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THE FACE, July 1993

SLACK MAGIC
Text: Jim McClellan, photography: Albert Watson

Even on duty at the strictly-choreographed, press promotional exercises for his new film Benny and Joon, Johnny Depp cuts a strange and shambling figure. Far removed from the old brat pack, Depp stands now as Hollywood's foremost twenty-something thespian.

The first time I met Johnny Depp he was standing on the roof of a farmhouse in the middle of the Arizona prairie. Though it was midday and the temperature was in the hundreds, he seemed at the time to be in an enviable position. He'd established his post-teen idol credentials with Cry Baby and Edward Scissorhands, and was now working opposite Faye Dunaway and Jerry Lewis on a magic realist coming-of-age drama The Arrowtooth Waltz (now known as Arizona Dream), the first American film by Yugoslav director Emir Kusturica (of Time of the Gypsies fame). He was also a man who didn't mind telling the world how much he was in love with his girlfriend, Winona Ryder.

But things change. The Arrowtooth Waltz missed more than a few beats. Kusturica got ill and left the set. Depp, though left high and dry, decided to see things out to the end. Which meant his career was effectively stalled for around a year and a half. He had to pass on some juicy roles (including, apparently, Keanu Reeves' part in Coppola's Dracula). The hiatus also had other less obvious consequences. It made it almost inevitable that people would busy themselves with speculation about his relationship, his dress sense, his weird quirks (he collects bugs! he thinks clowns are scary!), anything but his work. Indeed, with no new films, appearing, he seemed at times to be in the glossies merely because he was (or maybe now wasn't) Winona Ryder's boyfriend. Not surprisingly, that pissed him off.

Things look a little better now. Though no release is yet planned in the U.S. and the U.K., Arizona Dream has come out (and done reasonably well) in Germany and France. He's just finished shooting Gilbert Grape in Texas with director Lasse Hallestrom (director of My Life as a Dog) and Juliette Lewis (he plays an uptight guy trying to escape the commitments and craziness of his small-town home). And he's just about to start doing Ed Wood, Tim Burton's bio-pic about the transvestite trash auteur and supposed "worst film-maker of all time."

Meanwhile, out this month in the U.K. is Benny and Joon, a painfully sweet comedy about lost marbles and lost souls in which Depp starts as Sam, a kind of Keaton-esque holy fool, whose taste for slapstick street mime (yes - street mime) and trash videos charms schizophrenic Mary Stuart Masterson and her over-protective brother Aidan Quinn. With all this work on the way, it looks as if we might finally be in a position to answer the big question about Depp -- which isn't whether or not he and Winona are still together, but whether he is one of the more interesting actors of his generation or just a nice-looking guy with good intentions. There's plenty for Depp to talk about, it's just that the Benny and Joon press junket isn't necessarily the best place to do it.

Junkets works like this. A large number of journalists, both print and TV, are invited along to meet the stars and directors involved in a particular film. The print journalists get split into groups of around ten or so with each star. The TV journalists line up to get five minutes each. For journalists (and most stars) junkets are at best a necessary chore, at worst embarrassing, frustrating and pointless.

Film companies and PRs [public relations representatives], however, love them, mainly because they can get a lot of press out of the way all at once. They're a quick, painless way of mass-producing the raw material of film journalism -- star quotes. They're also safe. One-on-one interviews may look more credible (they tend to read slightly less like film company press releases). But stars can wander into dodgy territory, say things they're not supposed to. On a junket, however, it's harder for a journalist to push a difficult subject, or follow up an interesting reply because everyone else is trying to get in with their question (and PRs are always flapping around in attendance).

Junkets are one reason why so many celebrity interviews tend to read exactly the same. Everyone gets the same quotes. Sometimes even if they've been in different groups, they get exactly the same quotes. If a marketing team wants to get a particular angle across about a film, they will extensively prep their stars with the required angles. Perhaps that's why some celebrities come over even more brain-dead than usual at these events. In fact by the end of the day everyone comes over brain-dead. The big junkets are like a making for manufacturing idiocy. Knowing that they're not going to get much out of them, most journalists don't bother to do much research. So by the end of the day they wind up asking stuff like, "So, how was it working with X?" "Your character was very strange." What was it like traveling to the dark side?" "Is life a nightmare?" or "Is there anyone special in your life right now?"

THE AFFAIR WITH DEPP IS relatively intimate. There are around 20 journalists from Europe and Japan here. There is a definite technique to getting the best out of these events. For example, while the rest of us are hanging around waiting for Depp to arrive, an Italian woman nips into the interview room, decides which chair Depp will have, then bags the one closest to it. However, once the room is full and we're waiting for Depp to appear, her plans look like they are being scuttled. One of his "people" looks in and decided Johnny will have to step over too many outstretched legs to reach the appointed seat, and so as not to inconvenience him, he ought to sit on the other side of the room. (This, I guess, is what you pay your "people" to do).

The Italian woman isn't going to take this lying down. "No, the star sits here. This is the best chair. The star sits here," she insists, motioning to other journalists to shift their legs. She wants Depp to be installed next to her, within Wogan-style knee-touching range. Her aim is to hijack as much of the interview and the star's attention as possible. The only form of retaliation for the rest of us will be to desperately crane forward into the star's eyesight. (God knows how all this looks to the person stuck in the middle of it).

DEPP IS AN HOUR AND A HALF late. This is as expected and doesn't bode well. In fact, given his generally anti-industry demeanour, his discomfort with constructing a sell for publicity purposes, you imagine that Depp will view press junkets as something close to purgatory. He's late because he's been out most of the night drinking with current chum Gibby (from The Butthole Surfers). Sure enough, when he turns up, dressed in baggy brown jeans, battered jacket and heavy boots, he looks wasted. (This isn't such a bad thing. As one of the stylists who's hanging around to prepare him for a TV interview points out, when he's scrubbed up properly he looks "too pretty.") Despite his tiredness, he handles the event pretty competently. Though he's not much of a talker, his goofy lines are chatty and cultivated.

He regrets being so open about his relationship with Winona. " I know you've got to expect this stuff when you're in the public eye. But I would never go into a 7-Eleven and ask the guy about his sex life."

Strangeness goes over quite well. He comes up with little bits of nonsense in the different languages of the people present. Things like "I have a small rat in my house" in Swedish, "The peanut is in the belly button" in French, "I am a watermelon" in German. In someone else's hands this might look like a slightly obvious trick, but Depp pulls it off (you get the sense that he needs people, even cynical old hacks, to like him).

He starts out by talking about Benny and Joon. He says he watched lots of old Buster Keaton movies to prepare for his part and that Keaton is a hero of his. He says nice things about Mary Stuart Masterson's performance and that the film as a whole is about the damage caused by "judging people," especially those who don't quite fit in with conventional society. He talks a bit about his past, saying that what he most remembers is constantly moving houses. "We were like gypsies. We kept moving to different places, different cities. . . At one point we had one house and we moved out of that house and into the one next door. It was strange."

Despite appearances, he says he doesn't have any fear of commercial success. "It would be great to do a movie that made 800 zillion dollars. I wouldn't complain at all. But the one thing I can't do is do a film because it's obviously a commercial film. . . I can't do that. I would hate myself."

Still, while the devotion to offbeat films is admirable, it may become limiting in itself. Depp may wind up stereotyping himself. Essentially, Sam is another take on Edward Scissorhands, a charmed innocent unable to connect conventionally with what counts for the real world and normal life. What Depp really needs to do soon is play someone nasty, a serial killer perhaps. In business terms, he needs the odd mainstream hit in order to be able to keep doing the films he wants. "I don't think I'm limiting myself because I'm doing things that are true to me. I'm doing things that I feel I have to do. As far as doing things which people might think of as odd, to me they don't seem so odd."

A Spanish journalist seems particularly perplexed by Ed Wood. "So the point is he was a transvestite?" Depp struggles to explain the demented epiphanies of films like Plan 9 from Outer Space and Glen or Glenda. The Spanish guy interrupts him. "So it's trash movies - so bad it's good, yes?" At this point the Italian woman tells him to shut up while the star is speaking. Depp meanwhile is becoming vexed at the suggestion that Ed Wood, who he clearly sees as another naive outsider innocent, is a "bad" filmmaker. "If somebody makes something that is honest to them and it's their perspective, their story, then how could you say that's bad?" Everyone else seems a little irritated that we're wasting so much time on this.

Just to cap it, the PR comes in and says we have to wind things up (ten minutes early). Potentially this is a disaster, because none of us have yet got up the guts to put the question. The Italian woman blusters in. Depp has his Winona answer ready. "I think that it's an absurd idea to be fascinated with the private life of a guy who gets paid to pretend. That's what I think. I know you've got to expect a certain amount of this stuff when you're in the public eye. But, to me, it's ludicrous. I would never go into a 7-Eleven and ask the guy about his sex life." He moans some more about the assumption that when actors and actresses work together, they also share the same bed. He says he regrets being so open about his relationship with Winona in the past. "It gave people a free ticket and they turned it into a freak show. . . It's hard enough to have a relationship. For two people to be together is not an easy thing for anybody, but to have all that shit thrown on top of it, to be put under a glass jar creates extra pressure."

It's a prepared line, but the idea that a one-on-one interview would yield anything more revealing is pretty dubious. Depp also has a line ready for those. It's more jokey, more intimate, an anecdote about taking a leak in a public toilet somewhere and being interrupted by a guy who wants to know how he and Winona are doing. When Benny and Joon comes out in the States, it appears in three different magazine profiles.

It's time for Depp to leave -- he has to speak to an audience of high school students about Benny and Joon. As he wanders down to the hall where they're waiting, he chats to me about the new Butthole Surfers album, "Independent Worm Saloon" and tells me about the band he and Gibby formed. They played one gig then split up. They were called Pee, which was spelt U-R-I-N-E. Every letter was silent. (I think I've got that right -- I guess it seemed funny at the time.)

He and Gibby seem inseparable at the moment. When we meet up for breakfast the next day, Gibby comes along too. Depp's come along to chat about the possibility of writing something for THE FACE. I drift into interview mode, and he gently makes it clear that he just wants to relax and kick around a few ideas. He lets Gibby do most of the talking, and passes the time watching people in the restaurant, smoking numerous cigarettes, occasionally chipping in with a one-liner. He seems vaguely hung over (though it's hard to tell -- he can seem permanently dazed). Gibby explains how they got drunk last night and wound up sneaking into someone's garden, stealing a motorcycle helmet, giving it a multi-colour paint job, then returning it to exactly the same spot.

Gradually he and Gibby work up ideas for a piece. They talk about traveling to meet the guy who invented the margarita. Or writing about Spaz, a friend's two-legged cat. Or doing a travel piece on a small town filled with people who've cut off hands, arms and legs as part of an insurance fraud. Gibby rambles about Texas striptease joints. Johnny suggests writing about things they hate and Gibby volunteers the lead singer of the Spin Doctors as the opening target. It's the kind of conversation which some might see as emblematic of Depp's much-vaunted "weirdness." But it's also the kind of amiable banter familiar to people of a certain age. It's the kind of stoned goofy rambling that filled Richard Linklater's Slacker.

A few years back it was kind of hard to place Depp. He didn't fit in with a young Hollywood populated by bratpackers and method bad boys. But as he and Gibby wander off, it strikes me that you could make a case for Depp as a kind of superstar slacker, a generation X celebrity -- it's one reason why he remains fascinating, even when his films (i.e. Benny and Joon) aren't. Take the thrift shop threads, his love of Kerouac and Salinger, the oddball hobbies, the interest in marginal "weirdness," the fact that, in Hollywood terms, he's an underachiever, they way he seems to be caught somewhere between adulthood and adolescence, they way, on screen and off, he can seem gripped by a kind of internal drift, not quite there. And you get the feeling that he'd probably be this way if he weren't a movie star. Fame has just allowed him to pursue the twenty-something life all the way.

A couple of weeks later, I phone Depp to see if he's still interested in writing something. The answerphone is on. It's on all the time. But as if to compensate, he leaves clever messages. Bits of old movies, records, excerpts from hypnotism tapes. The current message comes from a film and features a stagily gothic actor hammily intoning "You might have noticed that I'm not all there. . .myself" Funny, clever, self-consciously goofy and, in a way, strangely honest, it perhaps says as much about Depp as anything he might say at a press junket.