jan 7, 2008 - TELEGRAPH Johnny Depp INTERVIEW

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The star of 'Sweeney Todd' and its director, Tim Burton, talk to John Hiscock about this gruesome screen musical

Tim Burton is a man who loves wallowing in blood, according to Johnny Depp. And he should know. The actor has starred in six of Burton's films, been on the receiving end of gallons of gore, and, he says, the director is like a delighted child when he is around it.

"He stands off-camera and squirts me in the face with it and I've seen him pouring it on the floor and painting with it," he says.

When we meet in London the morning after Sweeney Todd's first screening to the press, Burton does not look like a blood-lusting ghoul. Apart from a slightly wild-eyed look, unkempt hair, an ill-fitting jacket and a face that has not seen a razor for several days, he seems normal, affable and friendly. It soon becomes clear, however, that he does have a tendency to dwell in detail on the relative qualities of various shades of gore.

"Yeah, red is a funny colour on film because it's the most volatile colour and it changes," he says. "We had probably 20 different shades that we were toying around with because we wanted to create a theatrical crimson."

He has certainly succeeded. Sweeney Todd, his musical movie about the homicidal barber and his human-pie-making partner, defies all burst-into-song movie musical conventions and has spurting blood by the bucket-load.

A gruesome tale of vengeance in 19th-century London, it stars Depp as the rage-filled Demon Barber of Fleet Street, haphazardly slitting the throats of his customers after a corrupt judge steals away his wife and daughter. US critics have sung its praises and there is talk of Oscar glory.

Burton, 49, grew up in California watching old Hammer horror films on Saturday afternoon television, so the over-the-top, Grand Guignol aspect of the Sweeney Todd story had particular appeal to his dark, Gothic imagination.

"I've seen productions in which they tried to tone down the blood and they lost the spark and the over-the-top quality that the original story had," he says. "By having more blood, it actually made it a bit less graphic, because sometimes when you don't show stuff it has a tendency to be more real and disturbing. So we just decided to go for it in the spirit of those old melodramas."

Although it took only two months to film and cost a relatively meagre £28 million, Sweeney Todd was decades in development, with both Alan Parker and Sam Mendes having reportedly been interested in reworking and directing the Stephen Sondheim musical, which won a Tony for best musical in 1979.

Burton himself had toyed with the idea of filming it ever since he saw a stage production in London when he was a student. Last summer, he found a gap in his schedule when problems arose with Ripley's Believe It Or Not, which he was due to film with Jim Carrey. So he contacted Depp, who immediately agreed to join him in Sweeney Todd, provided his singing voice was up to the task.

"Johnny and I had talked for years about old horror films and people like Boris Karloff and Lon Chaney and Peter Lorre and that kind of acting style which you don't see very much any more, so we thought we would not only do a musical but do a kind of homage to those actors and that style," says Burton. "It's like a silent movie with music."

Sweeney Todd is the first movie Burton has made that has not been test-screened to audiences before its release. "We shot it fairly quickly and it is what it is," he says. "There was nothing to gain from test-screening it." He had been working on it until the morning of its first press screening, at London's Odeon West End, where the audience included Paul McCartney, who slipped in just as the lights went down.

Burton wasn't there. "I get scared," he confesses. "I feel very vulnerable and it's better if I'm not there because I squirm a lot. People want to watch the movie in peace."

Depp has still not totally overcome his surprise that DreamWorks did not baulk when Burton pitched the idea.

"It was amazing," he says. "Tim said, 'We want to do a musical about a serial killer who gets involved with a woman and they make meat pies from human flesh and it's almost in black and white and we don't know if the guy playing Sweeney Todd can sing.' And the studio just goes, 'Yeah sure, let's do it.'?"

A musical was an entirely new challenge to Depp (who had once played guitar in a rock band but never sang) and Burton too. "I couldn't relate this to any other musical," says Burton, "and because I wasn't well-versed in theatre or musical, I didn't really know what to be afraid of, so I just did it and relied on my own feelings about the material and the strength of the melodramatic story.

"I think my background in animation helped, because as an animator you have to think rhythmically; everything is on a beat that just gets ingrained once you start. Sondheim told me he wrote it like a movie score, and when you take out the vocals and certain parts of the orchestration, it seems more like a cinematic piece than a Broadway musical."

With Johnny Depp's singing ability still an unknown factor, Burton set about casting actors who could sing rather than singers who could act. His partner Helena Bonham Carter, who had his second child just before Christmas, took singing lessons for the role of Mrs Lovett and had to be approved not only by Burton but also by Sondheim. Sacha Baron Cohen auditioned for - and landed - his first post-Borat role as Pirelli, a rival barber, by singing almost the complete score of Fiddler on the Roof. Alan Rickman as Judge Turpin and Timothy Spall as the Beadle both had reasonable singing voices.

Three months before filming was due to begin, Burton was delighted to receive a CD from Depp, on which he performed My Friends, a song Sweeney Todd sings to his razors.

"Johnny's not a singer and the fact he did it and did it so well and without any fears shows that he's capable of almost anything," he says.

"I so enjoy working with him because first of all he'll try anything, and the other thing I love about him is that he's not one of those actors who wants to go to the monitor and see what he did. In fact, I don't know if he's even seen any of the movies we've made, but there's something really good about that. It's like he cares what he does but he doesn't like looking at himself."

Burton and Depp have similar tastes in movies, and because of their previous collaborations - Edward Scissorhands, Ed Wood, The Legend of Sleepy Hollow, Charlie and the Chocolate Factory and The Corpse Bride - they have developed what Burton calls a communications shorthand.

That is not the case with him and Helena Bonham Carter, who worked with Burton on Planet of the Apes, Big Fish and The Corpse Bride, despite the fact that they have lived together for the past six years.

"Our tastes are different, because she didn't like horror movies but liked musicals, so I think that maybe caused a little bit of conflict," he says. "I showed her a few old horror movies but she's not a big fan and it might have been because I live with her that I probably was a bit harder on her than on the other actors. But we survived it, we're still together and we're still speaking to each other. So it worked out good."

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