Tim Burton on working with Johnny Depp again

DIRECTOR Tim Burton talks about working with composer Stephen Sondheim, Johnny Depp and Helena Bonham Carter on the tale of London's most bloodthirsty barber.

Sprawled forlornly on a sofa, Tim Burton splutters his very British cold into a very British handkerchief. Having lived in London for years, the LA transplant seems to have gone quite native in London.

Partner Helena Bonham Carter, with apparent shared enthusiasm for Burton's dragged-through-several-hedges-backwards coiffure, makes a brief appearance. Perhaps she's tending to their two children, Billy Ray, 4, and Indiana Rose, 5 weeks.

Burton's local knowledge still has gaps, however. Does he know Sweeney Todd -- the name of his new film -- is cockney rhyming slang for Flying Squad, the elite detective branch of the London Metropolitan police?

‘‘No,'' says Burton, pepping up.

The 1970s cop TV series is named after it.

‘‘Yeah, yeah, yeah,'' he enthuses. ‘‘So that's what it relates to?''

The original Todd belongs in a different tale from Burton's adopted city. The legendary Demon Barber of Fleet St would, according to lore, slit the throats of customers without so much as an ‘‘Anything for the weekend, sir?'', their carcasses dispatched to the pie shop downstairs to be minced up for filling by kindly Mrs Lovett.

‘‘You think,'' asks Burton, ‘‘he was a real person?'' Burton doesn't. ‘‘Urban myth,'' he says.

Quite possibly there was a psychotic shaver, his misdeeds given currency by the Penny Dreadfuls of the era, bringing him within an untrimmed whisker of the notoriety of Jack the Ripper. But veracity doesn't matter.

Burton's quirky flicks have generally celebrated oddballs (Ed Wood, Willy Wonka) or the macabre (Sleepy Hollow, Corpse Bride), so you can see why he'd be jumping all over this story.

A $57 million gothic opera, Sweeney Todd stars Johnny Depp as the throat-slashing barber, and Bonham Carter as his pastry-rolling accomplice.

It is Burton and Depp's sixth film together (‘‘Our final descent into darkness,'' laughs Burton), and makes for a moodily handsome beast -- Depp's skunk-haired Todd slicing carotid arteries in the manner of an untamed distant relative of the first Burton/Depp creation, Edward Scissorhands.
It's also Burton's most ambitious film so far, for the words ‘‘Sweeney'' and ‘‘Todd'' have, in recent times, become synonymous with the musical by Stephen Sondheim. It's this that Burton is realising for the big screen.

‘‘I'd never really done something like this,'' he says. ‘‘It's very operatic and almost everybody in the cast is not a professional singer.''

You could throw in the commercial no-no of several hundred pints of blood, that cannibalism has never been a box-office turn-on, or that in the US it has been slapped with a kiss-of-death R (restricted) rating.

Dare one mention this particularly dissonant Sondheim score is not exactly High Society when it comes to populist singalong show stoppers?

‘‘Even seasoned Broadway people are saying how difficult it is,'' Burton accepts.

Burton was a humble art student when he saw Sondheim's Sweeney Todd in 1980, long before the then-aspiring animator harboured notions of becoming a film director.

‘‘I just sort of stumbled in on it and it really affected me,'' he says. ‘‘The first time on stage I saw them singing Joanna, and the throat -- you know, the blood -- I thought this is a unique juxtaposition of music and image.

‘‘It seemed like a great movie score. It would lend itself to one of those old horror movies.''

Twelve years later, after Burton launched his own film career with Pee-Wee's Big Adventure (1985) and sealed his spot on the Tinseltown A-list with Beetlejuice (1988) and Batman (1989), he approached Sondheim about a film version. They were sidetracked until a couple of years ago.

Sondheim has retained control over the casting and score. Even so, given Burton's idiosyncratic sensibilities, the old maestro seems to have been generous, not least because Depp had no proven record as a singer -- a sticking point for the studio until the actor's home-made demo of himself crooning My Friends (Todd's ode to his darling razors) convinced all.

‘‘I had absolutely no idea if he could sing,'' Burton says. ‘‘When it came to it, he exceeded my expectations, so I was very lucky I didn't go through any angst.''

THE movie opened before Christmas in the US, and the public and critics have given their verdict.
Indeed, as well as a box-office hit, Burton has been notching up winners in the pre-Oscars sweepstakes, bagging Golden Globe gongs for Best Musical or Comedy and an acting win for Depp, whose deep, crooning performance comes over like a Berlin-era Bowie.

Burton is still anxious to see how it will play around the world.

‘‘From a studio marketing point of view, I'm sure it's difficult,'' he says.

‘‘Things can fall through the cracks. People say, ‘I want to see a musical but there's too much blood', or ‘There's just the right amount of blood but what the hell's all that singing about?' It could go that way or it could go the way I hope it goes, which is it's not like something you've ever seen.''
He's working on his own tagline, just in case.

‘‘The Sound of Music,'' he laughs, ‘‘with blood!''

*Herald Sun*