Smash hit

“Tim has always charged me with being a gay man inside,” she says. “I always sang show tunes, in fact I sang one from Sweeney Todd, Nothing’s Going to Harm You, as a lullaby to my son Billy. So when Tim told me that not only was he going to do a musical but that it would be Sweeney Todd, I thought, ‘I have to put my hat in the ring.’ And he said, ‘Well, by all means, but you will have to audition along with everybody else.’ And quite rightly so. I don’t want to get a part because I sleep with him. I have to earn it in my own right. And also Sondheim was adamant that he had casting approval for that part… I had to audition to the hilt for this part and it was the biggest fight for any role that I’ve ever had to do. I felt like I was on X Factor. And the day that Sondheim rang up and said I had got the part I burst into tears – actually Tim burst into tears, too, he couldn’t believe that I had convinced Stephen Sondheim that I could do it and in three months flat, too.”

Sweeney Todd is the story of one man’s desperate desire for revenge and his descent into madness. The story is believed to date back to the early 1800s and some claimed that it was based on a real case, although historians have consistently dismissed this. It appeared as a melodrama on the London stage in 1847 and the first film version was made in 1936. In 1973, British playwright Christopher Bond gave the world the basis for the version that we have now: a gruesome tale of a wronged man, Benjamin Barker, who is sent to Australia for a crime he didn’t commit, by the evil Judge Turpin – played by a suitably villainous Rickman – because the judge wanted to steal his beautiful wife. Some 15 years later, when Barker returns to London, he vows to seek retribution on those who have ruined his life and sets himself up as a barber, Sweeney Todd, above a pie shop owned by Mrs Lovett. In 1979, Sondheim turned this version into a hit Broadway musical, most famously starring Angela Lansbury as Mrs Lovett and Len Cariou as the murderous barber.

A Broadway musical does not necessarily make for great cinema, but Sondheim, the toughest critic of them all, is delighted with the film. “I was pretty stunned by it, I must say. Both John Logan [the screenwriter] and I were nervous about seeing the first cut and Tim was nervous about our reaction. It was a very happy afternoon for everybody, a lot of self-congratulatory stuff going on.”

Depp, Bonham Carter and the rest of the cast recorded their songs before filming started at Pinewood Studios. Then, during each scene, the music would be played back through speakers. Most of the actors, though, still sang along to themselves on set. “And the great thing is, you hear certain pop bands and they could be anybody, but these are all actors and their characters and voices come through,” says Burton. “It’s really exciting to hear, like, a duet between Johnny and Alan Rickman. I mean, who would ever think about that?”

The entire film was shot inside Pinewood, where Oscar-winning production designer Dante Ferretti created Burton’s vision of early 19th-century London. “The sets were quite extraordinary,” says Alan Rickman. “Among the best, if not the best, I’ve seen. I’m connected to the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art where I trained, and I rang them up and said, ‘You’ve got to get your students down here to have a look at this, they won’t see this again…’ because it’s unbelievable craftsmanship. The detail was phenomenal – a sign over a shop door, the pies in the windows – and as an actor it’s just food for your imagination.”

Burton then “bleached” the film to drain it almost entirely of colour; it’s essentially black and white with vivid splashes of red. For the director, the film pays tribute to the classic horror movies of the Thirties. “Sweeney has come from our love of those old horror movies and trying to create an iconic character,” he explains. “You see Peter Lorre in Mad Love or you see Boris Karloff or Lon Chaney, all those old classic monsters. It’s an image and we just felt like that was what this character is about – you could see him in a wax museum and that’s perfect. It’s a certain look, a certain feel. It’s always exciting with Johnny doing it, he’s into that kind of stuff.”

Burton and Depp are family men and both in very different ways would find family concerns crashing into their work lives. Bonham Carter was halfway through the shoot when she discovered she was pregnant. She has since given birth, in December, to their second child, a daughter. “I found out bang in the middle of doing the sequence for A Little Priest. It was like, ‘Oh my God…’ And Tim said, ‘Now I’m going to have to be nice to you…’” she laughs. “And then he put me on a spinning machine the next day for the waltz so he spun me round and round, and that was tough with morning sickness. Not a good combination, believe me. I think the crew just thought

I was weak and pathetic because they didn’t know. I told Johnny because I knew I wouldn’t be able to concentrate and I might become this vacant thing and he might have to help me out and remind me of a few things, which he did. He was a gentleman.”

Later, Depp had his own problems to worry about when his daughter, Lily Rose, 8, was rushed to Great Ormond Street Hospital in London with a mystery illness, forcing the production to close down for a week. Depp doesn’t want to discuss the details. “It was without question the most frightening thing that she had ever been through, but also that we had ever been through. But the magic is that she pulled through perfectly, beautifully,” he tells me. “I don’t know what anyone else’s feelings were at that time in terms of, am I going to come back. I wasn’t sure if I’d be able to, but Tim and the production were unbelievably supportive, and just said, ‘Look, we’re hitting pause.’”

He would have expected nothing else from Burton. These two are indeed like brothers, or in the case of Sweeney Todd, more like blood brothers. They also happen to be one of contemporary cinema’s greatest double acts.

Sweeney Todd: The Demon Barber of Fleet Street is released on Friday

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