UPDATED: Public Enemies - Press Conference Part 2 - Johnny Depp

I was going to do them in order with Michael Mann after Marion Cotillard's press conference, but then I thought I would do the actors first and the director last.

With all dictaphones at the ready Johnny Depp walked into the room. Yep he is as cool in real life as you expect him to be. Waistcoat, glasses and just looked cool. Walking to the podium he stopped and looked at the poster of himself. “It is entirely too large!” he proclaimed. You can see it in the footage I took below, the photos are also by me. Always near was the white haired Jerry Judge - Depp's long time assistant, minder and friend.

John Dillinger is an absolutely bona fide folk hero, but what was the draw of playing this outlaw whose name is virtually synonymous with the gun-slinging American past?

Well, first and foremost, when I was like 9 or 10 years old, I had a fascination with John Dillinger, I don't know why - and probably not a healthy one. I think it was something about the twinkle in his eye; there was something mischievous that intrigued me. But, in terms of taking on the role, the idea that the guy was called Public Enemy Number 1, but, if you really think about it, was never an enemy of the public. That I found intriguing and challenging.

What is it about this character of John Dillinger that you think fascinated the public? And, famously, he died after watching Manhattan Melodrama, what would be the film you'd like to watch before you died?

[Laughs] If I had to see a last-ever film, it would be Withnail & I. Without a doubt, no question Withnail and I!

I think, especially with a guy like John Dillinger, if you think about where we were in 1933 - well, it's not unlike where we are now. The banks were sort of the enemies, and it was taking the knees out from under everyone. Displacement was a kind way of putting it - their lives were being ripped from them. And there's JD, who arrives as one of those people who've been ten years in prison for some youthful, ignorant, drunken crime. Ten years, and he arrives on the scene in the ultimate existential arena, and says 'I'm gonna stand up against these people'. So I think, for me, what's fascinating is the guy who says 'I'm not gonna take it'.

[In reference to a short scene where JD sings the country standard The Last Roundup, after a jail break] First Sweeney Todd, and now this, it was almost as if you were looking to crowbar in some singing...

I almost broke into dance... I just might now!

Why not? Just wondering if you've been bitten by the singing bug?

I've only been bitten once, and it was an indirect bite. No, no, no. I sang the one time on Sweeney because, well, basically I had no choice.

But you sang well in this. I know it was only a few lines....

Oh, yeah! I do sing in the film - is it in? I haven't seen it!

Any recording contracts come your way yet?

You know, some people better stay in their own little arena. [laughs]

How did you research for the role? Did you watch previous films about him?

I certainly had a strong memory of Warren Oates' John Dillinger in the John Milius film [Dillinger, 1973]. But, I hadn't seen it in years. I do remember there was a certain palate that was limited. And I thought there were more colours to be offered - without being too esoteric about it. If you think about the information that has come out since - some of Dillinger's own words have surfaced. So there's a bit more to the story, a little more dimension. And that was what I was hoping for, to add some of that.

Stephen Graham [Baby Face Nelson in Public Enemies] over here is our rising star - how did you two get on?

We hated each other, and we fought constantly. [assembled journos laugh] I think he's magnificent, one of my favourite actors of all time. What he did in This is... [journos, in unison, 'England!'] England... absolutely destroyed me. What he did, and what Tomo did in that film of Shane Meadows', took me to my knees. He's someone I'm going to fight to get... I'm going to force him to be in every film I do - even at gunpoint!

You've mentioned you've not seen the film, and did a double-take at the poster as you came in - do you not like looking at yourself? And what's it like now that you're a big star?

If I can avoid the mirror when I brush my teeth in the morning, I will. I find security and safety in the most profound degree of ignorance. If you can just stay ignorant, almost everything will be ok. Just keep walking forward, and it's ok to notice things, and look at things, but, to judge things will bog you down. So I don't like watching myself in the movie, because I don't like to be aware of the product, I like the process. I enjoy that. That [pointing at the oversized poster] is... not my fault. I didn't do it!

In terms of your success, can you get your head around it? Did you think your time had come?

I went through 20 years of basically what the industry defined as failures. So for basically 20 years I was defined as box office poison. And I didn't change anything in terms of my process. That little film Pirates Of The Caribbean came around, and I thought yeah, that would be fun to play a pirate for my kiddies, and all that stuff. And I created the character in the same way I created all the other characters, and... nearly got fired. And thank god they didn't, because it changed my life. I'm hyper, super-thankful that radical turn happened, but it's not like I went out of my way to make it happen.

You've played a lot of real-life figures in Blow, and Donnie Brasco, and now in Public Enemies, what attracts you to that? And, who do you want to play next?

Yeah... who would I like to play next. I don't know, Carol Channing, maybe. I do like Carol Channing, very much! I mean, in the digital age... you can almost do anything. I could play a 12-year-old girl at this point - in the digital age!

But approaching someone like John Dillinger, as opposed to Jack Sparrow, is it as in-depth?

It is, it's even potentially more so, because of the amount of responsibility you have, to that person who actually did exist. There's some sense of responsibility to their legacy. With John Dillinger, there's an enormous amount of information on the guy - we know where he was at 12:02, when the banks were robbed. But there's a great gap with regard to who he was. There's footage of him, there's endless photographs of him - but there's no audio. There's just an attitude. So, that was the dig - how do I find this man, how do I find the way he speaks. And what made the connection for me was that John Dillinger was born in Indiana, and raised in Mooresville, Indiana, which was 2 hours from where I was born and raised. It was at that point that I thought - ah, I hear his voice now, now I know him, I know what he sounds like, because it's not all that different. He was my grandfather, who drove a bus in the day, and ran moonshine at night. He was my step-father, who did time at Statesville Penitentiary. I knew his voice then.

Looking at you in this film, you don't seem to have changed much over the years. Do you have any particular skin-care regime?

[Laughs] Clean living. Oh yeah, most definitely. I say if you could avoid wine, I'd do it. And liquor, definitely. Avoid liquor. Most definitely don't smoke - anything. And stay in your room. And watch a bit of reality television, that's how I do it.

Looking at the extraordinary range of characters that you've played so far. Which has been the closest to you personally, and which has been the furthest away?

Well, the furthest away - oh boy, probably a couple of them. But, furthest away... might be Willy Wonka [laughs]. Let's hope that's the furthest! Closest to me, this would be horrifically revealing, wouldn't it? There's probably three, Edward Scissorhands, John Wilmot from The Libertine, and maybe Dillinger.

There's a great attention to detail in the film, in terms of shooting in real locations. How does that affect your performance, to know you're in a location where Dillinger himself was?

That was one of the amazing things that Michael Mann provided us with, that level of authenticity, to be able to break through the exact doors that John Dillinger broke though. As opposed to shooting on some soundstage because it was cheaper or handier to the studio. Michael was a real stickler for that thing, and I will thank him forever for that. To be able to go and fire my Thompson out of the very window John Dillinger fired his Thompson out of during the gun battle at Little Bohemia. You can't put a price on that thing. To be able to walk in the same footsteps as he took, to walk outside the Biograph theatre, and land exactly to the tiny millimetre where John Dillinger's head fell, in the alley near the Biograph was magical. I mean, you almost feel him arriving. Not to be moony or spooky, but there were moments when I felt his presence, moments when I felt a certain amount of approval from the guy. When you're going to that umpteenth detail, something's going on.

How did you find working with Christian [Bale]? Are your acting styles quite different?

I don't know if our acting styles are that different...

Christian tends to stay in character, and kept up the Southern accent between takes...

Oh, yeah, that kind of thing. Yeah, well I don't do that. But, if you have to do that, that's ok. I enjoyed our - basically - one scene together, besides when he and his cronies croaked me outside the Biograph [laughs]. Yeah, it was the scene in the jail cell, and I enjoyed it very much, it was like, how'd you describe it, like a great sparring match. Two guys in there with a similar respect for one another, trying to present different angles to each other. Obviously he's a very gifted actor, and very talented. When we saw each other, which wasn't very much, we talked about our kids, just talked about being dads. And that's where we really connected.

Could you tell us about Michael Mann - how was his style of directing?

I think, ultimately, Michael's style and my approach did complement each other. There are moments where, when you're building something, there will be things discarded - things will get broken along the way. So it wasn't right off the bat the easiest, but in the long run, what we were able to figure out together, was that, he presents something, he'd present something - we'd find a happy middle, and we'd get there. And we always got there. I have a tremendous amount of respect for Michael, as a human being but also as a filmmaker - he's not joking, you know. He truly means it.

Then it was my turn to ask a question. The last one of Johnny's press conference. Nervously I asked:

How difficult was it to let go of Dillinger once filming finished? And which character over your career has it been hardest to say goodbye to?

There's been a few. The funny thing is, you really don't say goodbye. There's a little chest of drawers in here [points at chest], where you can always access these guys. I'm not sure if that's healthy, but they're there. Saying goodbye to Dillinger was tough, because it was like saying goodbye to a relative. The most difficult to say goodbye to? Well, Scissorhands was rough. The safety of allowing yourself to be that honest, to be that pure, to be that exposed. That was hard to say goodbye to. Wilmot, Lord Rochester, on The Libertine, was incredibly tough, because I felt like it was a very intense 40-something days where I had the opportunity to be that guy. And I felt a deep sense of responsibility, so it was like a marathon. And then, in the end, it was like the light goes out and it's black.

There you have it. One of the biggest stars in the World today answered one of my questions and was looking straight at me when he did. Never thought it would happen to me, but an amazing experience. Depp was funny, charming and coolness personified.

UPDATE: Here is some more video from the press conference. You can briefly see the back of my head round about the 1:39 mark, oh and Johnny Depp is there as well.

Part 1: Marion Cotillard

Part 2: Johnny Depp

Part 3: Michael Mann

Public Enemies review

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Shane Meadows will Beware the Devil

Filmmaker Shane Meadows (Dead Man's Shoes, This is England) is going supernatural for his next film Beware the Devil.

He tells Empire Magazine, "It's based on a book of the same name, based on the life of a guy who, by getting involved with Ouija boards and the occult by trying to disprove it, trying to take the piss out of it, got possessed, had to be exorcised, and later became an exorcist himself. The guy it happened to has died, but his son's a novelist, and he helped him turn it into a book before he passed away, and now I'm working with him to turn it into a film."

Beware the Devil: A True Story of Deliverance was written by Robert Lee and published in 1983. Meadows currently has Le Donk & Scor-zay-zee on the film festival circuit.

It will be interesting to see what Meadows does with something of a supernatural bent.

Source: STYD
Photo: Jennifer Gregori

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Paddy Considine - Red Riding, toys and rage.

After 10 years portraying loners, oddballs and psychopaths, Paddy Considine has decided it's time to lighten up a bit. So why on earth is he playing a cop on the trail of the Yorkshire Ripper? He talked to Patrick Barkham of The Guardian.

The star of some of the most disturbing films made in England in recent years is mooching through the Toys of Yesteryear museum at a marina near his home in Burton-on-Trent. "Look at that little castle!" Paddy Considine exclaims with childlike wonder. "Look at that retro garage! It's amazing!" He had a vast Star Wars collection, now passed on to his son, and still treasures his Happy Days figurines. "I've got Fonzie and I've got Richie and I've got Potsie. All of them in their boxes. Except for Fonzie."

It feels unnervingly out of character for a working-class boxing fan renowned for his brutal turn as a grief-stricken soldier in Shane Meadows' cult 2004 film, Dead Man's Shoes, and perhaps best known for mainstream roles in Hot Fuzz and The Bourne Ultimatum. Reassuringly, Considine, who plays a detective investigating the Yorkshire Ripper in the pick of Channel 4's superlative Red Riding Trilogy, is soon on more familiar territory. "That's a really good toy machine gun," he points. "And here's Action Man. The business. The business," he mutters, more to himself than anyone.

Considine no longer wants to portray action men, "guys who rely on their physical aggression. All you've got to do is turn up and have a few facial tics and be a lunatic and throw someone around the room or blow their brains out and people think it's good acting," he says. Considine is not a big man but, in the flesh, he is as intense as many of his characters. When he talks, he peppers his speech with "mate", "man" and "brother", unfolding his arms and lunging forward to emphasise a point. We sit outside a cafe close to the toy museum; he usually comes here with his three kids and feeds the ducks.

If Considine was in danger of being typecast as a man of violence, he did his best to allay it by portraying a panicky, man-bag toting Guardian journalist opposite Matt Damon in The Bourne Ultimatum. He continues this middle-class career direction in 1980, the second of the Red Riding trilogy adapted from David Peace's noirish novels about corruption in northern England. In the first, 1974, Andrew Garfield plays a Yorkshire Post journalist drawn into a nightmarish web of police corruption. In 1980, Considine is the hero as Peter Hunter, a (fictional) senior policeman parachuted in to probe West Yorkshire police's shoddy attempts to find the Yorkshire Ripper. It is hard to do justice to the horror and suffocating sense of foreboding in the trilogy. It wasn't just the sewing of the wings of a mutilated swan onto a murdered child, the torture of suspects with rats or the graphic explanations of how the Ripper killed his victims that made me feel physically sick, but a lurching realisation that, as 1980 neared its climax, Hunter was surrounded by evil. And almost every other character in the film was complicit in the conspiracy.

From his 1999 debut in Shane Meadows' A Room for Romeo Brass to his comic turn as one of the local coppers in Hot Fuzz in 2007, Considine's characters often start out calmly enough before erupting with suppressed rage. This explosive violence is present in his writing, too: he co-wrote Dead Man's Shoes and, last year, won a Bafta for Dog Altogether, a short film he wrote and directed about a violent man's relationship with his pet. Hunter, in contrast, is clean-shaven and wholesome, with a loving wife and a mild demeanour, and no hidden demons - apart from guilt. Considine seems good at conveying guilt. "Yeah. What does that say about me? What am I guilty of?"

Like Hunter, Considine believes that in real life he nearly fell victim to a conspiracy: a secret whispering campaign to stop him starring in 1980. "There was a very strong campaign, people who didn't want me cast in this film," he says. Why? "Just bullshit, really. And insecurity." In the past, he says, "some people have even been frightened to direct me". Is that because of your reputation? "I don't know what my reputation was, I've no idea." Was that part of this conspiracy against you? "I'm pretty sure it was," he says, unwilling to explain precisely who was against him, or why.

It is all frustratingly opaque and, according to a senior member of the production, everyone loved Considine. Whatever went on, Considine's contempt for those he felt were casting aspersions on his professional reputation does not extend to the director of 1980, James Marsh, who "fought to have me in this film, as his man". And once Considine got started, he says, working with Marsh - who last month won both an Oscar and a Bafta for his documentary Man on Wire - was an "incredible" experience. "Good directors don't bullshit you. They make you feel creative. That's not blowing up your ego or filling you with lies - it's when you go home at the end of the day and feel like you've contributed."

Like Hunter, Considine feels like an outsider. He did not set out to be an actor and has no time for Hollywood. He still lives close to the council estate where he was raised in Burton-on-Trent. He was 18 when he met his wife, a graphic designer who is now full-time mother to their three young children, and met his friend and collaborator Shane Meadows a year earlier at Burton College. Considine got a first-class degree in photography from Brighton University and his portraits of boxers had been pub lished in the Guardian when Meadows, who also still lives nearby, invited him to play a role in A Room for Romeo Brass.

His "ordinary" lifestyle is not some kind of statement. He is as ambivalent as anyone about living in his home town: it can get a bit claustrophobic, he says, but it is handy for his eldest child's school and their relatives nearby. "I wanted to be married, wanted to be a father. I've met some great people through [acting] but I don't quite understand what living the life of an actor is. Does that mean poncing around Soho, falling out of the Groucho?" He gets stopped on the street, usually by men, who like to re-enact violent scenes from Dead Man's Shoes. "If you're in the mood it's fine. I do take exception when I'm eating a pizza with my wife and children and someone knocks on the window and says 'You, you cunt!' and all that."

In the past, Considine has talked of a "black hole" of childhood experiences from which he dredges his characters' scary levels of anger. Is this where his understanding of violence comes from? He sighs. "Now I'm a little bit older - I'm 35 - I don't want to trivialise my experiences and the people around me who I've got a massive amount of love and affection for. I didn't grow up in hell. But there's certain things that did shape the way that I am and my outlook on the world."

In Dead Man's Shoes, he played Richard, a soldier who returns from duty to find thugs have bullied his little brother and acts out a shocking retribution. Richard's anger, he says, is drawn from how everyone feels at times. "Isn't he how you feel? I dunno, I feel that way when kids are being broken in half by adults and having chocolate smeared on their faces. Don't you feel that sometimes you want to lock yourself in a room with these people and spend half an hour giving them a good hiding? Doesn't anybody in the dark recesses of their mind think, 'You bastards, you deserve your back breaking, you deserve chocolate smeared over your face?' That's what Richard is - that frustration."

It may be that in Red Riding's blend of fiction and fact, the presence of the Yorkshire Ripper attracts the most publicity but, as Con sidine points out, the true story of Peter Sutcliffe is actually the backdrop to a much wider tale of corruption and evil. Nevertheless, the malevolent appearance of the Ripper, played by Joseph Mawle (Jesus in the BBC drama The Passion), at the physical and immoral heart of the trilogy, was an event for everyone. "That was one of the days on set when it was like there had been a snowfall. Everywhere was dampened and quiet. I remember just looking through the glass and just watching him. Joseph played him so beautifully and gently and humanely."

Considine hopes "people don't feel it's propaganda for the Ripper". The filmmakers spoke to Andrew Laptew, the real detective who interviewed Sutcliffe 15 months before he was caught and reported he could be the Ripper, but was ignored. "He said Sutcliffe was like a little frightened rabbit." Currently serving life in Broadmoor for the murder of 13 women and the attempted murder of seven more, Sutcliffe could, it has been reported, be reclassified as a lower risk prisoner. Some have suggested he could then, in theory, be eligible for release. "I don't think that's gonna happen," says Considine. "People are still reeling from what he did today. The scars are still there, the wounds are massively deep, and I think people would be happy if he never saw the light of day again."

Considine describes his job as a "constant struggle". He is currently out of work. "It's a monster you've never got a grasp on; you've never got it cornered where you want it." This is probably because he has taken the unusual step of refusing to audition for any role. "They want you to walk in and have your lines learned and be there pretending to thrash an imaginary sword around your head in some office in Soho. It's like no, man, I find it disrespectful and impersonal," he says. Only working with directors who approach him is "a trust thing, do you understand? I need trust. Now Hollywood hasn't got time to set up trust. It hasn't got time to nurture. You're in and out."

This attitude could be confused for grandiosity but it seems instead to come from self doubt. "As an actor it's just not comfortable for me to watch [the film 1980]. All I see is a big fat head and the things I didn't do in a scene or the things that I should've done. In some respects, mate, I don't want this to sound stupid but I'm a bit of an anti-actor." When he is asked to "act" in an orthodox way, he closes up. "Then I think I can't act, I obviously can't act. I say that to people and they go mad and I say, 'You don't understand, I can't act.'"

Considine has turned his Bafta-winning short into a full-length script, Tyrannosaur, and is trying to raise funds to make it with Peter Mullan, a friend and co-star in the Red Riding Trilogy, in the lead role. A second project close to his heart is King of the Gypsies, a film he co-wrote with Meadows about Bartley Gorman, a legendary bare-knuckle fighter, who was befriended by Considine when he was a photographer. After taking his photograph, Considine joined him in visiting Reggie Kray ("It was like he was holding court still") in prison. "I've been sent scripts, and these people love and enjoy violence, and get a buzz out of hurting others; think it's gee-whizz. Bartley Gorman wasn't that man. He'd seen violence and he'd inflicted it in his arena but he was so humane and brilliant and funny. He was the Muhammad Ali of the Gypsies." Considine would have to turn red-headed and put on at least three stone for the role. "It's possible." He sounds defiant. "Stallone's smaller than me, man. I'm ready to do it."

The only time Considine veers into luvvie territory is when he talks about his band, Riding the Low. This, I say, sounds a bit like Russell Crowe, or any of those actors who dabble in hobby bands and vanity projects. He says he warned his band. "I said, 'Actors in bands does not equal good stuff,' but I can assure you, man, we are good and we've got some great songs. I'm more excited about that. I can talk about it and get animated whereas I look at my acting work and I just think," he sighs, "I dunno - you decide."

I wonder at the similarities between Considine and Crowe: both express contempt for celebrity, are studiedly anti-metropolitan, form bands with dodgy names and love boxing. The pair worked with each other on boxing flick Cinderella Man but Considine does not think much of the comparison. "He [Crowe] was telling me about how he went to LA and had no money and he got paid nothing to do his first few jobs, and he grinded it out. That's the difference. I'm not doing that. I don't want the world and everything in it. I really don't. My only problem is the pressure I put on myself."

Considine wonders whether I am going to write about the "conspiracy" against him. Extras, he almost spits, give filmmakers a harder time than he does. "The people who know, know, and they would work with me any day of the week." He strides ahead with a new urgency, dragging the toes of his shoes into the footpath. "I just want to do a good job. What's wrong with that?" He is almost speaking to himself now. "I just don't want to be bull-shitted. What's wrong with that? What's wrong with that, son?"

Red Riding starts on Thursday, 9pm, Channel 4.

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- Red Riding Trailer
- Interview with Tony Grisoni - Screenwriter
- Interview with Sean Bean

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