I would like to start this blog post by sharing an interview I found from and Entertainment Weekly article featuring Tim Burton and Johnny Depp. They have done 7 movies together to date, but this particular interview is about the movie, Alice in Wonderland. I have inserted a small portion of the interview below. I hope you enjoy it as much as I did!
EW: Alice in Wonderland has been adapted in one form or another hundreds of times. What inspired you to take a crack at it?
TIM BURTON Disney came to me with the idea of doing Alice in Wonderland in 3-D, and that seemed intriguing. I’d never really read the Lewis Carroll books. I knew Alice through music and other illustrators and things. The images were always strong, but the movie versions I’d seen, to me, were always just, like, a little brat wandering around a bunch of weirdos. [Laughs] It was fun to try to make the characters not just weird–I mean they are weird, but we wanted to get deeper into those characters.
EW Johnny, how did you approach the role of the Mad Hatter?
JOHNNY DEPP Oddly enough, I had reread both Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland and Through the Looking-Glass not long before. I started looking up things on hatters and where that whole term “mad as a hatter” came from. It was actually due to mercury poisoning, because when they were putting together the hats, they used this really vile substance that–it’s like huffing–it makes you go sideways. So I just started to get these images in my head. That’s where the orange hair came from.
EW When you did Pirates of the Caribbean, the executives at Disney famously panicked at first over how you were playing Jack Sparrow. Was there any concern this time about portraying the Mad Hatter as a sort of pale-skinned, green-eyed, orange-haired freak?
DEPP When we first went in to do the camera tests, I was thinking, “They’re going to lose their minds.” But Tim fully supported it. It was a couple of solid hours in the makeup chair every day, but it really helped. You start to understand who the guy is through all that weird kind of Carrot Top Kabuki.
BURTON From Edward Scissorhands on, Johnny has always wanted to cover himself up and hide. [Laughs] I get it.
DEPP I still do. Absolutely.
BURTON It’s fascinating to see Johnny work up to a character, though. In the past, we’ve done some studio read-throughs of the script and the executives will come up to me afterward, like, [in a nervous whisper] “He’s not going to do that in the movie, is he?” I remember on Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, we did a read-through of the script early on and Johnny was holding a pencil and pretending to smoke it like a pipe. And this studio executive said to me, “He’s not going to smoke a pipe in the movie, is he?”
DEPP The subtext underneath that question is so funny. It’s like [with mock outrage], “Are you kidding me? He’s smoking a pipe?!”
BURTON “The character isn’t wearing any socks? He’s got ripped jeans? Oh my God, don’t do anything to embarrass us!” It’s funny, because the thing that worries people most is often the thing that makes it work.
EW And to prove it, there are now people standing out on Hollywood Boulevard dressed as Jack Sparrow.
DEPP I was driving down Hollywood Boulevard one day and stopped at a light, looked to my left, and saw Willy Wonka having a conversation with Jack Sparrow. It was so cool, man. [Laughs]
EW Johnny, you’ve said you don’t like watching yourself on screen. What is it like to see yourself in 3-D in Alice?
DEPP I’m actually unable to see 3-D. I’ve got a weird thing where I don’t see properly out of my left eye, so I truly can’t see 3-D. So I have an excuse [not to watch myself] this time. [Laughs]
(Rottenberg, 2010)
“Twenty years ago, a frustrated young TV star and a wild-haired filmmaker met at a hotel off the Sunset Strip, drank coffee, and talked. To an outside observer, Johnny Depp and Tim Burton would have seemed an unlikely pair: one, a reluctant teen idol; the other, a shy, rumpled director with a penchant for the macabre. But from that meeting sprang a creative partnership that has produced some of the most memorable oddball characters in recent movie history: An alienated teenage Frankenstein with scissors for hands. A cross-dressing Z-movie director. A demented candy maker. A murderous barber.”
(Rottenberg, 2010)
“In 1990, Burton cements his signature style into the minds of filmgoers around the world and his Hollywood legend is all but secure. Edward Scissorhands is full of visual layers that offer a glimpse into the personal world of Tim Burton. On the most basic level one could read Edward Scissorhands as Tim Burton; lonely, misunderstood, and longing to touch and create in an environment more inclined to label and destroy. He infuses Edward with a purity and essence of goodness that is symbolic and in many ways extreme.
The elegant simplicity of Johnny Depp’s portrayal of Edward and the classical structure of the narrative allows audiences to identify with and ultimately understand the character on a base level. By using the elemental structure of the fairytale as a template, Burton creates his most personal film by tapping into universal themes.
Edward Scissorhands signaled the beginning of one of the most fruitful relationships of Burton’s professional career. He and actor Johnny Depp would team up again for Ed Wood, Sleepy Hollow, Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, and Corpse Bride. Many credit their successful collaboration to Depp’s uncanny ability to take on the role of Burton’s onscreen alter ego. For Burton, a director who externalizes the internal struggles of his character with his extreme imagery and use of costumes, make-up, and masks (Beetlejuice, Batman, Joker, Catwomen, Edward Scissorhands, Ed Wood, etc.) Depp’s chameleon-like nature as an actor makes him a perfect fit. Burton says, I love actors who like to transform…it’s exciting to see that. And I really get a lot of energy out of somebody like him who, you know, doesn’t care how he looks, is willing to do anything.”
(Burton & Fraga, 2005)
I have to say that one of my favorite Tim Burton movies that features Johnny Depp is Alice in Wonderland. His character in that movie is just amazing to me. He pulls off a Mad Hatter so well, and his character is one that you can never take your eyes off of. He is convincingly “mad” in this movie.
The following is a “Behind the Scenes” look at Alice in Wonderland from an Entertainment Weekly Article done by Josh Rottenberg:
“Lewis Carroll’s 1865 literary classic about a young English girl who follows a white rabbit into a fantastical world has been adapted into everything from silent films to anime to stage musicals to porn movies, but Burton–who has already put his unique stamp on such beloved characters as Barman, Willy Wonka, and Ichabod Crane–didn’t feel weighed down by all that history. “There are interesting versions of Alice, but I don’t feel like there’s one iconic version,” he says. For this latest take, which boasts a budget reported to be over $200 million, Burton and screenwriter Linda Woolverton incorporated characters including the Mad Hatter, Tweedledum and Tweedledee, and the Cheshire Cat into a whole new story that returns Alice, now a strong-willed and independent 19-year-old, to Wonderland for the first time since her childhood. Reuniting with the nonsense-spouting Mad Hatter, Alice learns that she must slay a fearsome dragon called the Jabberwock in order to fulfill an ancient prophecy and free Wonderland from the tyranny of the Red Queen (Helena Bonham Carter). To bring his vision of Wonderland to life, Burton shot the actors against a greenscreen and filled in the world around them with computer-generated imagery. Still, Depp had no problem getting into the proper bizarro spirit. “There’s all this surreal stuff going on: Everything around you is green, there are people dressed in, like, green Spider-Man outfits so they can hand you something during a shot. Maybe some actors would find it all a hindrance, but it was so ludicrous I actually got into it.” As for Depp’s Mad Hatter getup–from the pale makeup to the green, walleyed contact lenses to the frizzy orange hair–that was all real. “We did research on orange haired characters, from Bozo to Carrot Top and everything in between,” says Burton. “It was quite disturbing.”
(Rottenberg, 2010)
Work Cited:
Burton, T., & Fraga, K. (2005). Tim burton: Interviews. University Press of Mississippi.
Rottenberg, J. (2010). HOLLYWOOD’S MAD HATTER. (Cover story). Entertainment Weekly, (1092), 26-35.
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