Deppth

Selon Variety, l'acteur un peu rebelle aurait montré un intérêt tout particulier pour le livre de Mahidi Obeidi et Kurt Pitzer (journaliste au magazine Poeple), THE BOMB IN MY GARDEN. Il pourrait en acquérir les droits avec Initial Entertainment Group pour adapter cette histoire vraie au cinéma. Mahdi Obeidi est un physicien nucléaire irakien, ancien responsable du programme d'enrichissement de l'uranium en Irak vivant aujourd'hui aux Etats-Unis, dans un endroit tenu secret. Deux mois après la fin des combats, il s'est souvenu qu'il avait enterré dans son jardin des pièces de centrifugeuses, et des documents sur le programme nucléaire irakien en 1991. Dans son livre, il décrit dans le détail la quête de Saddam Hussein pour obtenir la bombe atomique. Mais le projet aurait été abandonné et l'Irak ne possédait de ce programme d'équipement nucléaire « que ce que nous avions dans nos têtes et les documents enterrés dans mon jardin », écrit le scientifique dans le livre qui a plu à l'acteur américain. Dans l'atmosphère tendue que fait peser aux Etats-unis la guerre en Irak, le film pourrait faire l'effet d'une bombe...

L'acteur américain Johnny Depp est tellemnnt heureux avec Vanessa Paradis, qu'il aimerait avoir 100 enfants. Depp a confié au magazine OK! « vous ne pouvez imaginer le genre d'amour que vous donne les enfants. La paternité ne fut pas une décision consciente, mais maintenant, je suis l'exemple parfait du père cliché dont je riais il y a quelques années. »
Et il ne semble pas trop s'en plaindre « je regarde en avant et j'aimerais avoir d'autres enfants. Une centaine si Vanessa est partante.* »
Il ajoute « pour moi, la famille est la chose la plus importante au monde. C'est votre fondation, vos racines. C'est le seul amour inconditionnel que vous avez. »
Cet homme est une perle...

* ce qui m'étonnerais !

Marie Rossinière, à propos de Pirates des Caraïbes :

" (...)Malgré ses qualités de spectacle familial à double détente – une lecture pour les parents, une autre pour les enfants – ce blockbuster vaut surtout pour le retour à Hollywood de Johnny Depp. Cela pourrait passer pour la concession d'un père de famille désireux d'assurer la pitance à sa progéniture, c'est au contraire l'affirmation définitive de son tempérament de gitan sédentaire. Loufoque, insolent, efféminé avec ses yeux passés au khôl, ses moulinets du poignet, ses bagues à chaque doigt et sa démarche titubante (il s'est inspiré, dit-on, de Keith Richard des Rolling Stone) Johnny Depp inscrit son personnage de Jack Sparrow quelque part entre l'orgueil idéaliste et un peu ridicule de Don Quichotte et la roublardise enjouée d'Arlequin, à l'image de son arrivée à Port-Royal, fier et burlesque, tout seul sur le mât de son bateau en train de couler. On ne peut rêver meilleure première apparition de personnage!

Johnny Depp et John Cusack se sont joints à la famille et aux amis du défunt scénariste Hunter S. Thompson pour un service commémoratif.
Le scénariste de Leaving Las Vegas s'est suicidé le mois passé à sa résidence du Colorado.
Conformément aux vœux de l'écrivain, seule la famille et les amis proches étaient invités à la célébration qui a eu lieu à l'hôtel Jerome à Aspen, au Colorado.
Depp et Cusack ont tous deux participé en 2003, aux côtés de Thompson, au documentaire sur la vie de l'écrivain intitulé Breakfast With Hunter.
Depp a également incarné Thompson dans le film culte de 1998 Leaving Las Vegas.

Si quelqu'un arrive a traduire ça, je l'en remrcierai vivement !

Johnny Depp is the first important actor of the hip-hop generation. Not because he's tucked deep into the heart of the hip-hop theatre movement (with its predictable cadences and bland riffs on performance art), but because he's the first actor to take the aesthetic of hip-hop and turn it into performances that have cultural resonance. Depp himself might not cop to being hip-hop; he comes from the world of rock and roll. In fact, being in an 80's rock band (The Kids) is what brought him to Hollywood in the first place – not acting. However, since putting down the guitar and picking up the script, Depp has been able to create performances that feel both familiar and edgy, mostly due to the fact that he takes stuff that's already out there and combines it in ways that no one could have expected. In his best roles the actor has sampled existing elements as diverse as Buster Keaton, The Tin Man, Pre-Teen Girls, Casey Kasem, and Hunter S. Thompson (among others), spinning them into something completely new. You could say that he's America's first successful Re-Mix actor. And what could be more hip-hop than that?
         Before we go any farther, though, let's define what we mean by "hip-hop." In this particular instance, "hip-hop" refers less to a particular brand of music than it does to a multi-racial, reference-based lifestyle that was made possible only through the visionary work of African American artists, particularly in the worlds of music, dance, and graffiti art. Hip-hop is of this time, it is of this place, and it is uniquely American. Johnny Depp's acting takes the best elements of a hip-hop consciousness – sampling, the recombination of disparate elements – and uses them to expand the craft of acting. In fact, most major advancements in the art of performance have been about taking what has come before and grinding it into something new. Think back...
         Eleanora Duse was a 19th century Italian actress, and company leader, who broke all the rules of her time. Back in the late 1800's, the rule of the day was ham acting, "spotlight performances" which were based more on oratory than on honesty. Duse's genius was in her departure from that style and into an acting mode that was much more quiet, subtle, and truthful. Her approach to acting was so influential that it prompted a Russian fan of her work, Constantin Stanislavski, to found a system that would be able to recreate it. It was Stanislavski's riff on Duse that helped define our 20th century approach to acting – and still forms the basis for most actor training today.
         Next, look at Lee Strasberg's advancement on Stanislavski's system. Strasberg's approach, with its focus on an individual's interior experience, sampled a small element of Stanislavski's system, Emotional Recall, and morphed it into what many refer to as "method acting." In an early-to-mid 20th century era when everyone was supposed to behave like things were "just fine" – and turn a blind eye to openly-tolerated racism, sexism, self-hatred, drug addiction, queer hatred, and downright homogenization – Strasberg's Actors Studio-based ideas helped a whole generation of actors, and America itself, come to grips with its insides. His active combination of both the inner and outer landscape is what redefined America's notion of "reality" as more relative than fixed. That notion was sampled by the next generation of artists, creatives who blew the roof off the idea.
         By the late 20th century, many artists were taking the idea of a relative reality beyond kitchen sink dramas and fourth-wall examinations of life. They decided to further fragment the artistic, and cultural, landscape by unleashing what can only be referred to as a gradual movement towards "post-everything." Post-Everything weakly describes the frenzy of performance that was set on departing from previous forms, deconstructing an easily graspable notion of experiential reality and discovering alternate modes of communication and presentation. Absurdism and Deconstructionist theatre, Performance Art and other experimental forms gradually bloomed on the scene, running parallel with the durable form of realism. And the acting of this era (with everything from Richard Pryor's comedy to The Wooster Group's theatrical experiments to the solo work of Karen Finley) was so schizophrenically diverse that it seemed to reflect a culture in search of its existential identity – a society wondering who were were, what we were doing, and how we could create a new artistic language.
         That search has led us to the next stage: hip-hop consciousness. This is a verboten term to some, because it seems to reflect a departure from a cold, analytical, Euro-centric world-view to a place that's more untested, not as codified, and, dare I say, more dark-skinned in its inception. Yet hip-hop is about much more than race, as so many African-American inventions, from Jazz to fashion to the way we talk, have proven. It is a big-tent culture that has given rise to artists of all hues. Back in the late 1970's, when a Jamaican-born DJ named Kool Herc first brought out his turntables and used contemporary (and older) records as a background for Masters of Ceremony, or as elements in a new type of Bronx-based party music, everything changed. Sampling was hatched, and the idea of using existing material as something vital, not merely nostalgic, was born. It's followed since that recombination has become the rule in our lives. And not just in music.
         Which is where we rejoin Johnny Depp.

        If Brando and Dean were exemplars of their emotionally conflicted times, and Post-Everything artists were reflections of a time when everything was in flux, then Depp is an expression of our age of readily available information. Thanks to the Internet and DVDs, every idea on performance, history, and the living arts is at our fingertips. And so, for this era, it's not about emotional recall anymore; it's about cultural recall. In Depp's widely varying performances his best acting happens when he steps away from the 20th century tradition of emotional realism, and even the forced eclecticism of Post-Everything art, and into this new form of sampled acting. Of Re-Mixed Acting.
         Depp's most savvy performances have been combinations of material that's already out there. In fact, he's the first performer whose genius almost completely relies on being able to work off of something that's extant; think of the way he mixes Casey Kasem's voice with Ronald Reagan's gestures in the film Ed Wood. He's like a DJ at the turntable, extending a break-beat from this source and mixing it with a horn blast from that source. And let's make something clear right now: Depp is not just copycatting. Anyone who's seen the actor at work knows that his creations are never simply Xerox copies; they are always uniquely filtered through the actor's peculiar sensibility, and that's what makes his work so great. It's old, it's new. It's right now.
         On the flip side of things, Depp's most stilted performances come when he's asked to work solely within the deadening form of "realism," or what passes for reality these days. For instance, compare his blank turns in What's Eating Gilbert Grape and Dead Man to the magic he creates in Benny & Joon or Pirates of the Caribbean. Or contrast his dead-on work in Donnie Brasco to the by-the-numbers bullcrap of Nick of Time. And it's not just about whether his material or fellow collaborators are off the mark – he's been able to elevate disasters like Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas into fascinating character studies – it's about the fact that when Johnny is allowed to sample, he rules. And when he's working from 20th century traditions...he still does quite well, but the work pales in comparison. Johnny Depp proves that a new age of acting is upon us. A heightened age. A hip-hop age.

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