Sprawled forlornly on a sofa, Tim Burton splutters his British cold into a
British handkerchief. He has lived in Hampstead for years, and has a
London-based family, so you’d think this LA transplant could lay claim to
having “gone native”. (On cue, his girlfriend, Helena Bonham Carter, nine
months pregnant and with apparent shared enthusiasm for Burton’s
dragged-through-several-hedges-backwards coiffure, waddles through to the
loo.) There are still gaps to be plugged in Burton’s local knowledge,
though. Did he understand that Sweeney Todd was cockney rhyming slang for
Flying Squad? “No, I did not,” he says, pepping up. He’s more than familiar
with the old cop series. “Yeah, yeah, yeah,” he enthuses. “So that’s what it
relates to?”
The maverick director attends, instead, to the tale of the demon barber of
Fleet Street – the dreaded Victorian barnet-buzzer who, according to lore
(and The Two Ronnies), would slit the throats of his customers without so
much as an “Anything for the weekend, sir?”, their carcasses dispatched to
the pie shop downstairs to be minced up as filling by the kindly Mrs Lovett.
“You think,” he asks, “he was a real person?”
Burton, as it happens, doesn’t believe Todd existed – “It’s sort of an urban
myth,” he concedes, disappointed. Quite possibly there was some psychotic
shaver who inspired the fable, his misdeeds, given currency by the penny
dreadfuls of the era, bringing him within an untrimmed whisker of the
notoriety of Jack the Ripper.
But veracity doesn’t matter. Given that Burton’s quirky flicks have celebrated
both oddballs (Pee-wee Herman, Edward Scissorhands, Ed Wood, Willy Wonka)
and the Hammeresque macabre (Sleepy Hollow, The Nightmare Before Christmas,
Corpse Bride), you can see why this story would have him jumping all over it.
This month gives us his $50m gothic opera (almost literally), starring Johnny
Depp as the infamous throat-slasher and Bonham Carter as his pastry-rolling
accomplice, with support from the likes of Alan Rickman, Timothy Spall and
Sacha Baron Cohen. Shot, as ever, at Pinewood (“Here, I’m more able to focus
on the movie,” Burton says. “There [in Hollywood], you just feel this vibe
of the business around you”), it’s a handsome beast, Depp’s restyled Todd
plodding about like a smack-addled version of the skunk-haired 1970s
sportscaster Dickie Davies.
It is also Burton’s most ambitious film to date, for the words “Sweeney” and
“Todd” have, in recent times, become synonymous with the 1979 musical by
Stephen Sondheim. It is this that Burton is realising for the big screen.
“I’d never really done something like this,” he says. “I’d always had music
in movies, but never full-blown. It’s very operatic, and almost everybody in
the cast is not a professional singer. Even seasoned Broadway people are
saying how difficult it is.” You could point out the commercial nono of
there being more blood flowing than out of the lift doors in The Shining;
that cannibalism has never proven a box-office turn-on; and that, in the
States, it’s been slapped with a kiss-of-death R rating. Dare one mention
that this particularly dissonant Sondheim score is not exactly High Society
when it comes to populist sing-along show stoppers?
At 77, Sondheim remains the most influential figure in modern Broadway musical
theatre, his bank account still jingling any time somebody gets up to warble
Send in the Clowns. A game-playing polymath (the playwright Anthony Shaffer
modelled Sleuth’s Andrew Wyke on him), he is unique in having won an Academy
Award, multiple Tonys and the Pulitzer. His hit shows – Company, Follies,
Sunday in the Park with George, Into the Woods and Passion – are embraced by
the faithful as sacred texts. Only two have crossed over to the silver
screen: A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum and A Little Night
Music. Both crashed like vaudeville cymbals.
“The one form of movies that I never particularly enjoyed was the
movie-musical,” Sondheim cautions. “I liked the sort of fluffy musicals
before the second world war, the Astaire/Rogers things, but movie-musicals
that told stories have always struck me as ponderous.” It’s all down to the
gulf between “stage time” and “film time”, he explains, the movie medium
being unable to accommodate someone simply standing and singing for several
minutes. “Take Tonight from West Side Story. It’s a close-up of him, then a
close-up of her, then a two-shot, then a shot of the fire escape. There’s
nothing to do. You have to waste the time.” We will forgive Sondheim here.
He did, after all, pen the lyrics.
For all his stage triumphs, it is 1979’s Sweeney Todd that is regarded as
Sondheim’s meisterwerk. The original production garnered eight Tonys and
wows for its leads, Len Cariou and Angela Lansbury, with the inventive
staging commended for the manner in which Todd’s victims hurtled down a
chute from his spring-loaded chair. A Grand Guignol, based on the 1973 play
by Christopher Bond, it envisages Todd as the alter ego of Benjamin Barker,
a man returning from penal servitude in Australia who changes identity to
seek revenge on Judge Turpin, the malicious magistrate who absconded with
his wife and has become the guardian of Barker’s teenage daughter. Todd’s
vengeance is soon extended to any gent with a five o’clock shadow.
Burton was a humble art student when he caught the London production on his
first trip over in 1980. “I wasn’t into theatre,” he recalls. “I’d never
heard of Sondheim. I just sort of stumbled on it and it really affected me.
The first time on stage I saw them singing Johanna, and with the throat, you
know, the blood, I thought, ‘This is a unique juxtaposition of music and
image.’” It seemed, he adds, “like a great movie score. It would lend itself
to one of those old horror movies”. He was not off target. Sondheim
conceived the music as a tribute to the film composer Bernard Herr-mann,
best known for his Hitchcock collaborations.
Twelve years later, after Burton had sealed his spot on the Tinseltown A list,
he approached Sondheim about a film version. “Then I never heard from him
again,” Sondheim mutters. Alan Parker subsequently showed interest, as did
Sam Mendes, who went off to shoot Jarhead instead. Burton was already into a
year-long preproduction on the Jim Carrey film Ripley’s Believe It or Not! –
but when that fell through at the 11th hour, Sweeney Todd landed in his lap
again. “In some ways, I think the timing was more right,” he muses.
“Because, having someone like Johnny, it’s like 10 years or more of life
experience, which kind of informs this version.”
Sondheim’s consent came on condition that he retained personal control over
both the casting and the score. Even so, given Burton’s idiosyncratic
sensibilities, Sondheim seems to have been generous. Not least because Depp
(in his sixth teaming with Burton) had no proven record as a singer, a
sticking point for the studio until the actor’s homemade demo of himself
crooning My Friends (Todd’s ode to his darling razors) convinced all that he
could do it. “The fact that he came from a musical background, a rock band,
even though he was not a lead singer, I knew he was musical,” Sondheim
insists. (Depp’s voice is a deep, Bowie-Berlin mocker-ney.) “I also knew
that he was intelligent enough not to allow himself to play this part unless
he could handle it vocally.”
The greatest gift to Burton is that Sondheim has been fully complicit in
shoehorning his own three-hour stage version into less than two hours of
screen time. “I do not believe that anything is written in marble. I want
the story to move ahead,” he says. “The thing with Tim is that he
understands that. Where the songs did not either suggest or need a camera,
‘Let’s cut’, Tim would say to me, or [the writer] John Logan, and I’d look
at it and see if I could elide it or rewrite so it had film motion to it.”
He lists the various omissions: the absence of the overture, the verses
excised from the songs Green Finch and Linnet Bird, and Pirelli’s Miracle
Elixir, and the shaving down of the pie eulogy God, That’s Good! “On the
stage, it’s about seven and a half minutes long,” Sondheim says, “and
it’s a very complicated piece. On the screen, it’s three very short
choruses, and that’s all that’s necessary. You get it already. She’s got a
successful meat-pie shop. Let’s go on to the next part of the story.” With
the score recorded at George Martin’s Air Studios (and lip-synched back
during filming), Burton was graciously left to his own devices.
The film opened in America before Christmas, and the critics have given their
verdict. Indeed, Burton has been notching up the commendations in the
preOscars sweepstakes, bagging, among others, four Golden Globe nominations
(best musical or comedy, plus nods for Burton, Depp and Bonham Carter). For
the film’s veteran producer, Dick Zanuck, former head of Twentieth Century
Fox, drummed out of office for making the 1960s bombs Hello, Dolly! and
Doctor Dolittle, it is welcome confirmation that newsof the movie-musical’s
demise had been greatly exaggerated.
Sweeney Todd is by no means a cosy bedfellow for the likes of Moulin Rouge!
and Chicago, or the more recent Dreamgirls and Hairspray, which seem to stem
from a revival launched in 1996 with Evita. The good news is that Sweeney
Todd’s creator gives Burton’s film his ringing endorsement – “I was pretty
stunned, I must say.” It’s the most important accolade for Burton, whose
“big thing”, he says, was “pleasing Sondheim”.
Sondheim is relenting in his old age. There’s a move afoot to transfer Follies
to the screen, he admits. “It isn’t so much, ‘Oh, that movie worked, let’s
do another of his musicals.’ It’s, ‘Is that story worth telling?’ Not only
that, but can it be done on the screen, and be in some way enhanced by being
on the screen? One of the things I really like about this movie is that it’s
not just a film of Sweeney Todd the stage musical – this is an actual movie.”
It will be the arch Sondheimites who will judge the film most harshly. Burton
is dismissive. “I always say: this is a movie. If you want to see the
Broadway show, go look at the Broadway show. It’s a different thing.” Still,
he knows Sweeney Todd is going to be a tough sell. “From a studio marketing
point of view, I’m sure it is difficult,” he says. “Things can fall through
the cracks. People say, ‘I want to see a musical, but there’s too much
blood’, or ‘There’s just the right amount of blood, but what the hell’s all
that singing about?’ It could go that way, or it could go the way I hope it
goes, which is that it’s not like something you’ve ever seen.”
He’s working on his own tag line. “The Sound of Music,” he laughs, “with
blood!” And, he might add, no Dennis Waterman.
Sweeney Todd: The Demon Barber of Fleet Street opens on January 25
Sweeney is my all time favourite show which I have seen in four different productions which were all good and the National Theatre and Opera North stagings sensational - the latter involving the smell of hot pies too!
Jason Donovan made a very fair fist of the part on tour and I am sure that Depp will carry it off equally well and probably better. Can't wait to see it and hope it draws in the crowds as it should - and for those who dont know the twist at the end I shall say no more.
Dr Trevor Stammers, Epsom, UK
An R-rating is hardly the "kiss of death" - plenty of successful films are rated R. Plus, everyone I knew snuck into R films when they were undergage...I suspect things have not changed much....
On a side note, Sweeney Todd was fantastic and I was pleasantly surprised by Ms. Carter's voice - very pretty indeed. Congrats Mr. Burton!
Kate, Connecticut, U.S