1 дек 2015 г. - GQ MAGAZINE Johnny Depp SCOTT COOPER Black Mass INTERVIEW

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Black Mass: Johnny Depp and Scott Cooper’s Triumph
BY AMY WALLACE
PHOTOGRAPHY BY MARK SELIGER


Scott Cooper is a “collaborative genius,” says Johnny Depp. Johnny Depp is a “national treasure,” says Scott Cooper. They’re loving each other up pretty good—and why not? The movie we’re talking about—Black Mass, the story of Jimmy “Whitey” Bulger, the infamous crime boss whose manipulative relationship with the FBI allowed him to rule South Boston with an iron fist—was a mutual triumph.

Asked to explain their two-way admiration one recent afternoon in Los Angeles, the actor and director both point to the same moment in the film. The scene unfolds after Depp—whose transformation into the blue-eyed, vampiric Bulger is so complete it might as well be a vanishing act—has devoured a steak dinner at the home of his FBI minder, John Connolly, who he grew up with in the old neighborhood. Each man believes he is besting the other, but in truth Bulger holds the reins, which he proves when he heads upstairs to pay a visit to Connolly’s wife. No blood is shed, but what happens next is the most disturbing thing in the film.

“He kind of face-torments her,” Cooper says, recalling the aggressive caress Depp gives the actress Julianne Nicholson. “It’s violent without any weaponry.”

Depp nods, taking a drag off a cigarette he’s just rolled. “When we shot it, I didn’t want to do the same thing in every take. You want to change it up. So I went to Scott and said, ‘Hey, man, what do you think?’ ” Cooper, a former actor who also directed 2009’s Crazy Heart, thought the menacing grope would be perfect. Together, on the spot, the two gave Bulger one more line of dialogue.

“I stood back and looked at her and just said, ‘John’s a lucky man,’ ” Depp says, satisfied at the memory of that final take. “It was very creepy.”

Depp has said that in depicting the cold-blooded Bulger, he drew on a reservoir of “old hillbilly rage” (a holdover from his tumultuous Kentucky childhood). “That’s not necessarily that far from the surface at times,” the three-time Oscar nominee says now. “To the degree that you can control it, have access to it in a split second, that’s what Jimmy Bulger had. I knew that’s what the role required.”

But there was more to his depiction than pure evil. Bulger is shown in the film to be tender toward his small son, gallant with older women in the neighborhood—a sort of Robin Hood–like figure (as long as you catch him in the right moment). “One minute, everything is fine and dandy,” Depp says. “Then somebody just happens to be dumb enough to call him Whitey, and he flips.”

Depp’s ability to embody that tension is key to the chameleon-like actor’s brilliance. “Nobody has the range that Johnny has,” Cooper says. “To create Ed Wood and also be in Dead Man and Edward Scissorhands and The Libertine and Sweeney Todd. To play Jack Sparrow and John Dillinger, Hunter S. Thompson and Joe Pistone [in Donnie Brasco] and George Jung [in Blow]. And yet, for all his parts, I was mesmerized to see him turn from the man he is—gentle-natured, soulful, sweet—to Jimmy Bulger. Whitey is always in control. If you stood 18 inches away, Jimmy was going to make that 12. And Johnny captured him.”

He had help: prosthetics, blue contact lenses, a complex, thinning hairpiece, and a front tooth made dead-gray with makeup. But more than anything else, it was Depp’s command of Bulger’s fierce intensity that made even visitors to the set feel a sense of foreboding. Cooper remembers that his wife and 9-year-old daughter, Stella, stopped by on a day “when violent things weren’t happening.” At one point, as Cooper and Depp were huddling between takes, he noticed Stella staring.

“I looked down, and she’s looking up at Johnny like she was thinking to herself, Hold on. That’s Jack Sparrow. But he doesn’t look like it,” he recalls. “And I thought: What a great way to fuck your kids up.”

Depp grins. “I remember I had to do the voice for her”—he’s already switched into his best Pirates of the Caribbean sing-song-y lilt—“so that she recognized me.” The shift is remarkable, if only because it seems so effortless. There’s a beat as Depp comes back into his own soft-spoken self, and Cooper raises his eyebrows as if to say, “See?”

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