cigarette butt. "But, after loving this guy's work, getting close to him during the shooting, I just had to go as far as he wanted to go. In fact, everybody made a sort of pact and said, 'All right, it's going to take as long as it's going to take.'" Which meant that although Depp in the meantime met such directors as Francis Coppola, to talk over the role Reeves got in Dracula, and Richard Attenborough, to discuss his playing Chaplin, he knew he wouldn't necessarily be free to accept offers that came his way. "I met with Attenborough," Depp says, "knowing all the while that I was totally wrong to play Chaplin. I just wanted the chance to meet him, to say hi. With Francis, that possibility came up just when Arizona Dream heated up again, so off I went to finish it."

The shooting of Benny & Joon, in which Depp plays a hapless guy who meets up with a schizy girl and her brother, was no waterslide, either. Early on, MGM brought suit against Woody Harrelson for ditching the role of the brother when Indecent Proposal came his way. Then, co-star Laura Dern defected. Sighing at the memory, Depp says, "I'd gone through the whole mess I usually go through when I'm about to start a movie, and then there was this strange thing with Woody, who actually lives down the road from me. To be honest, I wasn't familiar with his work. I'd never seen 'Cheers.' I was in France doing voice-overs for Emir and I'm hearing all this kind of weirdness, like, 'Woody's out,' then, 'Laura Dern's out because Woody's out,' then, 'Woody's in.' On and on. I was shocked by the whole thing."

More shocks lay in store once Depp realized director Chechik, best known for National Lampoon's Christmas Vacation, was "like a guy who jumps behind the wheel of a semi truck with bombs strapped to the sides, who says, 'I think I'll drive this thing crosscountry 'cause it might be. fun!'" On the other hand, Depp strews verbal rose petals before the feet of his co-stars Mary Stuart Masterson and Aidan Quinn. "Hearing it was to be Aidan Quinn in the part, not Woody, really made me happy; I didn't know how happy until I started hanging out with the guy, who's so strong, smart, centered. The movie's kind of a weird triangle, so I'm falling in love with her and, in a way, I'm also falling in love with him, because he's this guy I can never be like."

But Depp's main kick came from playing a character "who's Buster Keaton-like, and Keaton is truly one of my all-time heroes." The mere mention of the silent movie genius causes Depp to break out in symptoms of an advanced case of film-geekese. He's suddenly spouting from memory--hell, practically acting out for me--a slew of connoisseur's moments from such lesser-known Keaton films as Seven Chances and The Playhouse, stuff that holds a sacred place in his home library of virtually impossible-to-find videos. When I mention that there's more than a nod to the Great Stoneface in his Edward Scissorhands performance, he just beams.

"Stuff that Keaton did in movies 60-odd years ago is shocking, so brilliant. He did stunts without wires and head spins that--and man, I know, because I've tried to do them again and again--cannot be done by a human being. Unless you're Keaton. Or, maybe, a 12-year-old Russian gymnast."

I ask Depp who he most would have wanted to work for if he'd been around in the '20s and '30s, and he answers, "Tod Browning!" The man who directed such shockers as The Unholy Three and Freaks, the latter of which starred real-life sideshow attractions, is another cultural hero. "I love his movies, especially that last sequence in the rain in Freaks, where the entire freak show chases the bitchy blonde woman who has mistreated them, surrounds her and turns her into one of them. Whew, man! I definitely would have connected with Browning."

And, to prove just how much he would have connected, he starts filling me in on his prized collection of dead bugs and animals that, mounted and prominently displayed, adorns his rented Hollywood home. "When I was a little kid, like seven years old, living in Florida," he says, explaining the origins of his fixation, "I used to go out and catch lizards. I was sure I was 'The Lizard Trainer' and I'd take one of my lizards, touch its head and command him, 'Stay.' Idiot, I thought I'd trained him because he would stay put. Now my house has lots of cool stuff I've collected, like I've got the most beautiful bat you can imagine. I also bought a bunch of these lacquered piranhas."

Not exactly Home Shopping Club items, so where exactly does one find such treasures? "Various places," confides Depp in a so-glad-you-asked tone. "For instance, there's an amazing bug store I go to in Paris, which is also where I got my pigeon skeleton." Wait. Is he telling me he actually condones the mass slaughter of little birdies so their carcasses can serve as tchotchkes? "It's an old-age pigeon," he assures me, laughing, adding that ferrying such treasures through customs "can be a bitch, really. It's the kind of thing that, depending on your next answer, could determine whether they pull an ounce of coke out of your pocket. I bought a bunch of cool stuff and was coming back through Miami and the customs man goes, 'So, what do we have in the bag?' And I said, 'Well, I've got some books, clothes, dead piranhas and a bat.' At that point, they searched every nook and cranny." After a beat, he adds, laughing, "It was hell, but hey--at least I didn't have to pay duty."

Suddenly, up to our table saunters local rock-scene holy man Chuck E. Weiss, who slowly whips off enormous black shades, and--looking every inch the lizardy Romeo about whom Rickie Lee Jones gargled "Chuck E's in Love"--introduces himself. After Weiss shambles off, Depp says he borrowed some of Weiss's authentic zoot suits to wear for his Movieline photo shoot.

"He turned me on recently to a movie that flipped me out beyond belief called Stormy Weather. It's got Fats Waller and Cab Calloway. I'm obsessed by that whole era. Amazing." When I say I, too, like Calloway, Depp insists, "You've gotta hear this!" and routes me outside to visit his Porsche, which looks as if he'd driven it through the Dust Bowl. Etched by a finger into the layers upon layers of grunge powdering the hood and fenders are such catchy slogans as "Pee-Pee" and "I'm Pee-Pee, You?" Depp explains such custom features as, "the only way I can stand driving something so ... so ... you know what I mean?"

We wedge ourselves into the car's cockpit, though it's piled high with a fishing rod, paperback books, funky threads and lumpy brown bags. Depp keeps muttering, "You gotta dig this, man," while foraging through a spangly, psychedelic-hued stashbag. Finally, he yanks out a cassette, jams it into the player, and cranks it up. Cab Calloway, sounding like this planet's hippest, highest, down-est dude, wails a rare, growly take of his signature song, "Minnie the Moocher." Depp rasps, delightedly, "I started picking up on the things he was singing about, like that 'Minnie' loved a guy though he was 'cokey' and about how he showed her how to 'kick the gong around.' And 'jump' and 'jive' and talking about 'getting your steady groove.'"

While we're grooving to the hot, righteous music, we talk about where Depp is heading. "I'm not that outspoken or aggressive," he answers when I ask whether he's ever tried doing something really out there to land a role. "But I did steal a script off someone's desk, a Neal Jimenez script called It Only Rains at Night. I read it and couldn't help thinking, 'If I could only do this and never anything else, I wouldn't care,'" he says about the gloriously weird screenplay about a government executioner and his beloved decapitated head. Yet, as if to prove his reticence, he adds, "It took me years to get the balls to call Neal and tell him: 'I've really got to do this.'"

Once he polishes off Gilbert Grape and--maybe--The Three Musketeers, Depp and Lili Taylor plan on doing Kusturica's modern-day version of Crime and Punishment. He also hopes to take on Anthony Burgess's One Hand Clapping, in which Jennifer Jason Leigh would kill him when he goes psycho after winning a fortune on a TV game show. He wouldn't mind another fling with Tim Burton or John Waters, the latter of whom, thanks to Depp, is available between pictures to perform marriage ceremonies. "I'm very proud of how, for just $60 and some help from my lawyers," Depp says, grinning, "he became Reverend John Waters." The idea behind it all was that Waters would then preside over his and Ryder's nuptials; instead, Waters baptized former porn star Traci Lords before her marriage to his own nephew, who served as a role model for the sexy greaser that Depp played in Cry-Baby.

Historians of pop culture, Depp says, can make of his career what they will. But he observes, "I hope they can say, 'He's still alive.' Just so long as I'm not remembered as a TV showboat." If he could choose his own epitaph, Depp says that nothing would be cooler than a couple of lines from blues empress Bessie Smith's theme song. Doing his bad-boy smile, he recites, '"Give me a pigfoot and a bottle of beer, lay me 'cause I don't care,' and, 'Give me a reefer and a gang of gin, slay me 'cause I'm in my sin'--two of the greatest lines I've ever heard." Personally, though, I'd suggest the words of wisdom droned by a quack hypnotist on Depp's answering-machine tape: "Your breasts are starting to tingle now ... You can feel your breasts starting to tingle ... A sensation of growth is taking place!"

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Stephen Rebello interviewed Tom Cruise for the December 1992 Movieline

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