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| With a Susan Sontag patch of white streaking his pompadour, ghostly skin and distraught eyes, this Sweeney is both wretched and mad. “Статейки и интервьюшки) Сама пока не читала, планирую заняться утром) Demon Barber, Meat Pies and All, Sings on Screen SOME time in 1980, during the five months that the grim and glorious musical “Sweeney Todd” played the Theater Royal Drury Lane, a California college student visiting London bought a ticket. And another and another and another. Tim Burton, obsessive watcher of horror movies and a worshiper of Vincent Price, had discovered “The Demon Barber of Fleet Street,” not to mention Stephen Sondheim. And after stewing in his imagination on and off for some 25 years, that encounter has been channeled into Mr. Burton’s new film version, scheduled to arrive Dec. 21, with Johnny Depp as Sweeney, Helena Bonham Carter as Mrs. Lovett and the smoke-blackened streets of Victorian London as the setting for their danse macabre. Any way you slice it, it’s a gamble. Transferring a stage work to the screen is always dodgy; for musicals, so dependent on the artificial world of the proscenium, the risks are multiplied. To further complicate things Mr. Burton entrusted the lead roles in this operatic, difficult-to-sing work, which scooped up no less than seven Tony Awards in 1979, to two movie stars whose vocal abilities, like those of all but one of the supporting players, were untested. (They include Sacha Baron Cohen, as the competing barber Pirelli.) There’s also the little matter of the R-rated plot, which revels in the throat-cutting, meat-chopping proclivities of a serial killer whose victims are funneled from a trick barber’s chair into a giant meat grinder, processed and then baked into tasty little meat pies by his cooperative landlady. Even less bloody shows by Mr. Sondheim have not been served well by the movies. Some — “Pacific Overtures,” say, “Sunday in the Park With George” or “Assassins”— are so intrinsically theatrical in conception that they seem virtually unfilmable. Of the others for which he has also written both music and lyrics, only two, “A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum” (1966) and “A Little Night Music” (1978), had made it to celluloid (and not very happily) before Mr. Burton tackled “Sweeney.” “Sweeney Todd: The Demon Barber of Fleet Street” may seem a more likely candidate for film success, given its origins in melodrama and Grand Guignol, the slasher movies of the 19th century. Still, “It took courage and a certain lunatic leap of faith to think we could really bring this wild beast to the screen,” the screenwriter, John Logan, said via e-mail. Mr. Burton was not making films when he first saw “Sweeney Todd.” But he was struck, he recalled in a recent telephone interview, by how cinematic it was. Propelled by Mr. Sondheim’s extensive underscoring, Harold Prince’s production flowed from scene to scene within a cavernous metal cage, using revolving set pieces housing Mrs. Lovett’s pie shop, Sweeney’s tonsorial establishment and the show’s other locations. When Mr. Burton’s film career took off, in the late ’80s, he approached Mr. Sondheim about a film . “I said fine,” Mr. Sondheim said by telephone recently. “Then he went off and did other things.” Mr. Burton explained, “You get sort of sidetracked.” But, he said, it was all for the best. “Back then, I didn’t really know Johnny.” And he hadn’t yet met Ms. Bonham Carter, with whom he now lives. (They are expecting their second child next month.) Around five years ago, he said, he stumbled on an old drawing he had made of Sweeney Todd and Mrs. Lovett. To his surprise, “they kind of looked like Johnny and Helena.” The wheels began to turn. “Those kinds of things mean something to me,” Mr. Burton said. “Johnny had gotten to the point where he was the right age. There was something about it that felt really right, even though I didn’t know if he could sing.” He gave Mr. Depp the album and asked, “Would you ever think about doing something like this?” He said Mr. Depp listened and responded, “I may sound like a strangled cat.” Mr. Burton took that as a yes. “If he didn’t think he could do it, he would have said no.” Mr. Burton and Mr. Depp had already created a gallery of memorable weirdos, starting in 1990 with the unfortunate adolescent of “Edward Scissorhands” and continuing with the transvestite film director at the center of “Ed Wood” and the oddly epicene Willy Wonka in “Charlie and the Chocolate Factory.” Mr. Depp’s Sweeney isn’t a regular guy either. With a Susan Sontag patch of white streaking his pompadour, ghostly skin and distraught eyes, this Sweeney is both wretched and mad. “He needed to have a look that would say a lot about what he’d been through,” Mr. Depp said by telephone. What he’d been through, what turned him into a revenge machine, was a trumped-up conviction that enabled an evil judge (played by Alan Rickman) to destroy his family. Mr. Burton’s take on the material had been formed when he’d seen the London production. “I always felt it was like a silent movie with music in it — those old black and white horror movies.” He talked with Mr. Depp, also a silents fan, about the approach; their touchstones were Lon Chaney, Boris Karloff, Bela Lugosi and Peter Lorre, especially, Mr. Depp said, Lorre’s “creepy but sympathetic” surgeon in the 1935 thriller “Mad Love.” The influence of silent film permeates the movie, from the chiaroscuro lighting to the we-had-faces close-ups. “Johnny in front of his victims with the razor is almost like a ballet dancer, dancing around them,” said Richard D. Zanuck, a producer. Mr. Burton asked the designer, Dante Ferretti, to recreate not Victorian London but horror-movie London. Mr. Ferretti, who began his career working with Fellini, first visited the relevant neighborhoods around Fleet Street, he said. “Then we did it a little bit more frightening, more dark, more interesting.” Initially Mr. Burton had planned to make the film with few sets and lots of computerized effects. He ended up doing just the opposite. “This is a musical,” he said. “Having sets helps you, it helps the actors, it helps the crew get into the right frame of mind. Just having people singing in front of a green screen seemed more disconnected.” Mr. Depp began performing in rock bands as a teenager. But “never, ever, did I ever want to sing,” he insisted. “Singers always got too much attention. I was always happier playing my guitar in the dark.” The plan was for him to work with a vocal coach, “do the scales and all that stuff.” But “it started to dawn on me that I knew what Sweeney sounded like before, and I knew that it was up to me to go far away from that,” he said. “He needed to be, for lack of a better word, slightly more punk rock.” He studied the songs as he was filming the third installment of the “Pirates of the Caribbean” series in Palmdale, Calif. — “two hours to work and two hours back listening constantly, learning the melodies in the car.” Mike Higham, the film’s music producer, said that isn’t quite as easy as it sounds. “With Stephen’s music the melodies don’t roll off the tongue,” he said. “They run around the scale. It’s hard for actors to get into the pockets of where the music really is.” Part of Mr. Higham’s job was cutting the music to fit the film, which follows closely the contours of the original show. Mr. Sondheim summed up the operative principle: “In the theater you can sing for three or four minutes even though there’s nothing happening. On film you want to keep things moving.” Some songs, including the show’s framing number, “The Ballad of Sweeney Todd,” were cut. Others, like “Green Finch and Linnet Bird” and “God, That’s Good!” were shortened. Mr. Higham sent his changes to Mr. Sondheim as MP3 files. “Then he might say, ‘That’s O.K.,’ or ‘Change that F sharp to a B flat,’” Mr. Higham said. Mr. Sondheim’s longtime orchestrater, Jonathan Tunick, augmented the orchestra from 27 musicians in the original Broadway production to 78, “to get the big cinematic sound Tim was after,” Mr. Higham said. Like Mr. Ferretti and Mr. Depp, Mr. Higham noted how economically Mr. Burton conveyed his thoughts. “He can say three words, and he completely sums up what his vision is,” he said. “You get those three words, and you go.” For “Sweeney,” Mr. Higham said, Mr. Burton’s words were, “I want the music almost not to stop.” While Mr. Depp and the rest of the cast were finding their way into the music, Mr. Burton was finding his way into the gore. “He had a very clear plan that he wanted to lift that up into a surreal, almost ‘Kill Bill’ kind of stylization,” Mr. Zanuck said. “We had done tests and experiments with the neck slashing, with the blood popping out. I remember saying to Tim, ‘My god, do we dare do this?’ ” The results worked, at least according to Mr. Depp. The red liquid latex his razor sent spurting from the necks of Sweeney’s victims during the 50-day shoot last winter was, well, thicker than water. “You see it, you feel it, you hear it,” he said. “It wasn’t subtle.” Отсюда 'Sweeney Todd': A Musical on the Cutting Edge He sings, he slashes -- and did we mention he sings? Johnny Depp puts his neck on the line in Tim Burton's gruesome movie adaptation of the Stephen Sondheim favorite What sort of gift would you bring Johnny Depp, if he were to invite you to his home in the south of France? Six years ago, his director pal Tim Burton turned up with an original cast recording of Sweeney Todd: The Demon Barber of Fleet Street. ''I thought, That's weird,'' says Depp. ''I wonder why he gave me that.'' Broadway zealots have long been obsessed with the show, which won a Tony for Best Musical in 1979. But like most of the general public, Depp is not a Broadway zealot. He never got around to discussing the music with Burton. Still, he came to admire the sweet-and-sour mix of harmony and dissonance in Stephen Sondheim's intricate songs. ''I wouldn't say it's something I would listen to every day, necessarily,'' he admits. ''It's quite large and operatic. I've never been a big-musical sort of guy.'' Neither has Burton, actually. The director can't stand most burst-into-song movie-musical conventions. But he has always loved the heightened, melodramatic mien of Sweeney, in which a kindly man becomes a crazed serial killer. And he's managed to enlist Depp in creating a remarkably faithful film adaptation in which most of the action unfolds in song, pulling it off with something close to carte blanche from key DreamWorks and Warner execs. It's mid-October, and Burton is holed up in a postproduction facility in Manhattan, where he has until mid-November to deliver a final copy of the movie. He says this is the first time he hasn't had to submit a film to the test-screening process (although there have been screenings for marketing purposes). ''The studio people realize that the movie is what it is,'' he says. Besides, it's made up of interlocking musical sequences. ''It's not like there's other stuff to cut into it to replace anything.'' An early look at a version with only a rough sound mix confirms some expectations — the film is dark, desaturated, and visually stunning — and yields some revelations: First, Johnny Depp can actually sing, and second,the movie's got more spurting blood than a season's worth of E.R. Like the show, Sweeney Todd spins a gruesome tale of vengeance in 19th-century London. Unlike other, more whimsical characters in the Depp-Burton canon, including sad sack Edward Scissorhands and nutty candyman Willy Wonka, this guy is hard as a cobblestone: a heedless, psychopathic murderer. Depp's Todd starts slitting the throats of innocent customers as an exprеssion of rage after a corrupt judge (Alan Rickman) steals away his wife and daughter. (He also squares off against a nasty rival barber, played by Sacha Baron Cohen, better known as Borat.) ''That was always the difficulty,'' Depp says, ''taking a character like that and attempting to make people feel for him, at the same time that he's slashing people up. Not easy.'' But easier, perhaps, than Helena Bonham Carter's job in playing Mrs. Lovett, Todd's ghoulish partner in crime. Desperate to be part of Todd's life and to exorcise his wife's ghost, she becomes his business associate, grinding victims into meat pies and selling them to an unsuspecting public. ''It's so sick,'' she says of the subplot, wondering about the reaction. ''I hope we get away with it.'' Though it ultimately got made in a hurry, Sweeney Todd languished in development for decades. Alan Parker (Evita) was said to be interested in the '80s. Burton himself took a stab at it in the early '90s, but he says it came to nothing because there wasn't a sсript in place. Sam Mendes worked on a version for several years with Gladiator scribe John Logan before making 2005's Jarhead instead. Then, in the summer of 2006, Burton suddenly had an opening in his schedule after his Jim Carrey movie, Ripley's Believe It or Not!, fell apart. He pounced on Sweeney, and quickly persuaded Depp to join him. The budget commitment wasn't huge — around $50 million — and the shooting schedule sounded hectic at just 60 days. However, as Depp puts it, ''How many chances do you get at a musical about a serial killer?'' And how many chances does a non-singer get at tackling such an insanely difficult score? Did Depp realize what he was getting into? Sondheim, who had casting approval, okayed the actor without hearing him perform any material. ''I figured he'd have a light baritone,'' says the composer, now 77. ''You can hear it in his speaking voice. I love him as an actor, and always have. Put those things together, I didn't hesitate for one second.'' Depp was floored at passing muster so easily. ''It was a real shock,'' he says. ''He said to me early on that the singing was secondary to hitting the notes emotionally.'' Depp takes a beat. ''I didn't believe him.'' He laughs. ''I think he was probably just saying that to make me feel better about what I was about to attempt.'' Depp did have the advantage of a musical background. The actor first came to L.A. in the early '80s as the lead guitarist in a pompadoured punk-pop quartet called the Kids. The group lasted only a few years, and Depp has noodled around on guitar and bass in a number of other bands since. But he's sung only cursory backup bits. When the actor starred in John Waters' 1990 movie musical Cry-Baby, another guy dubbed his rockabilly songs. ''I knew I could stay in key to some degree,'' he says. ''But I didn't know if I could sustain a note, or belt one out.'' Last fall, when it came time to start working on his vocals, Depp was still in Captain Jack attire, filming the third Pirates of the Caribbean movie. That's when he did something unexpected, nonconformist, and potentially calamitous: He decided to go it alone. ''I was talking to people and they were saying, Well, of course you're going to get a singing teacher,'' he says. ''And I said, 'Oh, yeah-yeah! Of course I will. Yeah.' '' Instead, Depp ran as far from formal instruction as he could. ''I just didn't see the character developing with me doing scales in front of a piano and a vocal teacher going, 'No, no — bring it up from the bollocks,' '' he says. ''That kind of thing would have been a disaster. I would still be rehearsing right now. Or I'd have been fired.'' The Sweeney preproduction team was headquartered at Pinewood Studios, near London, where Burton now lives. But Depp chose to hole up at a West Hollywood recording studio. He felt he had to find the voice — and thereby the character — by making demo recordings on his own. The guy at the mixing board was an old friend named Bruce Witkin, who founded a small label called Unison Music. ''He's a brother,'' says Depp. The two were bandmates in the Kids and had lived together as teenagers in Florida, where Depp grew up. Like buddies cramming for a test, Depp and Witkin found a groove. ''It was an enormous help and comfort,'' says Depp. ''It meant everything in finding Sweeney.'' The preproduction team, however, was getting antsy. Filming was set to start in February of 2007 and, as of late October in 2006, Depp hadn't sent anyone a sample of his singing. Says producer Richard Zanuck: ''Nobody had heard Johnny's voice. Millions of dollars, committed on an assumption. We all said to one another, 'Johnny is a smart guy. He would never put himself in this position if he didn't think he could do it. He must be able to sing.' But nobody could prove that!'' Finally, on Nov. 2, Burton received a CD with Depp performing ''My Friends,'' a song Sweeney croons to his beloved razors. Burton was elated. ''He was really supportive,'' Depp says. ''It was the reaction I was praying for.'' Just as Depp had unusual freedom to shape his vocals, Burton was given great latitude in dreaming up his extremely gruesome visuals; the studio consented to an R rating from the start, though it would limit the audience. The director saw the picture as an homage to old Universal horror flicks (Frankenstein, The Black Cat), creepy silent-film melodramas (any number of Lon Chaney spine-tinglers), and Hammer horror films (pulpy fare from the '50s and '60s). Both Burton and Depp say there are major nods to Peter Lorre's Mad Love performance in Sweeney. Oh, and that shock of white in Depp's hair? A sign of Todd's trauma — and possibly a nod to Humphrey Bogart's skunk stripe in his lone horror picture, The Return of Dr. X., a Burton favorite. (Plus Depp says he's got a nephew with a white streak.) Burton felt Sweeney should be deliberately grotesque — a Mario Bava gorefest with ballads. ''It just goes with the story,'' he says of the geysers of plasma. ''I'd seen different Sweeney Todd productions on stage, and when they skimped on the blood, the production lost something. Everything is so internal with Sweeney that [the blood] is like his emotional release. It's more about catharsis than it is a literal thing.'' Audiences may or may not see it so intellectually when the viscera hit the camera lens. Back in London, Burton's partner of six years, Helena Bonham Carter, is seven months pregnant with their second child. (Their first, Billy Ray, is now 4.) She's due to deliver in December, around the time the film opens, and sounds unsure about which labor will be more difficult: the movie, or the baby. ''It was one of the toughest, most grueling rites of passage we went through in our relationship,'' says the actress, who appeared in small parts in Burton's Big Fish and Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, as well as in a key simian role in Planet of the Apes. ''I think I had to be righter than right to prove I was right to play Mrs. Lovett. But it had been in my blood. I wanted to be her when I was 13, when the show came out. I went around with a Mrs. Lovett hairdo.'' Unlike Depp, Bonham Carter studied for months with a renowned vocal coach, Ian Adam. ''He was famous for making actors sing who couldn't previously,'' she says. Sadly, he died the week filming wrapped. With the premiere of Sweeney Todd approaching, Bonham Carter knows she's in for a barrage of innuendo about nepotism, having scored a lead role that show-tune fans on chat boards had envisioned for a more seasoned singer-actress like Meryl Streep. ''I'm sure people will think, Aah, it's because I've slept with Tim,'' she says. ''But I didn't sleep with Sondheim. And he ultimately chose me.'' The composer says he watched a dozen or so audition tapes and insists that Bonham Carter's performance was the best. ''Even in a recording studio, wearing a schmatte, she is as beautiful and sexy as they come,'' he says. ''She knew what she was doing, more than the others.'' Sondheim is equally pleased with Depp. ''There are very few people who can act and sing at the same time,'' he says. ''He's one.'' Depp remains nervous about it all. In the spectrum of actors-turned-singers, he has no idea if he'll be received the way Ewan McGregor was in Moulin Rouge! (huzzah!), or more like Burt Reynolds in At Long Last Love (boo!). He may be the poster boy for cool, but he's sweating. ''I always freak out when any of my films are about to come out,'' he says. ''I think it's totally normal.'' It probably doesn't help that Sweeney Todd is an oddity, even within the anything-goes confines of Depp's filmography. ''Somebody sent me this thing from online,'' he says. ''Somebody said after they saw the trailer, 'I don't understand why, in the middle of that trailer, Depp broke into a song.' Like, 'Whoa! What is he doing?''' Forging his own path, as always. This time with a razor. Отсюда Ну и несколько кадров, естественно)  Читаем сценарий:  Репетируем:    Угадайте, с кем...  
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