On Tuesday, I’m told, the
Los Angeles Times will publish my story on Tim Burton’s “Sweeney Todd.” I’ve
reported it for months, after noticing in the summer that perhaps the only musical I like would be turned into a film. The story was initially assigned as a thorough narrative about
the idea of the music-film that would include deep reporting on how the music-driven
stage show became a cinematic production in many respects--good, bad, or ugly. In the course of the reporting, I had
some intriguing discussions—basically with everyone involved in the film, including some self-congratulatory remarks but also some really unusual quotes. Most
memorable? A lunch with producer Dick Zanuck at Warner’s and a few funny
comments from Tim Burton, to say nothing of a conversation about
the business of such filmmaking with Dreamworks’s Walter F. Parkes. But over
the course of the last few months, the Times also published a separate story
about Burton that included information my original story would have
covered (nothing personal: this is how newspapers often work when they cover
entertainment so thoroughly from so many angles). So my piece, for tomorrow or later this week, has had to be rejiggered. It will now focus more on the musical qualities of the film, but still include chats with Depp, Burton, and others. Still, there are lots of
cutting-floor scraps. To precede the piece, then, I thought I’d share some extra quotes
with you, and take you behind the scenes of the story.
1. From my Sondheim conversation:
On the cutting down of
songs in the film:
“Of course, you can fill
them, but it's not dynamic, and that's what Tim [Burton] and[screenwriter/producer John Logan] were so cognizant of.
You can't just expect the audience to watch anything. I'm a movie fan, and if
something isn't happening in a movie, get on with it... The director is hard
put just to keep the camera interested [when a song occurs in a traditional
movie musical].”
On the germination of
the work:
“In 1973, I was in London for Gypsy, and I'd heard there was this grand
piece called Sweeney Todd. I went out to this pub theater--you brought your
stein of beer into the main theater--and they did this play in between the
themes. They were music hall themes, but it just struck me that it would make
a good musical. The next day, I talked to the director about it. I had seen
Christopher Bond's new play. So I looked up old “Sweeney” versions, which were
all stodgy and terrible , and I read Bond’s version, which had charm and was
suspenseful: a combination of wit and really good language and a wonderful plot.
So I met with Bond and found out he had written it as an actor with a troupe,
and they thought it would be fun to do it. They had sent for the 1953 version.
There had been about six public versions over 125 yrs at that point. And he
said it was so dreadful that he would write his own. It ran 20-30 weeks,
himself playing Tobias, but what he did was he added elements of a revenge
tragedy and the Count of Monte Cristo to the mix. Prior to that, it was just
sort of a blood-and-thunder play from the 19th century. It was popularized in
1843 by a journalist, it was a penny dreadful show for a while and then a
serial. And then it was made into a play in 1847 by the Neil Simon of his day.
So bond wrote his own and ended up at Strattford East. I just asked if he would
option it to be written as a musical.
It had been nibbled at by two producers in New York: Barr and Woodward (they produced “Virginia
Woolf.” They optioned it just as it was: as a straight play. I went to them and
said I wanted to do it as a musical if they would mind waiting, I would be
happy to let them produce it. So in fact they paid the option money. They just
said: Ok, fine, write your show, and we'll do it. So they were the producers
[of the 1979 show].
I started work in 1977,
it was first done in ‘79, and that's it. I should say I was going to write the
whole thing, including libretto, but by the time i got up to page seven of 35
in the printed version, I was already close to an hour, and I thought: Uh, oh,
this is going to be longer than the Ring cycle. So I called Hugh Wheeler. He
was british and knew the legend and had also written mysteries - under name of
Patrick Quentin. Then, when his collaborator died, he wrote solo mystery novels
under Q. Patrick, and they were popular in the 1930s and 40s when Ellery Queen
was popular. I thought he would be perfect: he was a suspense writer and we had
a good time writing it.
He saw to it that it wasn’t five hours long. He essentially took what Bond had
done but re-plotted successions of incidents, introduced the young person's
story a little. He changed the periodicity of it. He stuck very closely to what
Bond did. And I did too. Bond wrote this as a potboiler for his traveling
theater company. He not only introduced classic stuff in it but made the distinction
in language between upper and lower class. The upper class spoke in a kind
of blank verse, not written out in pentameter. Lower classes were much more
vernacular. There was a whole sociological caste from the play. But the point
was that he gave us free reign. It was easy to write.
I was big fan of Bernard Hermann. A big fan of Hangover Square. And the score got me. So this is an homage to Hermann
and that kind of Victorian melodrama music that you hear if if you listen to Hangover Square. I wanted to write a musical that would keep an
audience in suspense without letting them laugh at it, which is not easy to do.
What you realize when you step outside the theater, though, is that the horrors
are so much more than inside. You have to keep background music going: it keeps
the audience’s suspension of belief. Once they step one foot back, it's close
to way over the top. Sweeney is over the top but in a way that an audience gets
involved as opposed to giggling at it.
On different productions of his many works, and this one work in particular:
“That’s the great thing
about writing for theaters: that it’s done in so many ways. A movie is always
the sames but a show, even one performance of the same show, is always
different. But from production to production, every group does a different
play, even when they’re working on the same song. It’s constantly full of
surprises, and that's what keeps any play or show alive.
An opera approach in an opera house is a different show than when [Sweeney’s
performed] on Broadway. I've always felt when people say: what defines opera,
what makes it different from theater. It's where the performance is done. When
Menotti was done on Broadway, it was a Broadway show. It's audiences’
expectations and what an audience brings into an opera house as well as how
performers perform. With opera singers, the concentration is on vocal production.
In Broadway or theater, the concentrations is on story-telling and acting. And
the best operas like Carmen combine both. That’s what Puccini was, too.
On Sweeney being a genre bender:
“There’s a lot of singing
and it's not through-composed but it’s pretty close. Nobody composes
through-composed musicals. Operas are through-composed as one structure, like Wozzeck.
There’s a lot of singing and there’s some dialogue.
On Sweeney being called “musically
complicated”:
”Well, Ravel would have thought it was pretty stodgy. That's not a Broadway
audience, though. A Broadway audience hears a dissonance and…[he was implying
they react strongly to this stuff.] A person at Yale even once came up and said
was this the first atonal music ever written! [Insert shock on the part of
Sondheim.] My father was shocked by West Side Story be cause he was brought up
on Victor Herbert.
On how a broad American
audience will react to it:
“What are they going to
make of it? I have no idea. They’re going to wait for the power chords!
“John Logan [the
screenwriter] tried very scrupulously to keep the shape of the score while
recognizing it had to be kept down… Anybody can do MTV-style cutting to any
song in world. That's happened in movies like La Boheme. The point of this is a
really good story, and you got to keep it going. This isn’t Bergman’s Magic
Flute [ prompted by question the journalist had offered] whose pleasure is
lingering over the singing and audience. An opera audience. I'm a movie fan. If
somewthing isn't happening, get on with it. When you go into a musical in the
theater, you have an unwritten contract: people are going to face front, imagine
a fourth wall, and what goes on for three and a half minutes holds your
attention because you have a little lingering that opera audiences have love
for.
On whether or not
Sondheim ever thought the work would have a life in Hollywood
It never occurred to me. You can't just adapt stage musicals for screen, you
have to recreate them. Where songs are respites in the middle of comedy, it’s
OK. But when you attempt with musical theater to tell story through song, it
becomes a whole other matter.
On letting go of the rights to the show:
Dreamworks took an option on the piece and it was developed. It's like writing
a novel. It started during the recording session of Bernadette Peters’ revival
of Gypsy. I went out with Sam Mendes for coffee, and he asked if I thought
about it as a movie, and I said no. And he said, wel, I have. He had a deal
with Dreamworks. He got together with [screenwriter John] Logan, and then Sam
decided not to direct it, but it was taken to Tim Burton. Tim came to me 20 years
ago and asked to do it, and I said no, and he went on to other projects. When Sam
brought it up again, I was startled. And
when this came back to Tim, he wanted to do it. It was a piece he liked. I
wasn’t worried about how it would be treated because it was Sam who suggested it
in the first place, and then I loved what Logan had done, and because Tim Burton liked it. It's so
much the province of the director, but no, I didn’t actively worry about it. I
thought it was the right match. I got to tell you: Burton had expressed such a real feeling and liking for
the story. And you can tell when a director likes and trusts the story he's telling-
he doesn’t feel the need to decorate it.
On how Oscar Hammerstein would react to the film:
“He died right after
Gypsy. One of his children said he would be disgusted by [the show]. I know he would
approve of the fact that I treated the story without condescension, though.
On the younger case in
the film:
“That was Tim's idea. It
changes the tone significantly, and that's again one of the wonderful things
about reinterpretation.
2. From my conversation with Tim Burton:
“This is not my background at all, you
know. I certainly was never a big theatergoer. I just happened to be in London and sort of heard about it. It looked like a
really great story to me when I saw it. I feel good about it; it's
interesting. I've never done anything on stage, or like I said, I don't
even go that much to the theater. But it's interesting to take something
that was a stage thing and do a film of it. Except you don't really know
until you get into it how much things can change.
“What works on a stage, doesn’t work on film all the time. With film,
you have the luxury of seeing character's faces and being up close and kind of
getting the more interior nature--the inner piece, in a way. And, it
changes things. My goal was always to be true to it, because I loved the
original.
The first script I ran by [Sondheim] had
less music in it, so we ended up going back and putting more back into it just
because the show was more music-driven and less kind of traditional dialogue
and structure.
On the
potential difficulties in editing the film:
Well, you know, the writer John, now I
don't know this for sure, but he'd done it where there was more music, less
music, different music, you know. He'd been through a lot of different versions
and when I got in the ballpark, I went back to more music, like I said. But
there were certain things that surprised me that we ended up not doing or
changing just because of the somewhat organic nature of it--and it being a
film. There a lot of different weird elements. Sondheim's music isn’t the
easiest thing to do. Except for a couple of effects, we had no real
professional singers--you know, they weren't really classically trained. But
that created an interesting dynamic and it was actually quite exciting to me
that way. We did it fairly quickly, as we went along.
The interesting thing is that it's great
having music on the set because it really informs you and the actors.
Any stage
influences?
No. Probably the first one that I
saw in London. I just happened upon it. I guess that was
the one I most enjoyed. The one thing I enjoyed about the one I saw in London was that they didn't skimp on the blood, which I
thought was especially in juxtaposition with the music. I saw another
production where they tried to be more politically correct with it but I just
didn't quite seem as powerful to me.
The music is quite beautiful. That's
what I love about the piece; it's very lyrical. And then you have that
juxtaposed against the imagery. That's what I love about it.
Was Sondheim
thinking movies when he wrote this?
Absolutely. The first time I met him
he said that and it just made complete sense. And in fact what was amazing was
when we first recorded the orchestra without hearing the lyrics, we really hear
it. So that was fun in this case to do. Some of the pieces, we
didn't keep the lyrics but we kept his score. So it's really kind of
great to hear the score because you usually hear it mainly with the
lyrics. To find that balance was interesting. And also we recorded
it with full orchestra and then we isolated some instruments, and when you pare
it down, it really is like an amazing film music score.
On this
recording of the music—is it thick or thin?
No, it's thick. But there are, like
I said, times when we didn't end up using the lyrics so that you could hear the
music.
Is it too sophisticated for mainstream
movies?
Well, it was a strange thing. It's an R
rated musical, and while some musicals have met with a certain amount of
success, you never know. It's something that, you know, doesn’t
necessarily come to mind. I think the term “musical” still scares studios
a bit. Throw in some blood and an R rating, and you know…
Is this an
homage to horror movies?
Yeah, that's one of the things Johnny and
I have always talked about over the years. You know, horror movie actors
that we loved. This was an opportunity
to try to do characters like that. And again the music really fit. There
used to be a pianist in these music, or somebody on the side, and the actors
just move differently. And what was exciting about this is that you see
everybody acting in a different way and moving in a different way because of
the music. I thought beforehand that it was going to be really
restricting, but it turned out to be the opposite.
On delegating the filmmaking:
“Dante Ferreti [the production designer], I've never really, really
worked with before but he's done Fellini movies. You just try to find
people that you feel in sync with. We kind of had... not quite a
luxurious schedule like you sometimes do on a movie. It was a bit
tighter. But it was fun in a way to do that because it did feel like we
were making an old horror movie. Just get in there and shoot it as
quickly as possible. It kind of woke up the whole horror movie thing. I
like to work where you don't have to be overly literal, and everybody gets the
whole vibe of it. We never see just one thing as an inspiration, it's
always a few. So it never feels like it's this precious box. If it gets to a
point where you have to say: do it exactly like that. Or you have to show them
a picture and say, make it look exactly like that, you know you're working with
the wrong people.
On Burton’s previous interest in
Sweeney:
“I was actually interested, a long, long
time ago, maybe more than 10 years ago. I was sort of involved with it
loosely. I was just with Warner Brothers at that time. I was interested
in it for different producers, and I just got sidetracked with other
things. I didn't even really know Johnny at that point very much, and I
always felt everything happens for a reason, and he just felt more accurate
with the character. And that was another issue. You know, on stage,
everybody was a little bit older, and that was fine. But for the film it
just felt right to make them slightly younger. To make a kid feel like a
kid, you know? Not that you’re going to harm your son by a real kid. But
it was great: it just gives them an extra layer of strangeness and emotion that
it isn't sung by a 30-year-old. There’s something about a kid going in
that makes it more strangely real.
On Sondheim
and the play:
“I didn't really know Sondheim at
all. I had seen enough productions to see that he seemed to be open to
different interpretations. One was a bit more stylized, one was not. You
know, it's been around for a while, and someone told me that it's one of the
most performed school plays: kids love performing it. There's a large
arena of different types of productions. I talked to so many people here at
schools in England, and it's one of the kids' favorites to perform.
On the cast
being mostly British:
It just seemed right. Obviously, Johnny's
not British. But [the piece] lived there, and it just made more sense.
How was
Sondheim involved?
“He had cast approval over the two leads
and we ran by everybody else with him. And he was great because he was
extremely knowledgeable about films. He was a fairly cool guy; he came to
the first couple days of the orchestra recording. He spoke to Helena, he spoke to a couple of actors, and gave them
pointers. The thing about him and I think he realizes, is it's like
speaking to, you know, God or something. He kind of freaked everyone out
a little bit. He didn't mean to, of course. And he was very respectful
and kind of let everybody have their piece, which was really good.
Blood.
“Well, it's not real. That's the
thing, to me. It's more like it was on the stage where it was a bit over the
top. It goes less for reality and more for emotional effect. It sort of
undermines the emotional; it flourishes; it serves as exclamation points. Because
it is a melodrama and old horror movie it sort of fit right into that.
Sweeney.
“He's such a repressed, such a brooding
character. Really, the whole movie is about him getting back at
people. So, you know, since he's such an internal character, it really
felt like it needed those releases. [The blood, again.]
Were drawings
made beforehand?
“Eh, not too much. A little
bit. I mean one of the things that struck me was as I was going back
through old sketchbooks, I found a little sketch of Ms. Lovett in Sweeney Todd
and I thought, Jesus, it looks like Johnny and Helena, you see. And I did
it before I knew her. And I mean all my sketches kind of look the same.
But it did strike me. I did a couple of drawings like that of the characters,
and I did a couple of little sketches, little barber shop sketches. Dante
[Ferretti] is such an amazing draftsman. I would do a couple of little doodles
if I had the thought.
The Desaturated
look.
We thought a lot about the color in terms
of how much color to put on the set and the costumes. It's nice to kind
of do and not to so much rely on so much post-production. It almost feels a bit
too easy, so we tried to think about it as much as we could up front. The
environment was the environment we wanted it to be.
Did Depp’s
portrayal surprise?
You know when I asked him if he would be
into it, I didn't know if he could sing or not. But I knew well enough
that he wouldn't have said yes if he didn't think he could do it. That
was good enough for me And I felt very confident that he would do
it. Which made it really nice when I first heard him. I thought he
could do it, but he also exceeded what I thought, and I just got really
excited. It's always nice when people do that: go beyond what you think
they're going to do. And it's quite an exposing thing, you know. I'm not
a singer. It was quite difficult to not rehearse people, singing. That
was a new feeling for me, seeing that.
“I hope it doesn't disappoint. It's hard to know how purists will
respond to it. I know, for me, I love the show. So it was always my goal
to keep it true to it but make it a movie at the same time. I think the spirit
of it is right. And I don't always feel that way. It's just kind of
weird experiment to do. We always felt a bit funny, kind of like almost
laughing, making this R rated musical. There was this kind of exciting
feeling on the set.
“When you see different kind of
productions of this done, there all over the shop in a way, aren't they?”
