A few months ago, I was lucky enough to meet up with Johnny Depp. The occasion was, eh, the fourth film in the Pirates trilogy - a fourth film that would prove the most lucrative of them all. Johnny seems oblivious to the fact that no one - bar uber-producer Jerry Bruckheimer - really called for another Pirates movie, but its success will lead Depp to believe that his acid-trip performances are the way to go. Especially after no one bought him as Joe Sixpack in The Tourist.
I thought it would be worth sharing that interview with you here, because I seriously believe that Depp has painted himself into a corner as an actor...
The interview took place in May.
HEEERE'S JOHNNY!
He may be everyone's favourite movie star, but Johnny Depp knows he's got a battle on his hands with Pirates 4. Paul Byrne met up with him in LA...
Outside Johnny Depp's hotel room at The Montage on Canon Drive in LA, the journalists are getting a little giddy.
Henri, from France, has brought not one but two presents. And he's hoping France's favourite adopted son will deliver a little Francais when he throws him a question about working with his French missus, Vanessa Paradis (Johnny does deliver, and, oui, the couple are currently working on a film together).
The heightened atmosphere is such that I keep expecting three elderly gents bearing gold, frankincense and myrrh to join the queue.
The simple fact is, since 2003's box-office battering Pirates Of The Caribbean: The Curse Of The Black Pearl, Johnny Depp has gone from being the cuckoo in the nest to Hollywood's #1 golden goose.
Up until then, only one of Depp's 20 films - 1999's Sleepy Hollow - had made more than $100m at the box-office. It's Bowie and Let's Dance all over again. Only trouble is, like Bowie, ever since Johnny Depp became golden, his art has suffered. The Pirates sequels, Charlie & The Chocolate Factory, Alice In Wonderland - they all made tons of money, but they each, in their own special way, sucked.
Even the more interesting offerings, the Michael Mann-directed John Dillinger biopic Public Enemies and the Ice Age-meets-Deadwood cartoon Rango, lacked a certain something. As for the recent waterlogged flop The Tourist, seeing Johnny play an ordinary Joe was akin to watching Kiss perform without their make-up. Or their hits.
Johnny is everyone's favourite wacky uncle now, and we need this beautiful creature to go ever more crazy and bizarre with the dress-up box for every role. We don't want to see him in his First Communion suit.
Which leads me to my first question when I finally get to sit down with Depp. Namely, how do you deliver the unexpected when that's exactly what people expect?
"But it's an interesting challenge," he nods. "As an actor, or as a human being, it's interesting to be, yeah, put up against an obstacle like that. It's a nice challenge. In the sense that, you know, if your instinct tells you to go do something that maybe you feel that, as an actor, oh, you've done it before, it's kind of more interesting to start to move towards it, and then back off. Because I think that's when you've got humour."
It's humour that saves Depp's latest film from being just a completely cynical exercise. No one but Hollywood was looking for another Captain Jack Sparrow outing, but, on May 18th, the world will be given Pirates Of The Caribbean: On Stranger Tides. Based on Tim Powell's eponymous 1988 novel, it sees Capt Jack teaming up with his possibly-triple-crossing old flame Angelica (Penelope Cruz) in the race - alongside Barbossa (Geoffrey Rush) and the notorious Blackbeard (Ian McShane) - to find the Fountain Of Youth.
It will, of course, be a box-office monster. Despite the cynicism.
The first three Pirates films made $2,681,440,232 at the box-office, despite the fact that the original two sequels - 2005's Dead Man's Chest and 2007's At World's End - were, like the Matrix sequels, overlong, convoluted and boring 12" remixes of a much-loved original. But, hey, people are suckers for sequels, even when they expect it to be bad. And Johnny Depp is a sucker for playing Captain Jack Sparrow, his blissfully twisted tribute to buddy Keith Richards and the great Looney Tunes cartoons.
I've seen Depp turn up at Disney industry conventions, dressed as Sparrow, and he famously called upon nine-year-old fan Beatrice Delap at her primary school in Greenwich on October 6th of last year, taking an afternoon break from shooting Pirates 4 at the nearby Old Royal Naval College.
And let's not forget the moolah. For the first Pirates film, Depp got $10m. For the combined shoot of Pirates 2 and 3, he got $37m. For Pirates 4, his fee is said to be either $35m or $55.5m, depending on who you believe. And that's not counting his percentage cut on the considerable profits.
Last year, in Hollywood, only James Cameron earned more than our Johnny.
Nonetheless, Depp is clearly aware of the cynicism that greets sequels, and especially a sequel like Pirates 4. Which may explain why the humour is to the fore this time, On Stranger Tides being as much Python as pirates, ultimately playing like Indiana Stoned & The Fountain Of Youth.
"Yeah, exactly," laughs Depp.
I'm guessing it was important for Depp to have some integrity here...
"Oh, yeah. Right from the get-go, when we sat down for the first time, they welcomed me into the story meetings, and into the process of creating the story and script. One of the first things we all agreed upon was, you know, we must kill formula, now! [Laughs] Kill everything. Don't go for the old jokes. Let's go from a fresh point of view.
"So, yeah, and I also believe, more than anything, that we owe that to the audiences who went to see two and three and went, 'What? What did that mean?'. Because there were so many subplots, and so many characters, and the mathematics was just insane."
Just like the box-office. Depp's need to - to quote Sir Bono of Vox - f**k with the mainstream was there right from the start with Pirates. At his first meeting with Gore Verbinski - the director of the first three Pirates outing, and the recent Rango - in a London restaurant, Depp's first question to him was, "What can we do to really freak the studio out?". And Depp's first suggestion was for Sparrow to have no nose. It didn't fly.
Chances are though, if Depp wanted to play any of his characters without a nose today, most studios would give it serious consideration. He is, after all, Elvis right now. For the first few weeks of shooting, Disney were determined to fire Depp from the first Pirates movie when they began seeing dailies ("They really freaked out - which delighted me, of course"), but now they realise that his particular brand of anarchy works wonders with cinema-goers.
I read Depp a quote from novelist and frustrated filmmaker Daniel Depp (the two brothers having made The Brave together in 1997) - 'I think the cult of stardom is dangerous to the actor and the art'. Given that it's unlikely many people say no to Johnny Depp these days, doesn't that neuter the anarchy...?
"Well, no, interestingly I...," Depp pauses. "I mean, he's right. Certainly the cult of celebrity, or whatever, it's... In this day and age, it doesn't take much to become a celebrity, so, the term celebrity is really outside of anything I understand, or even the term stardom, but I feel like, again, certain obstacles you meet with all your faculties, and you dive right into it.
"Yeah, also interestingly, when I do find myself in situations where I make certain suggestions that are, yeah, a little bit too much, people don't have any problem saying, 'Yeah, I think that's a little too much'."
Depp lets out a laugh.
"Because you do test the waters, you do try to test the parameters, here and there, to see how far you can go."