JohnnyDeppReadsInterviews

John Michael Bolger, PUBLIC ENEMIES co-star

2009-02-15T11:49:00.000-08:00

Photo by Michelle Martin used with permission

Slight spoiler warning!

As you all know, NY actor John Michael Bolger, who played Lt. Johnson for four seasons on "Third Watch" was cast this year as Chicago cop Martin Zarkovich, a pivotol role in this summer's blockbuster "PUBLIC ENEMIES."

John came to everyone's attention when he was seen quietly and unobtrusively greeting the fans on location, day after day, night after night. John was second only to Johnny as he was there too, giving and giving.

Here's a youtube clip of John on location

I want to thank Rachel and Jill for their kind assistance. Thanks to Elizabeth Herzog and Michelle Martin the kind use of their pictures!

John Micheal Bolger website:

Click here: John Michael Bolger Online

John Michael Bolger can be reached at: jmbonline@yahoo.com

I hope you will see the humble and giving man that is John Michael Bolger. He spoke with me openly and from his heart, and was very generous with his time. I thank him sincerely.

JohnnyDeppReads talks with:

John Michael Bolger

JDR: So John, tell me a little about your book "Stoop to Conquer".

JMB: What a nice question to ask. I was born and raised a Catholic and went to Catholic school and the nuns taught me penmanship and I always knew when I was a kid that I wanted to be an actor and it took me a long time to get around to it, I didn't start til I was twenty seven years old, but I always knew in the back of my mind that I was going to use this penmanship someday! And I wrote a book, I started it in 2001, it took me seven years to write it, it's a coming of age story about Hell's Kitchen - where I lived in 1980, seen through the eyes of one kid, Frances Doonan. About these seventeen year old kids growing up in 1980, just a coming of age story. I wrote it, it was hard, it was painful, it was cathartic, it was revelatory and now I'm hoping to get it published, hoping to somehow get it related to the movie when it comes out. I'd love that. It's also got "movie" written all over it. It's also a book about something, like a message to kids that their whole life doesn't happen in one summer or in one month or in one age. You have a long road ahead of you if you can somehow get through those tender years, ya know?

JDR: So is there a little bit of a personal element there?

JMB: Absolutely, absolutely.

JDR: We are all about reading (on jdr) so when you are published we'll have it for one of our book discussions.

JMB: Thank you very much.

JDR: Would you be so kind to talk to us then about it?

JMB: Absolutely, I'll talk to you any time you want.

JDR: You are wonderful! Are you still living in the Hell's Kitchen area of NY?

JMB I am.

JDR: It's sort of a community in transition?

JMB: It is, but what it's becoming, I sort of miss the old neighborhood. I miss the funk!

JDR: You've played a lot of police officers in your career as I look at your listings on IMDb!

JMB: That's very astute of you! :) But ya know, I'm not going to complain because it pays the bills and from stereotype, I can do so much more than that, but not as of yet.

JDR: They LOVE you as a policeman, so many roles!

JMB: It's because I've got this Irish mug, and I think my Shakespearian trained voice doesn't help the situation either. (he laughs) But like I said, I'm not complaining! If they want to keep casting me that way? Cool!

JDR: You were in Third Watch..Law and Order...really good roles in the series.

JMB: I was in Third Watch for four years, I've been very blessed, I've been extremely blessed. I hope the blessings continue. As you know, you have a nice knowledge of the industry, you can work non stop for years and then not work for years, so you've just got to somehow keep your foot in the water and remember your swimming strokes.

JDR: Talking about keeping yourself in the water, you have done a boat load of TV work, and I'm looking at the number of years that you have put into your craft and then BOOM comes this huge Michael Mann film!

JMB: I'll tell you a great story, at the age of twenty seven I got sober, quit and got fired at the same time from a job that I had worked in for ten years, since I got out of high school. And decided to pursue my childhood dream to be an actor because I always loved James Cagney and I always just wanted to be an actor. But I never told anybody, I never was in a school play, I never did anything. I knew inside, I knew deep inside that someday this is where I would end up, I didn't know how I was going to get there, but I knew I would end up there. And apart from getting fired by my public service job, I started to enter in the world of taking acting classes and going around the Actors Studio where I eventually became a member of the Actors Studio. My very first professional job was on a show called "Crime Story" - Michael Mann and Bonnie Timmermann was the casting director. That was twenty years ago. That was one of the better received "Crime Stories," people had always said to me during that time that Michael Mann loves you, Michael Mann loved that episode, he loves you. In the time since, I've told my representation that you've got to get me into that Michael Mann project, he loves me. Twenty years later? I'm back with Michael Mann. He gave me my first break in television and this is a big shot for me in this movie. So...look at that. There's a French word "la ronde" which means full circle and it's just like a full circle to me. It's like back to the beginning again.

JDR: What's up next for you?

JMB: I have no idea.

JDR: Isn't that the wonderful thing about acting though? You never know when that next phone call will come and your whole world will be changed again?

JMB: I humbly wait at the end of the line. This has been a wonderful year for me, I can't complain, I can't sigh or I can't moan in any way. Just working on that film alone, I have good thoughts and hopes for the film and who knows.

JDR: Judging my what we've seen and heard this film could be very well received. You are going to found by a whole new audience out there that didn't know you existed, didn't see your years on TV.

JMB: Yeah I'm excited about that.

JDR: Do you think that might open some new doors?

JMB: You know, I hope so. I've been plugging away at this for quite a while and the thing about entering into the acting world when you're a bull in a china shop is in the beginning in my case, you don't know what to do, you don't know what NOT to do. I've probably made a few mistakes along the way, but I hope what it shows people is that if you have perseverance and tenacity and you're willing to grow and you're willing to hang in. 'Cuz it's about hanging in, believing in yourself which can sometimes take a person a whole lifetime to just be able to say that. Even upon saying that you still have doubts. I'm excited about the fact that I know Johnny's got an incredible following so I'm excited about the fact that my face is going to be seen by a whole lot of people, on Johnny's back, which I am happy to do.

JDR: This is such a cross marketable film...all the fans of Bale, Depp, Tatum, older people who lived the depression...

JMB: I also think to add to your thought, the times we're living in right now are so similar to those times, and I'm sure that Universal and Michael and everybody's aware of that. Even while we were making the film, while I was doing my own personal research, I went my God this could literally be a story told today. Also there's an incredible boatload of actors as well. Growing up I loved the old Warner Bros. films, like I said, James Cagney...there's just so many characters, mugs and faces and energies, it's going to be interesting, like a big pot of soup.

JDR: You just brought up doing your research, tell me what kind of research that your did to play Det. Martin Sarkovich?

JMB: When I first went into the part, I knew that there was a book, I understand that you've interviewed the writer of the book.

JDR: Yes, and he's a very nice man.

JMB: I went and read the book and ate the pages and then because of my extensive background of playing police officers, there's a mind set that police officers have, so I sort of have that. And then when I got to Chicago there was a lot of material available to me from Michael and from the research team. And then believe it or not, I had these wonderful things happen to me like one time when I came from New York, because I wasn't there for the length of the film, I was there about five different times for big periods of time but then I would leave and come back. One time I came in and got picked up at the airport by this big, older driver and we got to talking on the way in and there was snow and there was traffic and he said to me...yeah what're ya doing?...and I said well ya know I'm working on this film "Public Enemies" and he said "oh yeah" and it turned out that his father there on the night of the shooting, his father was a Chicago cop. So I had little magic things happen to me like that and it turned out that his father knew Zarkovich, so I had these incredible, wonderful. mythical mystical things happen to me. Then this character I played had a nickname, he was called either the "peacock" or the "sheik" because he dressed very well, he too the money and likened himself to be a gangster and a swell dresser with the madam girlfriend. I was walking through Madison, WI where we were filming and I walked into a store, a boutique and before I left there this lady said, I'd like to give you something, and she gave me a peacock feather not knowing...not having any clue. So that peacock feather? I clipped it and wore it on the inside of my pocket through the whole filming. I just had things like that happen to me that put me right there. I'm also a method actor so I was really into Zarkovich, there are still aspects of him peeling away from me. I'm trying to put him to rest, you know we literally had to take these people out of their graves.

JDR: Had you ever played a character that was real person before Zarkovich?

JMB: No, this was the first time.

JDR: Is it harder to capture someone who was a real person?

JMB: It is, because the way I go about it is that I'm aware of the fact that this was a human being and I felt my responsibility was to try to play him as fairly and as honestly as I could... and a responsibility to his soul, if that makes any sense. There were a lot of things about Martin Zarkovich's story that really disturbed me personally because be betrayed. BUT he betrayed Dillinger for the love of his life. And there were a lot of extremely painful moments for me personally during this film portraying Zarkovich realizing the tumult and the pain and the hell that this man went through and ended up living the rest of his days in. It was quite an interesting journey and it took a lot of me.

JDR: I was going to ask you about playing someone who while he loved his Anna Sage, he was basically a dirty cop.

JMB: Yeah he was a bad dude, a bad dude. I believe the only person who meant anything to him at all was Anna. He was just a bad dude. It was interesting because I remember hearing an interview by Anthony Hopkins who I think's a wonderful actor and he was doing a mini series for ABC playing Adolph Hitler and about three days into the filming the producers called him up and told him that he was making this guy likeable and I remember Anthony Hopkins saying every person has a person who likes them and there's got to be a likeability as well as evilness, the bad as well as the good to make a well rounded person. So I kept thinking about that, even though Zarkovich just a prick, I'm sorry, I don't know how else to say it. But there was something that was likeable about him too, he was some mother's son. The internal tug of war was unbelievable.

JDR: So how did you come home alone and work through this character after filming all day?

JMB: When you work the way I work, it's better that I came home alone and wrestled with the demons, you're a smart woman to ask me that question because I'm still wrestling with some of Zarkovich. I'll carry him for the rest of my days and there were moments ......whew....there were subtle moments in this film that I will never forget, ever. Where nothing had to be said and nothing had to be done, I just felt it deep in my core that will always be there.

JDR: In talking with you today, I have to say that so much of what you share are like what Depp shares as an actor, he like you and Anthony Hopkins say that they strive to make something of an unlikeable character likeable because as you've said, that character has someone who loves them. Depp did that with murderer Sweeney Todd, found a bit of him that people saw as a human being.

JMB: Johnny and I didn't get to spend a lot of time together because it was just insane ...but we liked one another, I am sure of that and we connected and we had a couple of scenes together and whenever we saw one another we were very warm to one another, there was a connection for sure, I am sure of that. When it came time that we were coming to the segment of the shooting I would weep. I would just weep. Because I felt so bad. The way I was brought up, the way I was raised and the way I live my life is that the one thing you do is you have honor, you do not betray anybody. And you do not betray your friends and it still irks me, because I know that Martin Zarkovich after the whole thing was said and done they ended up deporting Anna Sage and he ended up living his life sort of in silence, he never spoke about it again and sort of drifted away. There's a great story "The Cask of Amontillado" by Edgar Allen Poe, he must have lived in his own cask of Amontillado, that's the part that haunts me. I remember looking at Johnny and I uttered under my words "I'm sorry kid". When you look in his (Johnny's) eyes there's a whole reservoir of humanity there. And it was killing me. It killed me. It killed me. Plus Anna Sage was the love of Zarkovich's life..there was a whole lot going on, that I (my character) was afraid for her sake and our safety. I just went back to my religion and I just thought about what Judas Iscariot must have felt like for those pieces of silver...he ended up hanging himself. It was deep, I took it to a deep level, I hope it shows.
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And I have to add on a personal note, that this man was completely open and giving, I did edit out some personal chit chat between us, but other than those things, this is exactly what he said to us, the fans. Towards the end of the interview is a special message that he wanted shared with you all, his fans. So John, I am fulfilling my promise to you with humble honor.

JDR: Let me ask you a different type of question, do you know why I wanted to talk with you?

JMB: I don't.

JDR: It didn't have anything to do with Depp, but it did. It was when I saw a clip of you on youtube saying so many really gracious things to the fans. Next to Johnny, you were the one who was out there with the fans after filming day after day. Being such a gentleman to the fans who were there, you gave of yourself. I said to myself that I wanted to try to contact this man, that this man was kind to the fans and we thank you for that.

JMB: Thank you, as I said to the fans, without them, I'm nobody, I'm just another John Doe on the street. And those fans were my safety net. I knew that whenever I came back from wherever I'd been, if I fell, that they'd be there for me. And I knew that their love and their support and their smiles and all their faces were all apart of the experience. I would see them, they were just a whole part of the experience. They kept me going so many times that you don't know.... My credo is I've never met a fan I didn't like, if somebody is going to take the time to walk over to me or say hello to me or smile at me or look for my attention...you know actors, we're all little kids who didn't work our stuff out so we're trying to work it out now, we're turning our pain into art and the fact that anybody would go out of their way on the planet to be nice to me or get my attention then they can approach me any time they want.

JDR: YOU are quite a remarkable gentleman!

JMB: Thank you very much.

JDR: May we speak about Michael Mann? You've worked with him in television and twenty years later in the movies, is he the same man?

JMB: When I worked with him in television he was the executive producer he wasn't the director, although he was around. Do you want my opinion of Michael Mann?

JDR: I'd love to hear what you'd like to share with us!

JMB: My opinion of Michael Mann is George Patton on top of a jeep driving through the snow with bullets flying. I would work for this guy anywhere, anytime, any place, for any amount of money, anywhere. I don't know anyone else's opinion and I frankly don't care about anybody else's opinion, this man treated me with respect, gave me an incredible part, put me in a great position and I have never seen a dynamo and this isn't and actor sucking up to a director. The job's done. I've never seen a man like this in my life. We were out one night filming on the famed, fabled Lake Michigan and within four seconds the weather went from being pristine to like the end of the world. And I watched this man running with equipment in the wind, this man is "first in and last out" he was, if he called me right now and said "John start walking to Chicago, I've got something for ya" I'd say, Karen, I gotta go. That's my opinion of Michael Mann. I can't say enough about Michael Mann and that's the truth, that's from my heart, that's not hoping he'll hire me again. I mean that. Michael Mann is one of THE most passionate, driven people.

I want to tell you as I'm talking to you right now I'm looking at a poster that's been on my wall my whole life and it's called "Public Enemies" ...it's a James Cagney movie that I've had in my possession forever. And I'm in a movie called "Public Enemies" I mean you can do the math any way you want. Michael Mann... I got to stand there and watched him in the most unbelievable situations whether it was ego or weather or demographics or logistics or all of the above at the same time coming down with the unknown, he handled it. He handled it with aplomb and grace. The man is the bomb. And I mean that. The man gave me permission, what do we look for in life, we look for an "atta boy" - we look for permission, we look for somebody to take notice of us, we look for somebody to see us across a room.

JDR: So you feel that as an actor, the way he treated you enabled you in the role?

JMB: ABSOLUTELY! And you know he's got a method to his madness, he knows exactly what he's doing. He would have you psychologically set up to be right where you were supposed to be without even knowing it. It was just brilliant what he was doing and he couldn't have been more graceful with me, sometimes he wouldn't talk, he'd just come over and put his hand on me and that was enough. A lot of people in this industry need to realize first that we're blessed when we get to do this and second we have a responsibility to humanity because we get to portray the human spirit, we go where other people don't get to go. And that there needs to be a little more respect for the craft and a there needs to be a little more respect for people called directors because they're the ones that are ultimately going to put it all together in the end and that doesn't just pertain to this project, it pertains to every project I've ever done. Michael Mann ran a first rate, first class operation, where we didn't want for nothing, we didn't need for nothing, we were treated like gold. All the way, first class from the beginning to the end. Given everything we needed to live, everything we needed to be creative. Everything, everything. The top, the best...cameramen, costumers...everything was the best.

And I hope Michael Mann gets the Academy Award for it, he has quite a body of work and he deserves it for this.

JDR: Well Universal has this film as it's tent pole film next summer, so I hope there's a big push for the film at awards time.

JMD: Gee I'm feeling like Will Smith all of a sudden! (we laugh)

JDR: Zarkovich was a bad dude, but was there any joy there at all for you?

JMB: Let me see, my first scene in the movie, there was a lot of joy because I was awaiting him and I was with her (Anna Sage) and I knew once I saw him we were going to get a pile of money and I was going to be able to eat steak with baked potatoes, carry on, buy a new suit, act like a big shot and treat my baby nice and life was going to go along swimmingly. That's about it though. From there on it was a battle for Zarkovich's soul.

JDR: As an actor knowing the outcome, was it that much harder for you?

JMB: I tried to sort of hypnotize myself that I didn't, that I was going to go moment to moment. And you know it was so disjointed for me, it wasn't like I was there and we did it chronologically so I had to sort of psych myself up. Zarkovich was with me all the time and when I would come back to NY, he was with me and people would say to me "what's up with you?" and it was too much to explain. Colleen Atwood, the greatest costume designer on the planet, when she would give me some of these clothes, shoes and just these little things, like the uniform..so I tried to take it moment to moment, I tried to imagine what he went through. It's in your soul, it's a deep, dark place. I always look at acting as if it were an Olympic swimming event and there's three types of actors, you have the first type of actor who wears the speedo, looks great, dives in the water, barely makes a splash, swims end to end, comes out, doesn't even look wet. Looks great. You have the second kind of actor, wears the speedo, looks great, but does something else in the water, does the butterfly, breaks it up a little bit, then you've got the actor that I am, that I think I am, the actors that I really care about you show up, you're probably not in a bathing suit, you find the deepest end of the pool, you dive in, you make a really big splash and you hope that people wait for you to come back up. If that makes any sense to you at all.

JDR: That makes great sense and so that also gives me a question, what swimmer is Johnny Depp?

JMB: He's my swimmer. Absolutely my swimmer.

JDR: Can you give something about him, a one word description maybe?

JMB: Soul. Soul. Soul. You look in eyes and there it is. Right there. There's no mistake in why he's a movie star, he's a gorgeous guy, he's got the suave, he's got the look, he's got the grace, he's got the moves but...when you look deep in his eyes? There's the soul. It's like a mine of gold. And that's what Tim Burton and anyone who uses him, they know. It's his soul, it's right there.

JDR: I hope that we can visit again maybe when the movie comes out? You've been such a great man to talk with!

JMB: I would like that very much! Now, could you do me a favor?

JDR: Yes of course!

JMB: I would like you to give my love and my best regards to all the fans and tell them that the brightness of their eyes and the depth of their smiles will stay with me forever and that I wish them well and I hope that we meet again.

JDR: I will get great joy out of doing that!

JMB I mean that. While we were doing this film, I mean we worked inordinate hours, there were people all around at the hotel, the Starbucks...and they got to know me and I got to know them and then we knew each other by name and they would see me like sleepwalking, staggering through the street. It's just part of the process, the hours, it's just part of the deal, no complaints. There were just fans there, the things they said, they'll never know.. little things they said, or did.

JDR: They will know because I will tell them.

JMB: It's the people who you remember along the way, that may say something to you or change your course. The fans, where ever we went? There they were and they'll never know how much they played a big part in keeping me going.

JDR: I promise you, they WILL know it because I will write it for you. Fans react to you because of what they got from you. You gave to the fans. It's an interaction. You shared with the fans and that's why I wanted to talk to you.

JMB: One of my favorite sayings comes from William Faulkner when he accepted his Nobel Peace Prize in 1956, I think, the year I was born, he said "when the last ding-dong of doom has clanged and faded from the last worthless rock hanging tide less in the last red and dying evening, that even then there will still be one more sound: that of his puny inexhaustible voice, still talking.". And that's something that keeps me going.

JDR: You've just portrayed a tortured human spirit.

JMB: Yes, one of them, and I'd like to put him to rest. Life is pretty simple, you're born, you learn integrity, dignity and compassion, sense of humor, some grace, manners and you're gone. You hope maybe you left a mark.

**This interview is copyright © 2004-2008 JohnnyDeppReads.com and may not be reprinted or reposted in any form without permission. Please use a link back to share. Thanks

Ellen Poulsen, author, DON'T CALL US MOLLS

2009-01-25T14:10:00.000-08:00

I was fortunate to be able to speak with the wonderful Ellen Poulsen about her fascinating book "Don't Call Us Molls" telling the stories of the women of the Dillinger gang.

Clinton Cook Publishing Corp. Copyright c. 2002 by Ellen Poulsen

Please find some time to look around on her site, it's fabulous and full of information and photos and all sorts of things about these women, who didn't want to be called "molls." http://dillingerswomen.com/index.html

I am grateful to her for her generosity of time and information!! And I thank her also for her patience in seeing this here on JDR.

JohnnyDeppReads talks with Ellen Poulsen:

JDR -This is one amazing book that you've written! Thank you for speaking to me about your book "Don't Call us Molls"

EP - Thank you for your interest, I appreciate that.

JDR - There's been a lot of interest in the women of the Dillinger gang lately because of the Depp film Public Enemies. So many people have read your book and we are discussing it on JDR.

EP - That's really funny, because when I thought of writing the book back in 1986, somebody said to me "oh and there'll be five people who will read it." Things have changed a lot since then, there's a lot of interest in Dillinger and that era now.

JDR - And with this movie being filmed, your book is right up there with the good books about Dillinger and his gang. Being a Depp fan site, we are primarily women of all ages reading these books and waiting for this movie.

EP - Count me in as a Johnny Depp fan, I love him!

JDR - There are so many people now who have no recollection of the depression. Can you speak about the women with these men? How or why did they cling to these men who were very obviously gangsters?

EP - I think that the money factor was an important one, but I don't think it was the ONLY factor. You see, for some of them like Pat Cherrington who was one of the women hanging around with John Dillinger's friend Red Hamilton, it was definitely economic need that motivated them to seek out men who were "gangsters" if you want to call them that or guys who were involved in crimes. Because they had a lot of primary needs that weren't being met...like it was a very common thing for them (the women) to go to the dentist after they got a boyfriend like that. Also Pat Cherrington had a series of operations, she had a lot of problems in her stomach and there was no health insurance back then, in fact the social blankets that we have now really didn't kick in until Franklin Delano Roosevelt's administration. They didn't have things like social security, etc. They didn't have the things that Americans take for granted. They had to find some way of getting by, of getting the things that they needed. But the thing is, a lot of women were in the same boat in those days - they didn't have any money and they needed things. Why did this particular group end up with gangsters like Dillinger? I think the roots of that are just in who they happened to know. Like Evelyn Frechette, who was John Dillinger's girlfriend, was going out with men on the fringes of crime as far back as the 1920s. And she had no interest in the boys who lived on the reservation. You know she was a Native American and she was of the Menominee tribe, she was a bad apple, she had a bad reputation within the reservation for being a woman who liked to run around. So she ended up in Milwaukee and Chicago and she married a man who was sitting in the county jail waiting to be shipped to Leavenworth and she married him, and so she was already involved with the criminal element when she met John Dillinger.

I know there was some hype, she told some newspapers that she didn't know who he was, but I'm sure she did. A lot of times these women ended up with people like that because of family relationships. There were three sisters who were involved in the Barker Karpas gang and they were as young as sixteen years old when these girls started going out with men like this when they were so young. It was almost impossible for them to change the core, you sort of brand yourself as a loser, more or less, when you start going out with men who have prison records or who are going into prison or committing crimes, so they had no real way out once they got involved in it. Something really interesting is that a lot of them were what I call "sister acts" because one sister would go out with a gangster and then her sister would go out with another gangster in the same mob and sometimes even a third sister would go out with someone because the mobsters liked women of that element, women who could be trusted not to talk, not to tell police anything, women who could stand up under pressure if they were arrested. So there was such a combination of factors there. I think the final factor was sometimes that they started out so young and so innocent with these men, before these men really became the big gangsters that we know. For example Baby Face Nelson was basically dealing in stolen car parts and he was a real low level criminal in Chicago when his girlfriend got pregnant, she was sixteen. By the time she had two children she was nineteen and he was public enemy number one and she went to jail on a federal harboring charge. So I mean they started out as just dating guys from the neighborhood and they ended up as very, very notorious women who probably never had a chance to live down their reputations.

JDR - As I read your book, I was struck by the idea that Evelyn for instance, bought fine clothing and jewelry and had a little dog with her. Stepping away from the fact that these guys were criminals, it's like these guys were the rock stars of their time and the women were their groupies. You pointed out that when they had money they got dental and medical care, yet as a group they could be rather outlandish and didn't always blend in as much as they could have. And yet so often they had to just walk away from these things.

EP - Also they sent money home, I don't know if that was guilt...but that was also a part of it, to help out relatives who were also indigent. But you know that they all weren't extremely poor. I know that Evelyn was, only because I personally visited her home on the reservation, and even as recent as ten or fifteen years ago it seemed very much an impoverished place. Although very proud in tradition, and not to be disparaging at all in saying that, it's a wonderful culture but economically they didn't seem to be really up and coming. But they weren't all extremely poor. Mary Kinder was pretty much a middle class person, the house that she lived in in Indianapolis was a fairly nice house by middle class or working class standards. Not all came from poor, poor backgrounds but I guess enough of them did.

EP - That's a very interesting observation, that these men were the rock stars and the women were their groupies.

JDR - Thanks! These women weren't just hangers on because these women loved these men. These women were absolutely with these men. I remember where you talk in the book about the women buying the cars for then, Evelyn driving the car for them.

EP - Oh yes!

JDR. I just loved the pictures that you found of them! They are fabulous! How did you find them? (go here to see many of her vintage photos http://dillingerswomen.com/index.html )

EP - Thank you very much. Well, I collected for such a long time that I guess I accumulated them over the years, if I found out that something was going up for sale. Those pictures pre-date the e-bay revolution or being able to find things online. I used to be able to walk right into the Associated Press wide world because I lived in New York City and I could look through the boxes (of photos) of that era and you see them reproduced in the books but you can't imagine how beautiful those photographs were in print form. Because the photo journalism of that era was magnificent, they really took some incredible black and white photos.

JDR - There is a part in your book where you talk about John Dillinger's niece Mary, and the fact that his sister took pictures and brought them to Dillinger so that he could have them. BUT on the back she had written that they were to be returned to her. Were these returned?

EP - Mary Gallagher was his niece. I don't know for sure if they were returned to her. I know that there were attempts made to get photos back for family members. Sam Cowley, the FBI agent who was in charge of eveything was killed by Baby Face Nelson and Melvin Purvis was demoted and eventually fired, yet I don't know who would have been in charge of getting those pictures. I have my doubts that they got those pictures back through regular channels. I know the Dillinger family had a lot of stuff that they sold over the years to the museum. But that's another chapter in Dillinger lore.

JDR - While we are speaking about pictures, there's a fabulous picture in your book with three women, I think Pat Cherrington is in the middle...

EP - Yes that's fabulous!

JDR - Yes the clothing and the demeanor and the stances of the women ... these are women that you don't want to mess with.

EP - That's right!

JDR - Was there anything about any of these women shooting anyone?

EP - Oh that's a great question! I don't think anybody's ever asked me that question. That picture actually has one of those "sister acts" that I was talking about. The big lady, Opal Long? Her sister is Pat Cherrington. Shooting anybody? You know there was a mythological story about a woman named Kathryn Kelly and she wasn't in the Dillinger gang but she's part of that school, she's the wife of Machine Gun Kelly, and she's one of those. like Evelyn Frechette, there's such a mystique around this particular woman. She was rumored to have shot her husband, her first husband, and he was found shot to death and there was a suicide note that said something like "I can't live with her or without her"..something like that, she was always rumored to have been the one to have shot him and left the suicide note. BUT I have to stress that's never been proven. All we know is that he died, he was shot and there was a note and most people attribute that to Kathryn Kelly. But as far as any of the other ones ever taking a gun and shooting it at another person? No, I can't really say. The only instance where it's hotly contested is Ma Barker, another woman from that ilk. In fact in "Don't Call Us Molls" there's one or two chapters in the back devoted to Ma Barker and at her death, she was killed in an FBI ambush. She was purportedly found with a smoking gun. That again has been disputed by historians. I'm just trying to pick my brain to see if I can think of any other instances ...no. In terms of getting these men, particularly the Dillinger gangsters, out of tight spots, the women more or less drove the cars when they had to or they very quickly packed up and got themselves out of these hideouts. They weren't really the ones who used the fire arms to any great extent. There's another exception of course, Bonnie Parker, who is considered to have been a "loader." There was an interview that was in "Playboy" magazine by one of the gang members of the Bonnie and Clyde gang, he said that she was a "loader" not a shooter. And I know that she did manage to shoot herself one time with a firearm. She shot herself in the leg. There really isn't any instance of these women acting out violently with firearms.

To get back to the Dillinger gang women, they were more or less along for the ride, they figured the kind of jobs that they had to do, they rented apartments, they opened safe deposit boxes to keep stolen money in, they were in charge of communication - like sending telegrams because in those days there wasn't any email, or make a telephone call.

JDR - Towards the end of the book, you wrote about speaking with Evelyn's last husband.

EP Yes, I spoke with Art Tic, he was also a Menominee.

JDR - What a fabulous opportunity to talk with this man, what was he like?

EP - He was very nice, some of the things he said were kind of off the wall. He said that she liked wearing skirts, that she never wore slacks. And some researcher friends of mine found pictures of her wearing bell bottoms! (we laughed) Well, so much for that.

JDR - We had been wondering about that quote on the forum, as we had seen some of the pictures coming from location and we know that the costumer, Colleen Atwood, is always as accurate as possible.

EP- YES! She contacted me and I sent her a book.

JDR - She (Colleen) has "Billie" in slacks in what looks to be several scenes including one scene where the Evelyn Frechette "character" is dressed in mens wear in order to meet John Dillinger.

EP I can't comment on that because I didn't see it, but is it a kind of wide legged, sort of a pajama?

JDR - Yes, it appears to be maybe a pajama, a wide legged pant and a raincoat and a hat, perhaps she's trying to somehow disguise herself?

EP There is a photograph that didn't get into "Don't Call us Molls" but it did get published in a book called "Dillinger:Dead or Alive" by J. Robert Nash and that publishes a photograph of Evelyn Frechette wearing a raincoat, a sailor cap and pants. So maybe the costume designer copied it right from that, her hair is a bit longer in that picture and it's assumed that the photograph was taken sometime in the late 1920s. In fact, in that picture Evelyn is standing with a man who's got a gun sticking out from beneath his jacket. So that was kind of proof positive that she always had a taste for men from the underworld. In fact there's another photograph that I have somewhere, which again I got this after I finished the book, where Evelyn is standing in that same outfit and she's standing next to a girl friend of hers that was mentioned several times in the book Vivian Warrington. That's the lady who was friendly with Evelyn up in the reservation as it's mentioned several times in the book and Evelyn is posing in that same outfit next to her friend Vivian, that was identified to me by somebody I spoke to at the Menominee reservation. So obviously that outfit (in the film) was taken from real life.

JDR - Was there anything that you learned about Evelyn that surprised you in any way? That may have been out of character? A juicy tidbit maybe?

EP - It's said that Evelyn used to snatch ashtrays from places she'd been.

JDR - Polly Hamilton, I think she's kind of an interesting character, she wasn't around as long as the other women, she came in and then took off and disappeared. What happened to her after John Dillinger was shot?

EP - Well apparently she did, the woman in red, Anna Sage, tried to keep Polly's name out of this. She actually got Polly out of Chicago and they went to Detroit for a while to get away from the heat. And then Polly and Anna Sage had a parting of the ways and Polly went back to her home and laid low for a very long time and ended up coming back to Chicago and marrying a salesman and lived in the "old town" section of Chicago proper for the rest of her life. And lived completely anonymously. The same life style was adopted by Opal Long, who was the heavy woman in that photograph. Opal Long married a man who was very loosely identified with the Dillinger era, he was a newspaper man who was friendly with Pearl Elliot who was the prostitute who was harboring John DIllinger. She married this man and lived in Chicago anonymously and it's interesting that they all died between the years of 1969 and 1971, they all died around the same time and Opal Long is buried in Chicago under a different name and Polly was cremated so there's no grave to visit for Polly and they were able to live anonymously. It's amazing that they were able to do that. Polly got completely out of the Dillinger loop, Anna Sage did not. Anna Sage was deported, but Polly didn't have such a sterling background. She was a prostitute and she worked as a prostitute for Anne Sage. They both had a very long record. And because of Anna Sage's connections, because she was very friendly with Sgt. Martin Zarkovich, she was able to have her records... she never did any time...it was sort of like a revolving door situation. She never had to face the music for anything that she did until she got involved with Dillinger.

JDR - While you were writing about these women was there a favorite of yours?

EP - (she laughs) Over the years my favorites have come and gone. When I was a little girl I had this interest in them and Mary Kindle was my favorite. She was the girlfriend of Harry Pierpont, but that was basically because she was quoted quite eloquently in John Toland's book " The Dillinger Days" and that was the book. Dillinger people didn't have much to read in those days. Basically " The Dillinger Days" and Joe Pinkston's book "A Short and Violent Life", and both of those books quoted Mary (Kindle) so much that she just came across as a very colorful, very tough, wise cracking person and I think she was, that was confirmed to me by Jeff Scalf who was John Dillinger's nephew. He went to visit her and brought her flowers and she took the flowers out of his hand and she threw them on the counter.

I think my real favorite is Patricia Cherrington, of course we all love Evelyn, that goes without saying but Pat Cherrington, the lady in the picture, in the middle with the cigarette. About two years ago a couple of my fellow researchers and some sympathetic people to her, chipped in and we put a head stone on her grave in Chicago. On my website you can see information about that and so that's what we did for Pat Cherrington. I went to visit the grave many times in Chicago and it always seemed so forlorn. They used to put a traffic cone on her grave site because people wanted to see where she was buried. So we went from a traffic cone to a monument and we put a cross on it. At around the same time some family members contacted me and I got their permission to do it. I don't think I really needed it after so many years but it was nice to get their blessing. We determined her religion was Baptist. The only reason I know this is because her sister's the big gal, her prison record - which amounted to one page - indicated that she had been a Baptist. So we felt that it was OK to put a cross on her grave. I thought she was a very sympathetic person, I think because she had a child and I think that it was poignant that she had to go through this whole life style, to use a new catch phrase, as a single mother, she had to leave the child with her sister quite a lot and with other people, her gangster boyfriend Russell Clark, his family took care of her child.

JDR - Well it's good that somebody stepped up to take care of the poor child caught in the middle...

EP - Yes, thank you, she was a poor child caught in the middle and it's an interesting testimonial to the families of the these desperados, that they were human beings. I mean Russell Clark's mother had Pat Cherrington's child living in her house with her in Detroit. You know Russell Clark was one of the gang, it's that the family members of these gangsters were not bad people and they were pretty much victimized big time because of what happened to their loved ones.

JDR - We've all seen the small news reel clip of John Dillinger's father speaking and you've written about how painful it was for John Dillinger to see that in the theater, to see his dad reading basically from a script about his son not being a bad person.

EP - Evelyn spoke about those clips in one of those interviews she gave with the Chicago Herald and Examiner "my Life with John Dillinger", she said that it was very hard for him to see his father in that news reel. I wonder if it brought it home to him too just how much he was going to lose, to be killed or brought to justice.

JDR - You can't even begin to imagine what went through their minds, I think these are all tragic people, who were just kind of caught in a web at a time and a place, especially during the depression.

EP - I agree with you about that. And the poverty went back before the depression.

JDR - These were just very poor people.

EP - With no access also to education. I always said Bonnie Parker, who was a talented poet, had she had the means in those days to maybe, I like to say, come to New York, live on the lower east side, take some courses, lead a fulfilling life. She was a creative woman who had no outlet and I think that she saw in Clyde an opportunity for the big creative splash that she had to make. Bonnie's been called a drama queen by some of the men I know who have written books about Bonnie and Clyde. And I bet you'll understand, I always say that was a gross put down because a drama queen is kind of disparaging.

JDR - She was in a way, trapped, no way out, no way up. There she was and along comes Clyde, thug that he was, and paid attention to her.

EP - And gave her a way to express herself you know with all of the fast cars, and the guns and the shoot outs and she wrote these poems about life on the run with Clyde and they were very evocative first person accounts of life on the run, and I think that her life would have gone another way. Our era, for all of the things you could say about the bad things that are happening in the world today we definitely have more opportunities than these people had, economic or opportunites for education and the lack of education is a factor. But you know something, they were not really illiterate women, I mean they wrote letters and some of them are pretty funny to read.

JDR I really like that you put those letters in your book. I remember reading old letters that my grandmother wrote her sister at about the same time, and their phraseology back then was so different than what we say today. That's the way they wrote, that's they way they talked...they were farm people.

EP - Evelyn was educated in the Indian school and she had a nice way of writing, they all were literate and they were basically, I guess, grade school educated or basic high school, without any real vocational training. But that was pretty much the norm for a lot of people in those days.

JDR - You've been so generous with your time today, I don't want to take up too much more of your time.

EP - No, as long as you want to talk.

JDR - You are quite nice to do this.

If there was one thing that you wanted people to understand about these "Dillinger" women what would it be?

EP - I think that for posterity the most important thing to remember is that they paid for their crimes, I don't know that that sounds too Eliott Ness. That they paid, they paid in spades. For the most part, they were very loyal to their men, they didn't really buckle under and spill. The women who were with the Dillinger gang, through thick and through thin all shared the same characteristics: they were all loyal, none of them caved in and gave information to the police and I feel that given the spirit of the era that that was a positive trait. And trust me, I am not anti police, my father was a police officer, I'm a law abiding person but I believe that because they were loyal to their men they suffered extreme consequences because J. Edgar Hoover, who was in back of all of the prosecutions, the federal harboring prosecutions that took place had the power to decide where these women served their time. So if they helped the FBI they went to a country club jail, they went to Alderson, if they didn't they went to Milant? which was a men's penitentiary with a steel barred annex for women. So because they were loyal to their men and to their gang they suffered HARD time, they served federal harboring sentences, most of them did. When they got out of jail, they were not free to resume their lives because Hoover at that point embarked upon a smear campaign. He ghost wrote a couple of books, I'll give you the titles if you want, one was "Ten Thousand Public Enemies" and one was called "Here's to Crime", in those books he wrote essays about women like Pat Cherrington and Evelyn Frechette and Delores Delany, who was a teen aged girlfriend of Alvin Karpas. He smeared them so badly and they had to go through life with that type of slander and libel directed at them after they served their time, after they were paroled and when they tried to start a new life. And as a result of that they were almost forced to remarry or to get married because they had to change their name. The psychological repercussions affected some of these women so badly! I mean Evelyn was one of the lucky ones, she married, remarried. Marie Comforti was Homer Van Meter's girlfriend and she was dead by 1944 of cirrhosis of the liver. Vern Miller's girlfriend Vi Mathis, he was another one of those midwest crime wave characters, not associated with Dillinger, she was dead by, I think, 1939. She died in an abusive relationship. They suffered and they paid.

JDR - Do you think that John Dillinger was abusive towards Evelyn?

EP - NO NO! I can say unequivocally he was not. And I'll tell you why. When I went up to the reservation I spoke to some of Evelyn's family members and I have never revealed their names because I never got written permission and didn't want to have any problems, but one in particular vehemently told me that he hated that Warren Oates movie and fifty percent of that movie showed him pushing her, roughing her up, kidnapping her at one point and this particular relative of Evelyn Frechette was very agitated about that film and he said that he wasn't mean to her, he didn't treat her like that, he said if anything he was afraid of her. And this wasn't a great nephew or somebody who only heard the stories passed down. This was a direct relative who had spent time with her and knew her, knew her intimately, and so I got it from the family and that was collaborated for me by the woman who I spoke with.

We soon ended our conversation and I thanked Ellen Poulsen for her generosity with her information, her knowledge and her time with us!

Bryan Burrough, author, Public Enemies

2008-08-31T20:11:00.001-07:00

This interview was originally posted on our main forum on Feb 26 2008:

I can't begin to tell you what a great guy Bryan Burrough is! We sent him a ton of questions and below you will find his answers! I originally contacted him back in December and he was so gracious to wait until I was able to get the book read and our questions together for him! Truly one of the nicest authors I've had the pleasure of visiting with!

This is what he said to us:

BB: First off, thanks so very much for the opportunity to chat with you and your many, many readers. You've got a fascinating site, full of good people and thoughtful observations. I'll do my best to answer your questions, plus any others that might come up. Karen, here's what I have so far. I'll try to finish later.

I really appreciate that he's offered to continue our dialogue and discussion a
s we go on! Byran! You're the best!

JDR: There are a ton of people out there who didn't grow up hearing parents and grandparents talk about living during the depression, bank failures, soup kitchens, etc. Can you speak a bit about why you think the times affected the way people literally embraced and cheered for Dillinger and some of the others?

BB:
It's so hard for people raised in recent years to understand what people went through during the Depression. The level of poverty, the level of hopelessness, there's just been nothing like it in America ever since. People thought it was the end of the world, and in a way it was. The world people had come to know, the America they had come to know, was simply gone. In its place was a world where all hope seemed lost, where there was simply no sense that the country would ever go back to what it had been before.

At times such as that, people look for hope wherever they can find it. In some small way, Dillinger and his criminal brethren gave hope to millions of Americans that there really was a way to fight back. People weren't just depressed, they were angry. Very, very angry. And the John Dillingers of the world seemed to be acting out the nation's anger. Dillinger never hurt most Americans. He hurt the banks. And that's what people wanted. They wanted a way to show the wealthy and the powerful how hurt they were, how lost, and Dillinger, who seemed like an exceedingly nice bank robber, became a symbol of fighting back.

JDR:
The kidnapping and subsequent death of the Lindbergh baby caused a change in Federal law, can you tell us how that affected the new FBI and how it affected the gangs? Why did it make a difference for law men?

BB:
The Lindbergh Law, which gave the FBI responsibility for tracking down interstate kidnappers, gave the Bureau its first chance to engage with criminals the country actually cared about. Until its passage, the FBI had never really accomplished anything of note; most Americans had no idea it even existed. The Lindbergh Law made the FBI relevant. Engaging with armed kidnappers transformed the Bureau into a far more professional outfit than it had been, much to the consternation of criminal gangs. For years criminals like Machine Gun Kelly had only hick sheriffs to deal with. In 1933, for the first time, the Kellys of the world found themselves facing a federal police force with seemingly unlimited resources that could track them across state lines. For the first time, there was no real place for criminals to hide. That was the genius of the FBI.

JDR:

You grew up in Texas learning of crime sprees of Bonnie and Clyde through your Grandfather. You have a friend who's great uncle was murdered by Clyde. This story is in your roots. How did your grandfather brought in to be involved with the Barrow gang? Did he live to read your book or know of your research?

BB:
My grandfather, John Vernon Burrough, was drawn into the hunt for Bonnie and Clyde in a very peripheral way, as a deputy sheriff in rural Northwest Arkansas who manned roadblocks set up to apprehend the Barrow Gang at several points in 1933 and 1934. I can remember him telling me how frightened he and his buddies were at the time, wondering what they would actually do if that car coming over the rise had Clyde Barrow behind the wheel. Would they be brave enough to shoot? Would they be killed? The Barrows whisked through Northwest Arkansas on a regular basis. Much to his relief, my grandfather never came face to face with them. But they remained very real to him, even in later years. John and my grandmother Mildred knew two people Clyde killed in Arkansas. They knew their families well, and I can remember how both of them would grow silent sometimes when I brought up the subject for the umpteenth time. Clyde wasn't a symbol to them. He was a murderer, and a frightening one at that.

JDR:
While we are speaking of Dallas' own thugs and original drive by miscreants, Clyde Barrow and Bonnie Parker, these were pretty low level hoodlums. Clyde was a murderer and Bonnie ended up with Clyde out of boredom. Do you think they would have been important enough to be a part of your book, had the 1967 movie not been made?

BB:
Thats a great question. Bonnie and Clyde certainly loom large in the American consciousness, almost solely because of that movie. Without it, they would be forgotten today. Still, theirs was a fascinating story, and I imagine it would have remained good enough to make it into the book, although, as you point out, they were very peripheral figures in the overall federal War on Crime. Hoover never thought they were important enough to seriously track.

JDR:
In 2004 you did an interview for Booknotes with Brian Lamb, while talking about the 1967 film BONNIE AND CLYDE, Mr Lamb asked you "Why do movies change the facts? You replied " Because movie makers have stories that they want to tell. If you want to tell the facts, you make something called a documentary.
Mr. Lamb then asked; "So they don`t have a responsibility to the truth?" and you answered: "It`s great when you get -- if you get movie people in that discussion, they will inevitably come around to the explanation that they believe that their idea serves as the spirit of the truth. One of the great examples would be the movie -- an FBI movie, "Mississippi Burning," which showed the deaths of the three Civil Rights workers in Mississippi. The facts were not correct. But I remember listening to the director say that it serviced -- it was true to the spirit of the story. And I think that`s inevitably what you find."

My question is, how do you hope that Michael Mann and his movie makers stay "true to the spirit of the story'? What do you wish for people to say about your story? Did or do you have any script input?

BB:
I've read the script, and while I shouldn't say anything about it, I will say I like it. I didnt have any input, nor did I expect to. That's not the way these things work. Obviously, there's always going to be a different viewpoint between a nonfiction writer and a moviemaker. In my experience, what you hope in these situations is that a filmmaker sticks as close to the facts as possible. In this case, I think you will see a movie that not hews close to the spirit of the book but the historic facts. In fact, I think this may end up being the most factual of any Depression-era gangster movie ever made. Did I use the word `facts' enough for you?

JDR:
What do you think Johnny Depp could or would bring to the role of John Dillinger?

BB:
The key to the real-life Dillinger, what made him a `special' criminal, was his likeability, his charm. Whatever you thought of what he did in life, and he did kill at least one man, there was no denying his charisma. Mr. Depp has that in spades.

JDR:
What intrigued you about John Dillinger?

BB:
His accessibility. Unlike some of his peers, you could get a sense of who John Dillinger actually was. Part of this was the fact that Dillinger was the only major Depression-era criminal who was arrested, and allowed to give press interviews, during his crime spree. So unlike Pretty Boy Floyd and Baby Face Nelson, one can not only view footage of the real Dillinger, but read his words. So not only did he have charisma, it was a charisma you could see and feel. If not for the interviews he gave at Crown Point, I'm not sure Dillinger would have been so well-liked by the public.

JDR:
When researching Dillinger, who was the closest person to him that you were able to interview?

BB:
No one, really. I mean, this was seventy years ago. The one person who was present during much was this, who I did interview at length, was Melvin Purvis's secretary, Doris Rogers. She gave invaluable insights into the FBI agents, and to a lesser extent the criminals.

JDR:
While reading PUBLIC ENEMIES, I got the feeling that not only was your book a comprehensive telling of that 20 month crime wave, but that you also had another purpose. Perhaps an homage to the FBI men that Katherine Kelly termed "G-men"? Why?

BB:
Well, first and foremost, you just want to tell an important story accurately. To the extent I had secondary aims, yes, I wanted to shine some light on the FBI agents, because by and large none of them had ever received any credit for what they did at the time. They were the real heroes here, not Dillinger. Sometimes that gets lost in the telling.

JDR:
Recently in Vanity Fair you said you were still "feeling like a fifth grader at a Hannah Montana concert." How's that feeling holding on? :))

BB:
Oh, golly. You know, Karen, I've sold probaby two dozen books and Vanity Fair articles to Hollywood, and I've had exactly one made into a movie, 1994's ``Barbarians at the Gates,'' made for HBO. At this point, I'd just be thrilled to see a movie actually made. But to see it being made by Michael Mann, with people like Johnny Depp and Christian Bale, well, that's really just too much to ever hope for. I've been surprised by how emotionally involved I've gotten, how exciting it all is. For instance, I'm still floored that they're calling the movie ``Public Enemies.'' I had always assumed they would call it something else, and I guess they still could. Right now, though, it just feels like I'm kind of floating through this. I'm surrounded by dozens of friends and family members who are as well. I guess we're going to have a big party here in New Jersey when (and if) the movie comes out. That'll be fun.

JDR:
The Kansas City massacre happened trying to free one man and he was killed as well as many others. What happened there and what did the FBI learn from this?

BB:
I think what happened there, and I didn't get into this in my book, was that at the moment the gunmen yelled for the lawmen to freeze, one of the lawmen's guns went off. The assasins panicked and opened fire. This was the theory in a great book you could pick up, ``The Union Station Massacre,'' by Robert Unger. I do think Verne Miller was accompanied by Pretty Boy Floyd that day, a contention I lay out in Public Enemies.

JDR:
The first car I bought for myself in the late 1970s was a Chevy with a huge V8 engine. Ahh those were the days. That car moved. Many people today don't understand the power behind a V8. My dad grew up in rural area in the depression and used to use the term "good dirt roads" all of the time and I didn't understand what that meant until I actually saw and drove on a "good dirt road". How did the vast number of new good roads and fast cars aide or encourage the 20 month crime spree? What all was happening then to help their ease of movement?

BB:
As I say in the book, the crime wave of 1933-34 was really the result of technology outstripping the legal system. The bad guys had V-8 engines and Thompson submachineguns, while many lawmen were still toodling around in hand-cranked Model T's with ancient pistols. It took a while for the lawmen to catch up, and when they did, it was pretty much curtains for the bad guys.

JDR:
Alvin Karpis. Probably the least known of the group, served the longest time in prison, ghost wrote two autobiographies and died in Spain in 1979. You approached the widow of his ghostwriter. You've said that because of that you were able to "uncover tons of new stuff"...what new stuff? What was the best bit in your opinion?

BB:
Yes, I managed to read more than a thousand pages of interviews Karpis gave around 1969. They brimmed with new insights into the gang's inner workings, including incidents where Karpis interfaced with the Chicago Mob and Baby Face Nelson. The new material didnt change the broad outlines of his story, but allowed me to tell it with much more nuance than before.

JDR:
Little Bohemia. 1 FBI agent and 1 civilian killed. 0 criminals captured or killed. Good grief. Not great numbers. What went wrong with what should have been easy? Head 'em up... move 'em out.

BB:
Little Bohemia was the result of inexperience, haste and a woeful lack of planning. These poor FBI agents had no idea what they were walking into, and once they found themselves confronted by armed gunmen, they had no idea what to do. What resulted was a comedy of errors -- a comedy, that is, excepr for the fact that men were killed.

JDR:
Melvin Purvis. Now there's a story. Good guy, young, eager. I got the idea that you liked him. What can you tell us about Purvis? Is history treating him fairly?

BB:
I loved Purvis as a character. An extraordinarily good man, earnest, hardworking, well-intentioned, but way, way, way out of his depth when pitted against John Dillinger. Purvis had never been trained for this. He was only 29, for pete's sake. His Achilles heel was his obvious love of publicity, which ultimately led to his departure from the FBI in 1935. History, at least the movies, has generally been kind to Purvis. In fact, I daresay Public Enemies is the first retelling of events to suggest that Purvis was so overmatched. What you have to say about Purvis is that he always gave his best, but in the end his best just wasnt good enough. It's sad that, having been hounded by Hoover for years after his retirement, he ultimately committed suicide. His family always blamed Hoover for that.

JDR:
The Chicago mobs were pretty much ignored by Hoover, Purvis and the FBI. Why the immunity?

BB:
Well, the easy answer is that the FBI had no obvious jurisdiction for fighting the Chicago Mob. That was up to the Chicago police and, at times, the Treasury Department. The truth is that the FBI had a devil of a time tracking down Dillinger, a single bank robber. Hoover had to have known his men simply weren't ready to take on a whole mob.

JDR:
Speaking of Chicago mobsters, why does most of the action seem to be in St. Paul and not Chicago?

BB:
Great question. St. Paul, it turns out, was the capital of Midwestern crime during the 1920s and 1930s, and for a simple reason. It was something called ``The O'Connor System,'' named after the St. Paul police chief who started in around 1908. Basically, the St. Paul cops made a deal with criminals: As long as they didn't commit crimes in St. Paul itself, they would be left alone. As a result, St. Paul became a safe haven for scores of bank robbers, including Dillinger, Baby Face Nelson, Alvin Karpis, the Barkers and Machine Gun Kelly. FBI files actually indicate it was a top St. Paul cop who initiated the Barker-Karpis gang's two major St. Paul kidnappings.

JDR:
It's been 5 years since you wrote PUBLIC ENEMIES, if you were to write it today is there anything you would add, change, leave out?

BB:
Oh, golly. Well, the book is awfully dense, especially the early parts. I committed the sin of falling in love with the subject matter, which happens. In fact, the manuscript at one point was far longer. On my editor's urging, I cut it by a full 25 percent to make it move faster. I know it's not the easiest read in places, but all in all, I wouldn't change a thing. I've written four books and just finished a fifty, and this was by far my favorite. I wish I could write it again!

We are grateful to Bryan, who continued to be available to us for questions. We thank him!

Rob Kidd, author, The Young Jack Sparrow Series

2008-08-30T22:01:00.000-07:00

Cover image copyright Disney Publishing
This was originally posted on our main JohnnyDeppReads forum on February 24, 2008. I'd saved it for Oscar Day!

I've been saving this interview for Oscar Day! In honor of AWE's Oscar nominations!

We are grateful to Rob Kidd and the Disney Press marketing staff who kindly arranged this interview right before Christmas. I was able to sit down and visit with Mr. Kidd, who was very generous with his time and I really appreciate his openess to our questions.

Rob signing our book for a giveaway! Thanks to our CaptainJackSparrow for going to the book fest and getting our book signed by Rob!

Pic owned by captainjacksparrow

JDR: I’d like to thank you Rob, for signing those books for us while you were down in Austin, we really appreciate it!

RK: It was great fun!

JDR: I understand that you are not a Disney Imagineer, so how did you get connected with this great book series?

RK: I actually work with Disney Publishing I’m an executive editor with Disney Press. Right before “Dead Man’s Chest” came out we decided we wanted to publish books in Jack Sparrow’s world, do a universe expansion type of thing. We took it in all kinds of places we were should we tell contemporary stories and there was a time when we thought about telling stories as Jack Sparrow as a really young kid-- an eight year old or so and there’s some of that in the most recent book when he meets up with Keith and they go back and visit so his early youth. But we decided that that was too young and we wanted out readership to be a little bit older so where we ended up was with him as a teenager and he would still live in the world that he exists in the films. The other thing that this helped us to do is that we were working really closely with the studio, it helped us stay away from where they were going with the films. Because we didn’t want to give away anything that would happen in “Dead Man’s Chest” or “At World’s End” came out and we also didn’t want to do something in the books that would contradict the films so we didn’t want to write about anything in ‘At World’s End” that would prove to be false. So we were looking for authors-kind of going crazy trying to do it and it was getting so complicated because there was a lot of liaisons with the studio and everything had to be kept under wraps (he laughs here) –don’t want to let too many people in, that we decided that we’d just write it here.

JDR: That’s certainly an economical way to get it done…sort of keeps it all in the house. (More laughs)

RK: It was a great group effort with lots of people sharing their input. It wound up really working out well for us.

JDR: It’s a wonderful series! And it’s a very entertaining series. To paraphrase Capt. Barbossa from the first POTC, those were some might long words you used in the books and we’re not but humble pirates. Are you looking to attract an older kid audience that way?

RK: It’s funny that you should quote that line from the film because that’s part of where we pulled that aspect of the series, from when you watched the films, there is this play on a lot of big words…wanting to acquiesce Jack using egregious and so we thought that was really part of the world of the films and it served the dual purpose of being able to make this a series worth reading where you can get into a classroom and kids’ll be hooked because they really like Jack and they like the stories and at the same time they’re introduced to some more complicated words. I think hopefully if I did my job right it will allow them to feel less intimidated when they read works of literature, classics, stuff that they are being assigned in school.

JDR: I think that’s great, anything that gets kids reading a book and in turn gets them to a dictionary is good! You talked about being on the set, were you able to work with screenwriters Ted and Terry?

RK: I spoke with Ted and Terry at one point, but we didn’t work directly with them, but the way that we worked with Ted and Terry is that we have a contact (“we” meaning Disney Publishing) at the studio and then they deal directly with Ted and Terry and everybody else on the production team. So whenever we had a question about storyline, wanting to make sure that we weren’t going somewhere that might conflict with a screenplay, we would go to the studio, and the studio would go to Ted and Terry and clear everything. It just made it easier as we had tons of questions for them and also for the partners, like the toy group and things like apparel so that everybody was on board with POTC and the Walt Disney Company, so they would take all the questions to them at once and then they would get back to us.

JDR: Did you actually get on the set?

RK: Yeah, I was on the set a number of times less for the Jack Sparrow series because I was also working on the tie-ins. So we really needed to see what the sets looked like and how they operated, if you are going to describe a scene, it really helps to be there and watch it being shot. So that really helped a lot on that end, of course it also brought me into the world of Pirates which inspires the book.

JDR: You just mentioned tie-ins? Can you tell us what those are?

RK: I meant the books that come directly from the films, we did a few storybooks and the junior novelisation and stuff like that. I didn’t write those but I was editorial on them.

JDR: OK Rob, you’ve left your readers hanging here on #9 and I understand we have #10 – 11 -12 to come. When can we expect #10 and also when can we expect the series to wrap up?

RK: Book #10,”The Sins of the Father” is due out Dec 18. (Update, it is available now!)

JDR: And the wrap up for the series will come when?

RK: The 11th book “Poseidon’s Peak” is scheduled out in April and then #12 is following on the heels of #11, probably July.

JDR: So when #12 ends, there will be a gap of Jack’s life between book #12 and POTC:COTBP. Will there be any fill in there for us?

RK: Yeah the plans are to try and fill in all of that time with different formats, the Jack Sparrow books are chapter books, they are geared for eight to twelve year olds, but we made a very conscious effort to make sure that they crossed over the way that comic books cross over, where a kid could read it and enjoy it but then there’s also a huge adult fan audience. As we move forward we’ll be taking different aspects of the timeline of Pirates of the Caribbean films and applying them to a certain readership so next up is a series of books called “The Legends of the Brethren Court” which I will be editing and will be written by a great writer called T. T. Sutherland, who did the adaptations for “At World’s End” and that’s going to be a six book series and it’s basically going to examine the lives of the Pirate Lords and that will launch August of 2008 and those books will be a little bit longer, they’ll be probably for (ages) twelve and up, where as Jack was for eight to twelve and of course adults will hopefully enjoy them as well. And then we also will be going back and revisiting the whole crew of the Barnacle, with a tentative title of “Young Pirates of the Caribbean” a younger Jack will be in them, but it will give us the opportunity to visit more with some of the other characters like Arabella and Jean and Tumen and Constance and the others from the Jack Sparrow series.

JDR: You managed to tie in a lot of things in the series from the movies. Like Jack’s paprika, the pirate skeletons from the ride, the upside down boat thing, etc..was that a specific idea that Disney wanted included or was that you?

RK: (laughs) No that was me. When we first started thinking about the series, when I was out in LA and went down to Disneyland and I took a boat ride through the POTC and with an Imagineer and they took me through first with all of the lights on so I could see and really point out all of the details (of the ride) and then we went through with the lights off, I was looking for things that could be folded into the books, like they did in the film with the dog and the keys,. things that people who were fans of the ride would appreciate. What we wanted to so was make sure it felt like a cohesive whole in that whether it’s a book or the ride or a movie there are common elements that tie them all together so when you see stuff like that, it’s done for a reason and I’m glad that you caught on to that upside boat … it kind of got stuck into the book.

JDR: About the timing of the books’ releases, you had to be careful about releasing the new characters and release of the movies so as not to give anything away plotwise?

RK: Yes, and then things like Tia Dalma got pretty tricky as she was introduced in the second film but it’s revealed in the third film that she’s Calypso so we kind of had that fore sight, that was this weird balance like now it’s OK we can write her into the books, but at the same time we have to be careful, there are things about her that people can’t know about. So it was a little bit tricky there for a while.

JDR: I am a history buff and I noticed that your books contained a lot of historical references, is that you again, trying to educate kids?

RK: That’s exactly what that’s all about, when we just felt like this was a really good opportunity to get kids excited about things that they might otherwise not be excited about. The hope was that maybe if they are reading something about Montezuma that maybe they would then think to themselves that Montezuma or Cortez really existed, if they hear about them in school they’ll make that connection and say I read this Jack Sparrow book and he was in there too and it just might make things that they are supposed to be doing, things that they are doing in school…it might make them more exciting and in addition to that especially with Cortez, there’s that connection with the gold of Cortez in the films. There’s always a historical conflict going on simultaneously with the supernatural conflict in all of the Pirates films and so we wanted to make sure that they were also grounded in the real world and in history to some degree to remind readers that this isn’t a separate world all together, it’s our world and the conflict between the new world and the old world and the natural and the super natural and all that kind of stuff. The primary reason was to help prevent kids from thinking that history and big vocabulary words weren’t cool.

JDR: Do you know if Johnny’s kids have read or seen your books?

RK: I hope they have and that they like them, but I don’t know.

JDR: When the entire series has been published, can we speak again?

RK: Absolutely, that way we can talk about the follow up series, too!

Mark Salisbury, author, Sweeney Todd

2008-08-28T21:02:00.000-07:00

We have had so many great opportunities here at JohnnyDeppReads and last week we were given the chance to ask SWEENEY TOOD author Mark Salisbury a few questions. Keep in mind that Mark attended the SWEENEY TODD premiere last week and also moderated the SWEENEY TODD press conference the next day, I think we are very blessed that he found the time to visit with us over the weekend.

I asked our members if they had any questions for Mark and many sent in ones that were very similar so I tried to combine those, and I added some myself. I knew that Mark’s time was very limited so I trimmed the numbers down to the questions that I thought would best represent us as his readers.

Many thanks to author Mark Salisbury and to Titan books for so kindly arranging this wonderful opportunity for us!

JDR: You have quite a long working history with Tim Burton and his projects, I think starting with the original "Burton on Burton" and with the "Planet of the Apes" and also "The Corpse Bride" books. How did your relationship with him come about?

MS: I first met Tim back in 1988 at a Beetlejuice/Warner Brothers Christmas party while he was shooting Batman in London and interviewed him for the first time shortly after. I met him again a couple of years later when he was promoting Edward Scissorhands in Rome. Then in 1994 I pitched the idea of doing Burton On Burton to Faber, approached Tim, and he agreed.

JDR: Since your books have been non fictional works, including books on comics and comic screenplay writing, would you ever consider writing a screenplay?

MS: I finished a script at the end of last year with a friend of mine who writes comic books. We got a lot of positive feedback on it, which has encouraged us to write another one.

JDR: What has been your favorite book project? Can you envision yourself doing more books like this about any of Tim's future projects?

MS: Burton on Burton was and continues to be the most fun because I get to hang out on Tim’s sets.

JDR: Is there a more memorable part about the making of ST and writing this book?

MS: My first day on set was when they were shooting part of The Contest between Sacha Baron Cohen’s Pirelli and Sweeney and I broke into a huge grin just watching it on the monitor and hearing the musical playback, and that smile didn’t leave my face throughout the rest of the shoot. You could tell, even then, that Sweeney was going to be something special.

JDR: Since you were on set during filming, do you enjoy that part of your research process? How did you decide what ended up in the final book version?

MS: I love spending time on film sets, seeing a movie being shot, watching the creation of moments big and small. Martin Amis once called being on a movie set (and I hope I’m remembering this correctly): repetition followed by boredom followed by more repetition. And in a way he’s right, but I still love it. And despite many years of visiting film sets I’m still amazed that a movie ever gets made, such is the small amount of footage shot each day.

JDR: How long were you on set? Filming happened earlier this year, ended sometime in May and your book was published a short seven months later. That sounds like a pretty short time frame. Is this the norm for you?

MS: I probably spent around two weeks on set in total, maybe more, spread across the shoot. “Making of” books tend to be very last minute, and while there was talk of a book throughout shooting, I didn’t get the go ahead till sometime in August and the book needed to be finished by September in order to meet the printer’s deadline to be in the shops before Christmas.

JDR: What was the first step in making this book happen? Did the book turn out as you'd envisioned it when you began it, or did it evolve into something different as you went along?

MS: Because of the fast turnaround (see answer above) there’s not much time for the book to evolve as such. You find the spine of the story first, then fill in the body of the book as it were. As someone who buys a lot of “making of” books, as well as having written a few myself, it’s fair to say these books tend to follow a certain structure but each film is different and each book must reflect those differences. In Sweeney’s case, the musical aspect was hugely important, so it became the thread for this story…

JDR: Do you have any idea what prep work Johnny did for the slashing scenes? Practices on dummies...that sort of thing?

MS:I have no idea. But I would think not.

JDR: I know that you've written a few books on comics, movie monsters, comic script writing... did you know that Johnny's production company owns the rights to Arvid Nelson's "Rex Mundi" graphic novel series? Any chance that you might be involved in that project?

MS: Funnily enough, I’d forgotten they’d bought that. And seeing as I’ve never read it, I’ve just ordered myself a copy from amazon.

JDR: What's up next for you?

MS: I’m currently in the midst of another script with my friend and there’s the possibility of a book project that I refuse to divulge any details about it in case I jinx it.

JDR: And our final question to Mark was: Who is the one person you would like to interview or write a book about?

MS: I’d have loved to have interviewed Billy Wilder, but sadly didn’t get the chance.

Our sincere thanks to Mark Salisbury for his wonderful answers and his time during such a busy period for him!

Keith Buterbaugh, actor, Sweeney Todd National Tour

2008-08-27T10:38:00.001-07:00

JDR had the distinct pleasure in being able to sit down with actor Keith Buterbaugh who was at the time portraying the despicable Judge Turpin in the National Touring Company of SWEENEY TODD. This interview was published in JDR on October 31, 2007.

I thought it might be nice to be able to visit with a musical actor who could help us understand a bit of Mr. Sondheim's music and a bit about the musical SWEENEY TODD. Mr. Buterbaugh is an original cast member of last year's Tony Award winning Sondheim musical COMPANY. He was most generous with his time and we thank him and the National Tour for granting us permission for this interview.

JDR: Mr. Buterbaugh, I've read your biography on the ST site, this is your third Sondheim musical. First was Passion and then Company and now Sweeney Todd, is that correct?

KB: Right.

JDR: Can you tell us a bit about who you played in Passion and what the character was like?

KB: I played Giorgio, he's a young soldier, who gets caught between two kinds or types of love and his exploration of what real love is. Giorgio is in love and having an affair with Clara, and then finds himself in love with Fosca, who no body could imagine being involved with. Its two types of relationships.

JDR: So is he the good guy or bad guy?

KB: I guess you would call him the good guy.

JDR: So he's just caught in a bad situation?

KB: Right, there's really no bad guy. Maybe someone may argue that Fosca is the bad person in Passion. But she's actually the character who brings truth to the play.

JDR: OK let's change plays, in COMPANY (which won the Tony), you played Harry! Harry's an interesting fella. With COMPANY you have a mix of musical genre; you've got a "musical" that's made up of "revues" that are strung together with a through story line. Is that an accurate description?

KB: Yes. COMPANY started out as a series of short stories or vignettes, actually five or six vignettes that were character driven and in order to put them into a coherent book form they were basically all brought together by the Central character of Bobby, who was experiencing each of these five vignettes in different places and circumstances.

Click here: Broadway.com - Video Feature
(Video with Keith and Sweeney Todd and Company director John Doyle talking about Sondheim's Company)

JDR: COMPANY is a bit of a different vehicle, looking at what SS has written, all of his works haven't been dark. Many have been funny! FUNNY THING HAPPENED ON THE WAY TO THE FORUM.

KB: Yes! Very funny and clever, incredibly clever. He has a great sense of humor. Look at his take on life! After meeting the man and having spent a little bit of time with him he’s obviously highly intelligent…and he has a great sense of humor…really great! He finds some of the greatest humor in the darkest situations, I mean look at SWEENEY TODD! Even in COMPANY- the humor of some of the vignettes between couples.

JDR: So you've done three Sondheim musicals, most of your characters can be characterized as good guys most of the time.

KB: Then there’s Judge Turpin, he is the antagonist of the show. But he thinks he’s doing the right thing, the moral thing.

Photo by David Allen

JDR: About Judge Turpin. When you look at the play and the characters, Judge Turpin should be the sanest of the lot. He’s a man of power and supposedly someone in a well respected position in the community. But he is the sickest twist in the lot. How do you get into a character such as that every day?

KB: John Doyle’s direction helped a lot with that because of John’s take on it. When you look at previous interpretations of the show, the Judge is most commonly portrayed as this well respected guy, and immediately they go with this dark side of him, but what’s the real side of him? Not the side that he presents to the world or the outside. A lot of actors tend to go immediately to what he really is. So to answer your question, how do I approach that? (Director) John Doyle’s approach on that was that he always felt, and I find this fascinating - that the Judge Turpin character should “seem” to be the nicest the nicest guy in the world. And he should be cast that way, as this nice John Kennedy-ish type character when you see him on stage and first hear him, you should think “Oh my God ..we should make this man the President. WOW! This is the guy who pulls up next to in his Beemer and waves you a smile and shakes your hand and offers you his parking place. A man’s man. Everybody loves this man. You go that direction so that when you peel off the layers, and there are many layers, you get down to really what he is, that you realize Oh my God this is a man who cannot be trusted and yet you did. You immediately want to trust this man and you immediately want to be embraced by this man because he’s such a charismatic, nice, kind, handsome wonderful person to be around. And you realize HE’S NOT. And that’s what’s really frightening about the character. I think it’s interesting that Sondheim, with the lyrics and Hugh Wheeler with the book (script) really flesh that out, it’s really a comment on the people in this world who live a double standard. They portray one thing and this hypocritical – he mentions something in the text “cuts across the throats of hypocrites.” It’s such a hypocritical character when you look at what he practices is not what he preaches. And he doesn’t even know it.

JDR: When the play has ended and you are off stage, do you feel like you need a bath after playing Judge Turpin or are you able to walk away from him completely?

KB: Nah…you walk away. It’s acting. (He laughs)

JDR: But for those of us who aren’t in the theater world, we find it hard to imagine playing someone like this character. That’s one of the reasons I wanted to talk with you, someone in the cast of SWEENEY TODD, so maybe you can help us understand this play and these people.

KB: We’ve had a few talk-backs with people in the theater and students and they ask that question a lot, how much of you do you bring to your character? Especially with someone like Judge Turpin or Sweeney who’s murderous! And I find that to be a really great question because as an actor, what you have to do is, you have to go to that place in yourself that can identify with those ugly things. You have to do that. If you don’t? Then you’re going to get a very general interpretation of the character. So I had to, as an actor, go to those places within myself – that can identify with what is in Judge Turpin’s head and I’m still going there and still fleshing it out and looking for new things. I was telling some of these students in talk-back that I’ve got to look, I’ve got to look at my own lustful nature. I’ve got to look at my own compulsive nature. I’ve got to look at those ugly things that are a part of my life that I experience and really delve into it – really let it come out and explore it. You can’t just look at it and say he’s a compulsive, lustful character. You’ve really got to look at it yourself and how I identify with those particular negative, if you want to call them negative, traits. Not just the positive traits, but the negative traits, you’ve got to look at them in yourself. That brings it more to the front, so it’s more of an expression of things that you have experienced yourself as well.

JDR: I believe you have a preteen daughter yourself.

KB: Right.

JDR: By the math that’s given to us in the play when Sweeney’s sent away, Johanna is one year old.

KB: Johanna’s sixteen (in the story).

JDR: The story is set back in the late 1800s and it was not unheard of for young women of that age to marry. So, we are looking at a character who is just a few years older than your daughter in real life. Does that bother you?

KB: No, it doesn’t, but it’s one of the things that I had to look at. It’s one of the things in my life that I had to look at and wonder what it would be like for a man my age to lust for and pursue a young woman who’s only a few years older than my daughter and it was something that I was able to look at because I’ve got a daughter who’s not far from that age. So there’s my point. You’ve got to look at your own life and deal with what you can with the process of fleshing out this character with what you can. That was one of the things that I was able to look at. What’s really interesting is when I do the role from night to night, for instance the other day we did a matinee show for nothing but high school kids. And as I started into the scene, the one scene where I try to seduce my ward (Johanna) -I suddenly as the scene started, I suddenly became terrified. I was terrified. I was on the verge of tears also, doing a scene because I realized oh my God what I’m about to show these kids...some of them out there are actually experiencing right now. And I felt really because I knew I was probably churning up some terrible things in some kids out there. I felt very responsible for that. After the scene was over and we came off of intermission I told the stage manager how uncomfortable I felt doing it to that audience and he said “But Keith, you are communicating something to those kids that needs to be communicated.” I said that I don’t know about that. Do I really want those kids to have to feel that again? I’m not sure.

JDR: Could you see or feel any reaction from the audience?

KB: No, of course we can’t see the audience, but I’m sure it was very uncomfortable for some of those girls out there in the audience.

JDR: There have been and are several versions of the play. Some of them have removed or skirted around Lucy’s rape by Judge Turpin. Does that scene take place in your version of the play?

KB: It’s not removed, but it’s not acted out, the story is told through the narrative.

JDR: Can I ask if the Judge’s self flagellation scene is in your John Doyle version?

KB: It’s in, but there’s no flogging, I do an indication of it. It’s really not about that.

JDR: There’s a piece of music that happens in that scene…

KB: It’s called the Mea Culpa and that’s in. I do the Mea Culpa, I do the song and I do the text. What’s beautiful about John Doyle’s production is that you don’t have to.…he’s stripped away a lot of the visual reenactments. He lets the words do the work, so it’s still there. And it’s still in the character.

JDR: Good, I think it’s an important part of the scene, the audience has to hear him say those Mea Culpa words.

KB: Oh yeah. You can’t eliminate it, the lyrics are very important…they are incredible lyrics. Actually Sweeney Todd was the first musical I ever saw.

JDR: When a friend heard that I was going to be able to speak to you for JDR, she wanted me to ask a question.

KB: Sure, go ahead.

JDR: Keeping in mind that we are really anticipating the Depp version of Sweeney Todd, this question has more to do with film rather than live theater. Once a film has opened there is no altering it. When you do live theater do you find that you the actor are affected by the vibrations or feedback that you get from an audience? How does that help or hinder you?

KB: Absolutely you feel it. I never find it hindering me because what’s beautiful about live theater is that you need to feel that. If you are NOT feeling that it’s not because the audience isn’t giving it. If you’re not feeling it, it’s because you are not open to be receiving it. So if I get to a show where I realize I’m not getting anything from the audience I realize it’s not the audience’s fault. It’s mine. And what I need to do is listen and that’s the beauty of live theater, if you’re really listening to your other actors and you’re listening to the energy. When I say listening to the energy, I don’t just mean aurally, I mean really being in tune with the energy you’re getting from your fellow actors and the energy you’re getting from the audience. If you’re really doing that it will affect your character, it will affect your performance in a positive way. It will cause you to do things or not do things, and whatever those things that you are doing...is in direct relation to the energy that you’re getting back and forth. And sometimes it will be interesting stuff and some times it won’t, but as long as you’re open to it? It will always be something! As long as you’re open, as I call it, you will sometimes strike gold, something will happen that you didn’t see coming. And that happens because as an actor you were in tune with the energy you are getting as an actor from the audience and with the energy you are getting from your fellow performers.

JDR: Being Depp fans, the one remark we hear from Depp’s costars, crew members and directors is the same thing that you’ve just shared here. That you have to be open and react to your fellow performers. I believe I read somewhere that Sondheim said that (and I paraphrase) once actors go before a live audience that they then bring the audience in as a third person. That things change and you have to start readdressing what you are doing.

KB: You always have to, with my performance and with the amount of film work that I’ve done, it’s completely different and it’s the same. That’s one of the things that I love about live performance is that it IS so live. It IS right out there, but like you said with Depp – and you see it in his performances. If you’re not really communicating with the person you’re talking to, if you’re just doing your lines with a preconceived notion of how they should be done, it’s dead and it’s a very obvious thing that Depp is a pro at that, to be able to make each take…each take is going to be different provided the person is really feeding you the lines, that you’re really having a conversation. It’s just that the feedback is more immediate in live theater than in film and that’s what I like about it.

JDR: Can we talk about your background a little bit? As we’ve said, you’ve done three Sondheim shows and COMPANY won the Tony last year for Best Revival. You’ve played both the Phantom and Raoul in PHANTOM OF THE OPERA on Broadway and in the National tour. You did THE KING AND I, Ravenal in SHOWBOAT and PASSION as we’ve already touched on. You’ve done some opera, some regional things, some films. As an actor with a lot of different kinds of characters, do you find yourself drawn to a particular kind of character? If all things were equal, and you didn’t have to look at the money or convenience in playing a role…what role would attract you the most?

KB: I would go for the role that allows you to stretch in the most, that would allow you to explore the most facets of a character.

JDR: Would that be one reason why you chose to accept this tour? I know you have family at home while you are on the road for several months.

KB: Yeah, it’s a great role! It’s an incredibly complex role. I’d choose the most complex character. It’s like chewing up scenery, that’s one of the reasons Phantom was such a great role, he’s so complex! You go to every emotional precipice that you can think of. The same is true in many ways of Judge Turpin.

Photo by David Allen

JDR: Change of thought here, what intrigues you about Sondheim music?

KB: Oh so many things! I remember from day one when I started out and I was singing Sondheim a long time ago for some reason I just loved singing his music and when you try to figure out what it is, it’s a combination of things, his lyrics are brilliant. Every time I do a Sondheim song, sometimes I find them easy to learn and sometimes I find them very difficult. Mea Culpa’s one of the most difficult songs I’ve ever had to learn, ever.

JDR: Why is that?

KB: Because there is nothing general about it what so ever. It seems random and that nothing fits into a pattern and nothing does, then as you work on it and sweat over it you finally figure out there IS a very subtle pattern to it – there is a specificity to it that makes sense and once you lock in on that? It’s like oh my God, of course, that’s the way it has to be. BUT when you’re first learning it, you can’t get it, it’s so complex. Then as you work on it and work on it. What I like about it is that all of his lyrics, all of his music is very specific. And you’ve GOT to find the specificity of it – once you do, then it locks in and it’s almost like a stream of consciousness that his music has and once it comes tripping out on your tongue and you’ve learned it then you’ve found the specificity. And you realize that there’s no other way that it could be. The only other writer/creator who does that with words is Shakespeare. After you do Shakespeare you’re like of course, there’s no other way to say it. It can only be said with those words, those words were right on the money. He’d probably be humbled and embarrassed if I said this to him but I find Sondheim’s stuff to be very similar in that regard. It’s incredibly specific. And that’s what I like about it, it has a flow to it that makes perfect sense. I remember doing a Sweeney Todd review, like a cabaret show way back when I was down in Miami…it was two hours of Sondheim material and I remember having to cram it in in fifteen days and learn it. I remember sitting in a room eight hours a day going over (it) and learning, learning, learning. Some of the Sondheim stuff came so easily because it just happened to fit my speech pattern and fit my speech sensibilities other numbers didn’t and therefore took me forever to learn. So once you’ve learned Sondheim material, at least for me, it trips off the tongue, very easily-very easily, it’s very singable, makes perfect sense and just goes (insert singer making rapid clicking sounds with his voice LOL). And that’s what I love about his stuff.

JDR: I think of Sondheim as a wordsmith.

KB: He’s an incredible wordsmith and also an incredible musician, and the way he combines the words and music is brilliant!

JDR: One of the reasons I wanted to talk with you, someone in Sweeney Todd right now, is that there is a whole group of people who will be seeing YOUR national tour show of Sweeney Todd as background for the Depp/Burton film and as a guess, I’d say a majority don’t know or didn’t know this musical before the Depp project was announced. They don’t know Sondheim’s work either.

KB: Well, it’s the medium too. With a film, you can have multiple millions of people seeing it, when you talks about musical broadway you can reduce that audience tenfold, maybe more. It’s the nature of the media.

JDR: Many Depp fans have never seen a musical of this kind, and many have never heard Sondheim music before. A class where Sondheim is teaching a young actor to sing “My Friends” surfaced and we were all enthralled with what actually went into learning to sing a song. This is why I wanted to be able to have someone from the National tour speak to us. The lyrics of the song are the equivalent of dialogue in a play.

KB: Yes and it all comes down to whether the story is told. It will be up to Tim Burton and his direction. The story is there in the lyrics, Hugh Wheeler and Stephen Sondheim fleshed that out. It’s got it’s problems, Act II has it’s problems, it’s hard to follow in some instances because it is so complex. It’s the ability and where with all for someone to be able to tell a story. A great story teller can take this material and tell a story. Tim Burton is a story teller. I’m looking forward to it, my expectations are really high.

JDR: What is your run time, subtracting intermission?

KB: 2:15, maybe 2:20

JDR: Sondheim was quoted as saying that the movie will run about 1 hour 45 minutes. Do you think things will be cut or shortened and still tell the story?

KB: Yes, I actually talked to Sondheim and talked to him about the movie. I asked him how it went over in London. I mistakenly said to him “How did it go with the rewrites?' He said “Rewrites? Rewrites? REWRITES?” as if I had insulted him. "You know what I mean" I said laughingly, I asked him "what kind of changes?" He replied that things had to be shortened to work with film length.

JDR: Sweeney Todd’s been around since 1979 and people keep showing up to see it. You’ve got this new John Doyle Tony Award winning production. 30 years after the original production it’s a movie. It’s gruesome, it’s dark, it’s bloody. What makes in intriguing to audiences still?

KB: It’s a fascinating story! Really when you stop and think about it, what makes anything great is a great story! Then you take the music, which is incredible, that’s married to a great story, a great book so you take those two elements and…BANG! You’ve got a masterpiece!

JDR: I’ve heard people make a comment over and over about Sondheim’s works, Sweeney Todd, Into the Woods, Assassins …that they are “typical Sondheim.” What do you think that means? Typical Sondheim?

KB: It’s not fluff. I think that’s what they are saying. If it’s “typical Sondheim” it sure isn’t going to be fluff, is it? It's going to be intelligent and it's going to make the audience think. It might be dark humor, it might be uncomfortable, but it will be insightful. I think that’s what they are referring to. And I’m glad it’s not fluff, I find him incredibly humorous, amazingly insightful, he gets right to the nitty gritty and sometimes it’s hilarious, sometimes it’s ironic and sometimes it’s incredibly sad, but it’s never uninteresting.

JDR: If you could play any one Sondheim role, who would it be?

KB: Well Sweeney, obviously. Or George, from Sunday in the Park with George.

JDR: Are you happy with the show?

KB: I’ve been with the show for two months now and I am not even close to figuring it out. It’s a daily discovery for me and that’s what I love about it.

JDR: Do you think the other cast members are having that same sense of discovery?

KB: Yes, even the ones who were with the Broadway version of it, they’re coming up with it, they’ve been with it nine months on Broadway and another two months now. I still think they’re finding new stuff because that’s just the nature of it. That’s what makes doing this kind of work fun. When you stop finding new stuff it becomes a tedious bore.

JDR: Your role as Judge Turpin is being played in the film by Alan Rickman...

KB: Which I can’t wait to see. I adore his work, I can’t wait to see how he went after this character.

JDR: I have to ask this because we are Johnny Depp forum. What do you think about Johnny playing Sweeney?

KB: There’s a part of me that would say it’s completely miscasting and a part of me that would say it’s dead on. I think that’s just the beauty of Johnny, the man, God bless him, is one of those actors who can do just about anything. And that’s what I love about him, so when I see him cast in a role and I go “huh?” and then I think “of course!”

JDR: Good actors seem to seek out parts that make them stretch. That’s what you’ve done with Turpin, you’ve had to stretch out of your comfort zone.

KB: That’s one of the drawbacks about doing film. You’ve got to do your research way ahead of time, before you do your performance, so in a certain sense when you are doing film work you are really working before the film, and then you lay down your performance and it’s a wrap and that’s all the further that it goes. With theater you just keep doing it over and over and it gets more and more subtle and by the end of the run, provided you aren’t checking out, you’ve got an incredibly fleshed out character, which you can’t do on film…unless you are spending months before the filming preparing. Which good actors do! Sondheim makes it so easy for the actor/singer that what he puts down on paper, once you’ve figured out the complexity of it, it is easy. He makes it easy on the actor. That’s what I love about Sondheim material, because it’s so natural for me and to many other actors too.

JDR: What advice can you give to some one seeing your play or the movie?

KB: Go into the theater awake! Don’t zone out as you do with so many movies. Wrap you brain around the show. The audience has to participate.

JDR: This has just been a pleasure, to have you sit down with us and share your thoughts about Sweeney, Sondheim and the Judge. We thank you so much for giving so generously to us. Thank you…

KB: My pleasure.

JDR: Whenever our JDR people come and see your show, could they get their programs signed by you afterward?

KB: Sure, absolutely! Come to the theater and make lots of noise.

****************Check for a town close to you! Note** National Tour site webpage was taken down when the tour closed.

So, when you all go, if you have a chance, go to the stage exit and wait politely for them to exit, and when you ask Mr. Buterbaugh to sign your program be sure to tell him that you read his interview with us here on JDR! Please let him know that we appreciated his time and also his performance!
Photo of Mr. Buterbaugh used with permission.

Photos from the SWEENEY TODD National Tour credited to David Allen, used with permission

Arvid Nelson, author, REX MUNDI

2008-08-26T05:21:00.000-07:00

Rex Mundi ™ and © 1999 – 2008 Arvid Nelson. All rights reserved.

Here are the answers to our questions to Arvid Nelson, "Rex Mundi" author. I have to say that Mr. Nelson has been a real treat to work with!! He was gracious about our time situation and allowed us access and use of anything on his website. Arvid joined JDR and posted a few things as our discussion went on over on our main board.

Arvid got this Q&A done in record time even though he was working on deadline. And those of us who are hooked on his series know how much we want the next installment!! So please enjoy his answers, he was very candid and very gracious and complimentary! And we thank him sincerely for being so accessable to us! Here is what "Rex Mundi" author Arvid Nelson had to say to JDR. Please remember not to repost this anywhere.

JDR: These books were a nice surprise for me. At some points I felt like I was watching a movie rather than reading a story. It was incredible. How does the combination of the text and illustrations come together for a comic book? If you have the idea for the text of the storyline, how do you partner with the illustrator so that you are able to provide the work for your vision?

AN:Thanks for the kind words regarding my little story![/b]You know, everyone works differently, but this is how most people, including me, do it. First, I write a detailed script that breaks down each page panel-by-panel, along with accompanying dialog. Then Juan, the artist, sends me back a rough sketch of each page, along with suggestions -- adding a panel, removing a panel, changing dialog, that kind of thing. Once we reach consensus, Juan draws the page. Then I letter it!
If you’re interested in seeing the process graphically, Dark Horse, my publisher, put together two “Making of Rex Mundi” features online:
Issue 2: http://www.darkhorse.com/downloads.php?did=556
Issue 4: http://www.darkhorse.com/downloads.php?did=611

JDR: I've read that your mother is a witch doctor and your father is a professor and an investment banker. It must have been a very interesting family to be a part of growing up. How do you think they influenced you into becoming the person that you are?

AN: My family is very interesting indeed! My father taught me to be intellectually rigorous. He’s an intense person, and he always made sure my brothers and I gave our best, whatever we did. My mother is very loving, caring and spiritual. I only that hope some of her gentleness and kindness rubbed off on me.

JDR: How did you find yourself writing graphic novels to tell your stories?

AN: Almost by accident! I’m really interested in film -- in college I did a few internships in the film industry. One was at Scott Rudin productions, who produced Sleepy Hollow. In fact, it was in production while I was there. My first summer following college I landed a job as a production assistant on a Woody Allen movie, Small Time Crooks. Both the internships and the stint as a PA were pretty grueling. A lot of fetching coffee and a lot of photocopying. It occurred to me no one would ever ask me to write or direct a movie because I was good at either of those things.
That same summer I worked on the Woody Allen film I visited Paris, and there I had the idea for Rex Mundi. I had some leads in the film industry, but I made the decision to drop out and start writing. Comics seemed like a good way of telling epic, filmic stories on a modest budget.

JDR: I found it interesting that you would use a woman as a personal doctor to the Duke and to be very involved in politics. Any particular reason for that?

AN: Most of the time, women are portrayed very ineptly in comics, so I wanted a female character that was realistic and three-dimensional. In some ways, Genevieve is the classic femme fatale. But her motives aren't purely selfish or diabolical either. She’s more complicated than that.

JDR: I loved the use of art work in your book as a form of clues, do you have a background in art?

AN: Thanks again! I’ve always admired and appreciated art, and I’ve taken a few courses here and there. I constantly drew as a child and in high school. That’s about all!

JDR: I think Julien is really in an 'I have to know but don't really want to know' situation. Do you think his own personal beliefs have something to do with this?

AN:Yes, they certainly do. Julien is a complex person, he’s not the sort who’ll believe something just because he hears it repeated over and over again. There is also lot of conflict in his past -- he’s really in conflict with himself. So his quest to discover the Holy Grail is also his quest of self-discovery.

JDR: Will viewers compare Rex Mundi as a 'copy cat' to "The Da Vinci Code" movie since the movie deal for the "Rex Mundi movie" was made public afterward the release of the DVC? Are you getting weary of the comparisons?

AN: They might! I should let it be known I first published Rex Mundi three years before The Da Vinci Code. I’m just happy to know a story similar to mine found such a wide audience. I take that as a good sign I’ve got my finger pressed firmly to the pulse of the zeitgeist. It’s also extremely gratifying to have elicited Johnny Depp’s interest. I truly believe Rex Mundi is deeper, more exciting and more engaging than The Da Vinci Code. If I didn't feel that way, I would have abandoned it long ago.

JDR: You've hooked us! When will we have the last of the books for "Rex Mundi" in our greedy little hands?

AN: Hah, I’m very flattered! The next book, “Crown and Sword,” will be in print by this summer. You can see a preliminary version of the front cover on the Rex Mundi website. The site is a good place to go for all the latest and greatest news.

JDR: Have you stayed with your planned original storyline or have you made some changes along the way? If you have, why the changes?

AN: I always knew the ultimate course Rex Mundi would take, but I’m constantly revising, deleting and adding things. I think I’m finally at the point where everything is locked down, but it’s taken me seven years to get here! It’s a constant work in progress. They say paintings are never finished, only abandoned. That’s absolutely true of Rex Mundi.

10) What do you think there was about the "Rex Mundi" series and Julien that attracted Johnny Depp to option it?

AN: I can only stab blindly! But he’s one of my favorite actors, and a person I’d like to think I have some things in common with. To know he’s interested in something I’ve written is absolutely surreal to me. I believe he’s interested because he sees some potential for it as a “thinking man’s action film”. And it’s funny, because that’s exactly how I conceived of Rex Mundi.

JDR: What are you reading now?

AN: I’m reading “The Book of Wonder,” by Lord Dunsany, considered to be one of the fathers of modern fantasy writing. I’m also reading the stories of Clark Ashton Smith, another of my favorite writers. Smith lived in California and was active in the 20s and 30s. He wrote the most darkly beautiful and elaborate fantasy stories. His vocabulary is awe-inspiring. I learn so much about the English language by reading his stories.

JDR: I've read that Jim Uhls, of "Fight Club" fame is penning the RM screenplay. WOW! He did a great job with that screenplay. Will you have any input in what shape the film takes? Any idea when production will begin?

AN: You know, Johnny Depp and the rest of the producers are expending a lot of effort and money to get the film made, and they need me to give them complete creative control. It’s really my job to support them. I’m always happy when they call me for advice, but it’s really incumbent on me to stay out of their way. I just try to be as helpful to them as I can. And I’m incredibly excited and honored to have Jim Uhls writing the screenplay.

As to production, no specific information yet! If all goes well, it could be in a year or two. But it could be longer. I’ve been working on the film adaptation of Rex Mundi for about five years now, and I’ve learned the virtue of patience!

JDR: Is there any chance that there will be another murder or mystery for Julien to solve? A sequel perhaps?

AN: Honestly, no. Rex Mundi is a finite story, I’ve always imagined it that way. It ends up in a very different place from where it starts. I’d rather it end in a burst of glory than have it outlive its purpose.

JDR: Without giving away the secrets, what was the most difficult part of the storyline for you to write?

AN: Well, Rex Mundi is a murder mystery and a historical mystery all rolled into one. That translates into a lot of people, places and dates! The hardest part is trying to cram it all into the story and not make it ponderous. Admittedly, a few issues near the beginning are a little overbearing, but I’m much better now at communicating the vast amount of information. Every issue is a learning experience.

Thank you very much Arvid!

Gregory David Roberts, author, SHANTARAM

2008-08-18T11:16:00.000-07:00

Our interview with Greg Roberts was originally posted on our old JohnnyDeppReads.com forum on Feb. 22, 2007.

Here is my conversation with Greg Roberts. And oh what a conversation it was! I was fortunate to be able to spend just under two hours on the phone with Greg Roberts last week. He graciously set the time after he'd figured out our time zone issues. He's in Bombay. I'm not. LOL We started our conversation at midnight his time. What a guy! We could have spoken for another hour at least as I didn't get half of my questions out. He was very generous with his answers as well as his time. I was the one with a time commitment issue as it was a work day for me and I had no idea we'd get on so well, for so long. We had been in communication with each other for almost two years trying to make this conversation happen and it turns out he was as happy to finally speak with us as I was to speak with him.

I've done my best to remove much of my comments and dialogue with him in this discussion as I only included what I thought I needed to keep continuity in tact for your reading clarity. Many things were discussed that I never thought would be simply because Greg was willing to share. Some things didn't get asked because I literally ran out of time. His voice is familiar if you've heard any of his interviews and he possesses humor and becomes amused at simple things yet when he wants to be understood he has a take command sense about his voice that you don't question, and his manner is always lined with a quiet tenderness and yet strength. A firmness and a softness at the same time. This man opened his thoughts, experiences and his ideas with us and spoke so freely, in exchange I listened and absorbed with respect and a feeling of his shared, quiet dignity.

Many heartfelt thanks to Greg for being so open and sharing with us and especially for giving so much of himself and his time.

So here is our discussion with "SHANTARAM" author Gregory David Roberts. Storyline spoiler warning.Copyright © 2004-2008 JohnnyDeppReads.com.

Please do not reprint or post without written permission from Admin from JohnnyDeppReads. To share please post a link back to JDR.

Photo used with thanks to Greg Roberts and Shantaram.com
Feb. 22, 2007

Telephone interview with SHANTARAM author Gregory David Roberts[/b][/SIZE]

JDR: Let me please tell you how thrilled we are to have you take some time to talk with us! We’ve been talking about this for a long time now and we are so honored and excited that this is happening!

Can you please tell us...let’s start at the beginning, you’ve been writing for quite a while, since you were in your twenties?

GDR:I wrote my first play when I was five years old, my first little collection of poems when I was seven, I’ve been writing all my life, it was my first instinct, it’s what I do. It’s always a thing that I’ve been driven to do, since I was a very young kid. I was published in an anthology when I was sixteen. I’ve been writing all my life. Of course for twenty years I couldn’t get published, except haphazardly here and there, because I was either in prison or on the run.

JDR: I read in another interview that you wrote some stories using the Nick Caraway name (a character from THE GREAT GATSBY) and you became too popular?

GDR: I started getting a following and became popular in Bombay and had to stop. I told a friend that I can’t do this any more, it’s compromising my status as a fugitive!

JDR: Life has really turned around for you, you have turned your life around…

GDR: I did, well the first thing I did was to stop taking drugs, to assume responsibility for my mistakes and my errors, to change my life. That was sixteen years ago. So in sixteen years I haven’t taken a drug, had a cigarette, a drink or committed a crime. It’s worked in my favor to do this. And the second thing was to assume responsibility for my family, to become the breadwinner, to send money to my family, which I’ve done. I support my family, it’s fourteen people and some Indian families as well. I got my writing career reestablished, it took me five years to write SHANTARAM as I had to work full time while I was doing it, it was an extremely complex book to write, to make sure my family’s secure and to return to Bombay to establish a charity, that I support. I basically pay for the treatment of people with Tuberculosis.

JDR: SHANTARAM is dedicated to your mother. May I ask if you still have your mother with you?

GDR: Yes I do. My mum and I and my step dad are all very close. I see them all of the time at their home and I bring them to Bombay as well. We are very close, they are loving, intelligent people. My mother is my hero. My mother is the most intelligent, creative, generous person I’ve ever met.

JDR: You mentioned earlier your treatment and concern about TB, can you tell us about it and what you are doing?

GDR: TB is a significant problem in Bombay and throughout India, it is everywhere. It’s a very significant problem in New York, the American prison system is so over crowded, they are creating new strains of TB every year and that in turn spreads to the population. It’s a big problem everywhere. Because I had a personal connection a few years ago, people I knew who were friends of mine had died. When I came back and looked for a focus, I decided that was it. That I was going to spend money to try and eliminate TB in Bombay, where I live. That’s something that I work on here, part of it is the motorcycles and I wanted to set up a business where if anything happened to me…I pay for this all myself…I set up a little business where we buy old motorcycles and modify, rejuvenate them as classic machines and then sell them to foreigners, tourists who come to Bombay…you can’t buy these sort of bikes in the states or in England or Europe. They buy them and from the profit of this all the workers and the people involved get a good wage and from the profit of these I pay for the treatment of people with TB.

Photo used with permission and thanks to Greg Roberts and Shantaram.com

JDR: You’ve just reminded me about an article that I read, I think it said that you were going to send Johnny Depp a motorcycle?

GDR: Yeah we will, I’ve got it, it’s sitting here, many people have seen that bike, it’s here in Bombay (he laughs) with the rest of my bikes. I’ve sent a message to Johnny, it’s one we did ourselves, it’s unique, there’s no other bike like it in India, probably no where else in the world. It’s an old bike, not like a Harley-Davidson but it’s a very, nice motorcycle. We’ve reconditioned it, modified it and I think we’ve made this into a thing of beauty. I’ve sent a picture to Johnny and the message came to ‘put it in a box and send it… I’ll pay for it.’ I told him no first you have to come to Bombay and ride it once here on the streets. Then we’ll put it in a box and send it where ever you want it, France, the US… wherever. So it’s sitting here waiting for Johnny to ride it.

JDR: So he’ll be there this coming fall to ride it when he comes to shoot the film?

GDR: Yes, well I’m not sure what “fall” means because I work in so many time zones, but October, November.

JDR: This must really be exciting for you to finally see this film happening.

GDR: Yeah, it’ll be a lot of fun I think. It will be something that will be a joy in itself I think, in its own way, but it will also be something I think and hope that leads to more work. I should be able to expand my treatment for TB sufferers here and initiate some other things on the basis of riding on the back of the movie. Because the movie gives you a platform to do other things …and if you’re focused and there are things you want to do then the movie allows you to do that so I’m looking forward to doing that as well.

JDR: I would think this film would be a wonderful entrée to a global platform for your organization. Does your foundation have a name?

GDR: Yes, Shantaram Charitable Trust.

JDR: Can people make donations to help?

GDR: Well I don’t take donations, I pay for everything myself. I am on the board of another charity called “Hope For India” and that DOES accept donations so that’s a fabulous charity… they got me to be involved after I got to know them and the work they do and that’s sort of a sister charity to mine. Mine is just individuals and me and the work I do. Theirs is quite big, they’ve built an orphanage in south India for abandoned girls.

JDR: Oh that’s fantastic!

GDR: It’s fantastic, state of the art facilities, with beautiful facilities… lovely clean beds and mattresses and sheets and computers for the girls and the equipment is excellent.

JDR: You certainly are making a difference.

GDR: Thank you.

GDR continues: In my case, giving, it’s always been my instinct, I’ve finally I’ve reached a point in my life where I can be the kind of person, in a way the Shantaram, the man of peace, that I always wanted to be and should have been before my life took it’s terrible detour in the wrong direction.

JDR: One of the things that stuck us about the character Lin, and I suppose if Lin is based on you and your life, then you basically went to sleep one night in the slums and woke up and you were a doctor! What was it like for you to have that sort of weight on your shoulders, their dependence on you to help them?

GDR: Well that’s a good question and it gets to the heart of who I am and what I am. I was making my living at the time I went to live in the slum, and I made my living from one day to the next, by working on the black market trade with foreigners who wanted to buy hash or wanted to sell their passport ...what ever it was they wanted to do...they wanted to change the money on the black market for profit. So I was doing that and committing crimes and doing crimes. So I’d go back to the slum and every afternoon set up my little slum clinic and when I was confronted with this on the first morning when I woke up after the fire I fell asleep and woke up and the guys are sitting there looking at me and I said “What’s going on guys?” and they said (at this point GDR does a spot on Indian accent) “Oh sir, your patients are waiting to see you.” And here they were. I went outside and there were all these people lined up saying “Good morning Doctor, Good morning Doctor.” “You see I’m having broken arm Doctor, you can be fixing for me” and so you look at that, I think for most people the instinct would be...woah this is too hard or you can look at it as I do and say I cannot walk away from this. These people need...there is a need here. And that need has arrived to confront me and so I am going to do it. It’s for me the same thing if you like when I was a junkie. When you’re a junkie people overdose all the time and the standard reaction when people overdose is to quickly scramble, get your stuff and leave as fast as you can because the cops are going to come, the ambulance guys are going to come, you’re going to get into trouble. My instinct was to give the people CPR. I’ve been an ambulance driver, I’ve learned how to do this. I’ve done first aid courses and I just couldn’t walk out and leave them alone even though I knew there was a chance that the police might come and then there would be a hassle for me because I’m taking drugs and whatever else. I just couldn’t leave those people and I never lost one. Every person that OD-ed that I worked on, I brought back. So on the one hand I have it in my nature that I’m a fighter and I’m ready to fight and I will fight if I have to. In prison when men attacked me with knives, I fought back and I stabbed them, cut them until the were on the ground screaming “all right I give up, I give up, stop, stop, stop”
And then I stopped. It’s not my nature to go on and inflict injuries but if I’m attacked? I’ll defend. I am a fighter, it’s my nature. BUT my nature is also to heal and to help as much as I can and I can tell you faced with that life in the slums, treating those people and living there, there’s not many who would have done it, especially not if they were on the run with a price on their head.

JDR: Words are failing me now, I am so awestruck by your ability and want to put others first, before yourself, to help and care for so many people. And you were not a trained doctor! Our members have said how moved they were by your book! For many of them this was the first book they’d read in a long time for fun, and it’s started many, many people on the reading path. You should know that you’ve changed the lives of so many people, all over the world with this one book.

May I ask you about Bombay now?

GDR: Sure

JDR: Your story opened talking about the senses of the city, the smells the, the different looks of the people and the intense heat. These were things that you wrote about noticing in the city. When you have traveled away and returned, are those things still what you notice most about the city?

GDR: Oh sure, every time. I have a driver that meets me at the airport and so instead of getting on a bus or in a taxi, which I did for the first few when I first came back, I’ve been back two and a half years now, when I come back now because I travel so much… I do public speaking. I did fourteen trips out of the country last year to do speeches and so on. I come back and I have my guy waiting for me, I have a driver with a car and the first thing is get the windows down so I can smell the air on my way back into the city so it’s still the same indeed, and when you come to Bombay the first time there’s a smell that you’ll get it’s the smell of the air, it’s so different to any where else, you’ll say OK I get it, now I know.. every time you come back to Bombay that smell will be there and you think ‘allllll riiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiight!’

JDR: How wonderful for us that you were able to share that with your writing. The little details you bring into your story of Lin, of yourself in some ways, you are transported to where the story takes place. You take us to the story! Do you think this same feeling will be able to happen with the movie? Do you think the director will be able to tell your story the way you want it told?

GDR: That I don’t know, but certainly she’ll get Bombay because she made a movie called “Salaam Bombay” which is a beautiful film and she knows the city, she did documentaries on the life of the prostitutes and the lives of others here in the city and lived with people in these areas for months at a time to do this documentary. She also has made a film called “Monsoon Wedding” and she can get the feeling of cities like Bombay and Delhi because she’s lived in them and knows them so well, so that’s a real plus for her! She’ll “get” the city. As to how they do the film? I don’t know… they’re rewriting the screenplay now. I gave them my input, I did my second draft, I gave it to them. Eric Roth is doing a second draft at the moment so everybody’s waiting to see what they come up with by combining his work, mine, hers and see what they come up with. I don’t know how they are going to do this story. I think there are probably going to be a lot of people who love books who’ll be disapointed, it seems to be the general trend. Have you seen a film called “To Kill a Mockingbird”?

JDR: Oh it’s one of my favorites!

GDR: Me too. Did you read Harper Lee’s book?

JRD: Yes, I read it years ago in high school, I need to reread it as an adult.

GDR: I read it and loved the book, and then I saw the movie and I loved the fact that they made such a beautiful film, they didn’t lose anything from the quality of the book, they captured it. They did a beautiful, faithful but elegantly made film and with its integrity intact and so on, now that’s rare. Most of the time, I think we love a book we go and see the movie and say “man that’s no where near as good.” Even a film that I think IS good, like “The English Patient” and I know Anthony Minghella who made it. And I like the film, I think he made a wonderful film, I know a lot of people who even thought they enjoyed the film say ‘oh but the book was so much better, I enjoyed the book’ and so on. You know I think that’s probably going to be a reaction because it’s such a big book and it’s hard to make it into a movie so I think there’ll be readers who’ll say “Oh no, no I liked the book much better.” I don’t know, but on the other hand I don’t...I don’t want to intrude. I think as a writer, especially if a book is in part about yourself and your life, you have to stand back, you can’t be looking over the shoulder of the director and the crew, it’s their art. This is their vision of this book it’s not mine, I’m not directing it, they are. So I have to let them feel free and not constrained or in some other way limited by the inspection of a writer. So I have some involvement now, I’ll come on as a consultant when they start shooting, there’s a few other things I’ll do but generally speaking, I’ll leave them in peace.

JDR: Being a fan of books and film, I try not to compare the two works, they are two different entities that stand alone. You can’t compare the works. One of the things about your story is that it’s such a complex story, I can’t help but think they will have to leave some thing out. Some storyline threads may not be brought to the forefront. Will you have any say over what happens?

GDR: Well to a certain extent at the beginning here I have a certain amount of input and I’m happy to have these meetings that I’ve had with Mira Nair and I like her personally by the way. I think that she’s very intelligent, creative and she’s very inclusive so I’ve certainly enjoyed her involvement at this stage because at each of the meetings that we’ve had she says each time “Hi, tell me what you think. And I want your feedback” and this is great. At a certain point I’ll cut off my input and just let them do what they want to do, you know.

JDR: Any chance you’d do a cameo?

GDR: Yeah I was asked if I was interested in doing that, but you know, I’m not. I think it would under mind the integrity of the film. So I won’t. BUT I will do a cameo in a film I’m producing this year and I’ll do a little cameo in that probably. Not even a cameo, just a tiny thing where I’m just sitting in the background with sunglasses on, or something, it’s only for those who know. It’s a film about the slave trade in women and we’ll shoot it in Mexico.

JDR: I have to ask you this, so many of us fell in love with the character Prabu (Prabaker)

GDR: I’m really glad they did. Thank you, it’s lovely, it’s endearing for me to hear this, it’s a wonderful thing when you create a character from nothing, and there’s no gesture, no expression, no word of dialogue, no physical appearance. Nothing is matched by in the real world by a real person and you get access to this created character… through… I don’t know, channeling in a way, and you create your character carefully, I wanted to make a character who was a gateway to India for all those people who had never been there. I wanted to create a character people could like first, be amused by, but then respect, then love and then grieve for when he passes so that this emotional experience, with the spectrum of emotions, would lead them to engage with India. Now it has, I get about 800 emails a week and of those… some 400 or so are about the book specifically so in many, many cases now people are saying, as you said, this book has changed my life for one reason or another, which is lovely to hear, and then you also get, “I’m going to India because of this” and now the Maharashtra Tourism Development Corporation here and the MTDC, they had a meeting with them here the other day and they said you know we’ve got about two hundred people a month coming to Bombay because of the book “Shantaram” ..they are coming on the “Shantaram tour”, they’re telling travel agents “I want to go to Bombay because I read this book called “Shantaram.”

JDR: This is something that I wanted to ask you about, the “Shantaram effect”... your books has to have affected the way people view the city. How does that make you feel, to know that you’ve opened up the world for people?

GDR: I love it because I love the city and I’m not blind to her faults. The city has a great many faults, the country of India has a great many faults, we can love a person and still be fully aware of that person’s faults so I am aware of the problems here but I love the city and so I’m thrilled that hundreds of people, it’s not something I expected… I didn’t think that people were going to come and do a “Shantaram” tour in large numbers, more something like the odd person who might make a kind of a little pilgrimage to say “I really like this book so I’m going to go there.” But it’s hundreds and hundreds of people, it’s like a couple of hundred people a month. So Leopold’s, for example, has been completely transformed. Leopold’s was almost dead and now it’s absolutely packed, it’s thriving, books get sold everywhere. It’s good! There’s…there’s a lot.

JDR: So let me ask you a question to clarify something for me, Prabaker (Prabu) is not based on any actual person?

GDR: No, of course none of them are, they are all created characters.

JDR: There was an article on the internet last year, I think, that said that the “real” Prabu was alive and well.

GDR: That’s so funny, you know what it was? There was a guy who was my guide who lead me into the city of Bombay and to his village. And I spent six months in his village with him and his family and I came back from there and went to live in the slum where he lived. So, in fact all of the experiences in the book are real experiences and that much happened but the character, the guide himself was the diametrical opposite of what I needed to create as an artist to create a gateway to India because he was such a negative character and a negative person. He did die, God rest his soul. Not speaking ill of the dead because he knows that I think I was probably the only person including everyone in his own family who actually loved him. He was a thief. You couldn’t put anything down, he was a drunkard, he was serial womanizer, he had four wives, one in each town along the highway and children to two of them…not counting the one in the village who was his first wife, and he had children to her as well. In the village the parents used to say ‘please don’t let him come back to the village, YOU come whenever you want. But don’t let him come back because he always gets drunk.’ Within his nature he was a liar and a cheat, he was all sorts of negative things. I like him. We got on well, he was my friend and we went through a lot together and I like him. I’d come from a prison full of men who were of an order of magnitude… to the power of 10 to the power of 3 who were worse than he was. So I measured him against the men I’d known in prison, for god’s sake. The people who knew him were measuring him against decent happy citizens in the community and found him to be an extremely negative person. Which he was and If I’d used him in the book, he was a racist and a sexist and oh, so many things. I couldn’t use such a character. I had to create a character. So now his brother, he did die, but his brother tried to kinda cash in on the story. When I came back his brother said “you know oh it’s so good to have you back, my mum and dad are still living in that village and they are very poor and they want to see you” And I said ‘sure no problem’ and so they came to see me they said we’re still living in the same house made of mud and blah blah so I spent a lot of money. I went there and built a huge house for them, it’s got two bathrooms, marble floors, it’s the biggest house in the area, they’re elderly, very elderly people and in India it’s not a lot of money, it cost me $50,000 to build it. So it’s not a huge amount but it’s a mansion in Indian terms. We built that for them. They had mortgaged their land, so I paid off their mortgage and so they owned their land again and this guy just decided he was going to cash in and wrote a story…(and he was interviewed by a journalist) and the story came out and they had to print a retraction after this saying, because it just obviously isn’t true. Everyone who knew the guide said, excuse me but the actual guide actually IS dead. That is just a crazy little mixed up story that went on and the guy came crying and said “I’m so sorry, I got greedy” and this and that . And I’m like it’s alright, don’t worry about it.

JDR: You write such vivid characters that obviously people have fallen in love with and taken to heart. I had one woman tell me that she just cried and cried when he (Prabaker) died, so you are indeed moving people’s hearts and they were absolutely certain that all of these characters were based on absolutely some individual person and that you had just given them a new name and they are not giving you enough credit for your creative ability as a writer and I’m going to try and make sure they all understand that YOU’VE created these characters, that they are all YOUR creation.

GDR: And all of the dialogue, yes…

JDR: Are you going to pick up where we left off?

GDR: The sequel? Yes, I’ve been working on it for four years.

(I must interject that at this point we got into the architecture of the book’s structure. And we then discussed at great length the allegories, mirror images, etc. contained in the book. Since we will be revisiting the book this summer, for now, I’ve opted to hold this part of the discussion for later use by us.)

JDR: I want to thank you for giving us so much of your time, but I have to ask, you mentioned in an previous interview that you are a musician, and you gave Lin a guitar that was slung on his back when he first gets to the city. Do you still play your guitar?

GDR: I do, I am still a really bad guitar player. The children in the slum had a name for the way I played the guitar, they used to call it ‘killing the chicken’ …I’m a terrible guitar player but I love it, I’m sitting here in my apartment here in Bombay talking to you and I’ve got three guitars beside me, they are very cheap here, Indian guitars, and I love these cheap, beat up Indian guitars. They’re knock offs of the genuine brand and so a Gibson here is called a Gipson with a “p” instead of a “b” and I love that, and the Hofner guitar is Hobner and so on…so they are copies of the originals but they are cheap Indian copies and I LOVE them, they’ve got a sound is not like any other instrument, they are really peculiar to India, I’ve got a couple of those and I play- I’ve got my guitars here, I like to play at least half an hour every day. It’s one of my mediation things you know, I sit down and play guitar now, late at night usually just before I do to sleep, my wind down before sleep is thirty minutes on the guitar. I have my routine, I get up in the morning and I take a quick wash and I make a coffee and I clean my teeth, make a coffee and drink half a cup of coffee and do three hundred sit ups..I do forty minutes..

JDR: whoosh!

GDR: (laughs) Yeah I can’t miss that, I gotta do that every day, you miss your sit ups…forget it… it’s all over. (he laughs) For a woman? No. But a guy? He’s got to do that. You’ve just gotta do it. You get in here and you’re in your fifties …and I’m never gonna give up and I’ll never stop. You know I do my three hundred sit ups and I do my training, forty minutes of training and I then do five rounds on the bag, five two minutes rounds on the punching bag, I’ve got a big heavy body bag here and then I take a shower and have breakfast and write for three hours then get out and do whatever I have to do, so I have a lunch, usually I have to meet people for lunch because.. if I have my lunch at home, which I like to do, then I have to meet people for a longer period… that way I can meet people and eat at the same time and then come back and write for three hours and then go out and do a couple more things maybe have some dinner with some people then come back and write again and do email for an hour, hour and a half and write a bit more then get a half an hour on the guitar and then bed. In between I read, I like to try to read, if I can forty to fifty pages a day from the various books.I usually read five or six books at the same time.

JDR: What are you reading now?

GDR: OK, I’ve got a lot...a lot of stuff at the moment I’m revisiting Nikos Kazantzakes and I’m reading a book of his called “Freedom and Death” which is dense and very difficult but it’s entertaining. A book by John Banville called “Athena” which is beautifully written – he’s a damn fine writer then, that’s John Banville. Then there’s another book on the largest covert operation in history, one of the biggest efforts ever made for smuggling weapons through the CIA and so forth called “Charlie Wilson’s War” ( JDR note by George Crile)

JDR: Yes!

GDR: You’ve heard of that book?

JDR: Yes I have but I haven’t read it yet.

GDR: That was given to me and I’m reading an interesting book by Richard Dawkins called “The God Delusion” because I’m convening a group of philosophers and scientists who are coming to London on March 21st at this major conference. We’ve got eighteen of the world’s leading physicists and philosophers who are coming together for a conference to try to hammer out some clear definitions of some of the biggest terms we use like “moral authority” “right and wrong” “good and evil” “justice” “freedom” “liberty” “democracy” what do we mean by these things in the 21st century? What should they mean for us today? And so we’re doing this as part of an initiative that’s been started by Richard Branson and Peter Gabriel. So they asked me to convene this group of philosophers and so I’ve done this and they’re coming together in London and so I’m reading a book by Phillip Ball called “Critical Mass” it’s a fantastic book, terrific book, fabulous book on what’s called phase transitions or “Critical Mass phenomenon” how one thing tips over into a different state and becomes something else. Another thinker is Matt Ridley, and so I’ll be working with some of Matt Ridley’s stuff. I’m going back through “The Red Queen” and a couple of other of Matt’s books and so doing that’s what I have on at the moment that I’m reading.

I’m getting a lot of offers coming from the British film industry, British television, from the United States to write movies, write TV series and I’ve taken some of those offers. I wrote two movies last year, I’ll be working on the sequel to “Shantaram” for four years. In between I’ve written three films… three film screenplays- one of them was the first draft of “Shantaram” and I wrote two movies. One is a romantic comedy, this is last year, and the other is this one about the slave trade in women. So that was the first one we got up – we got the budget for, got my production team, the producers who are working with me, so we settled on a director whom we love who’s just brilliant. (I was asked to edit out the details as contracts are not signed as of the date of this interview)

GDR continues: It looks as though a lot of the writing I will be doing in the next three to four years will be a mix between my own writing projects, I’ve got two novels that I have to finish next year which are not related to the “Shantaram” series. So two new books next year.

I’m introducing a character in the next book (the Shantaram sequel) who will have a spin off, who’s a detective, a reluctant detective, and that he will have a spin off of three novels of his own which are already plotted. I think there’s a high order of probability that they will get made into movies. I would think that’s very likely.

GDR continues: In a novel which is striving for…using a term one of my favorite writers “the first duty of the artist is to create a masterpiece” and I agree and I think that we should try to do that. And I always will try to do that, I may never succeed in my lifetime but I may look back and say I tried and I strove for it and I never did less than try. SO when you are trying to write a masterpiece, when you are trying to write literature of fine art you can’t be too specific about the time and times of events and places because you lock your book down. What you are striving for is universalism. You want the book to be relevant to people fifty years after you’re dead. But with an entertainment [book] you can afford to be much more locked into time and space and a lot more critical, with a book that’s a light entertainment so I can write things that are much easier… that I hope allow me to be critical of the society of India, in a way I can talk about things... grittier side of life in Bombay in a more critical way than I could do when I am trying to write serious literature, if you know what I mean.

JDR: In the scheme of a time frame, when do you think we can look forward to the “Shantaram” sequel? Within the next couple of years?

GDR: Yes, I will have the first of these book ready by the end of 2009, so that’s my timeline for that. And another novel which I’m bringing out, it’s a fantasy novel, that’s next year, I’ve been planning that for two years. So I want to bring that book out and prepare it.

Copyright © 2004-2008 JohnnyDeppReads.com.

James Meek, author, THE PEOPLE'S ACT OF LOVE

2008-08-15T14:46:00.000-07:00

JDR: This is an amazing and life altering work for me. Thank you for reminding me that I could think outside of my little daily world. I was interested to read in an interview that you said "It so happened that, while I was living in Russia in the mid-1990s, I heard about the three situations which are woven together in the novel - the practice of premeditated cannibalism by escaping convicts, the existence of the castrate sect and the stranding in Siberia of the Czech Legion, trying to make its way home."
There are so many stories to be told about Russia and her people, why did you choose to set your self admitted one book on Russia in 1919 and have these situations be the focus of the story? What attracted you to these extreme situations?

JM: I don't much care for the word "situations", but I used it because I couldn't think of a better one. I wanted to draw a distinction between stories, and the situations out of which those stories arise. We're always using the word "sitcom", which is, as you know, short for "situation comedy". A bunch of characters is faced with a situation. In the case of the sitcom, it's characters + situation = comedy. In the case of many of the great works of literature which we rightly think of as stories, it's more like characters + situation = story, although that story often happens to be a tragedy. A "sit-trag", if you like. You then get to the intriguing question - which comes first, the situation or the characters? In the case of The People's Act, the characters were born in my mind when I heard about these situations. Two men walking through the forest, the cannibal and his victim. A husband and a father about to cut himself off from his wife and son. A lost army thousands of miles from home. How did they get to that point? How would they deal with it? The stories came in the answers I found in my imagination.

On one level, these particular situations are extreme and unusual. On another, we are faced with extreme situations all around us every day - illness, birth, death, madness. All around me in my life I see people I know going quietly crazy or having the light that once shone in their eyes going out. That's extreme.

JDR: For me, it took two times reading the novel to completely understand all of the characters and their actions. I also saw these characters not only as extremes in their behavior in some parts, but as parallels to human behavior that currently is happening in the world today. If this wasn't your intent, why do you believe your book has struck a chord with so many around the world?

JM: Maybe because human behaviour doesn't change as much as we sometimes think over the centuries. If there are differences between human behaviour in 1919 and 2006, why might this be, do you think? Is it because the human race has changed, or is it because society, culture and technology has changed? I believe that it is the second reason, and what I tried to do was to find the universally human in my characters, and make the fact that they were living 43 years before I was born incidental. In a more banal sense, too, much of the technology which shapes our lives today, which seems so modern, was already there in shadow form in 1919. The telegraph network was a foreshadowing of the Internet - in fact, pre-revolutionary Russia had one of the world's most advanced telephone systems. And I would argue that the steam train was closer to the age of air travel than it was to the age of horse travel.
The question and my answer to it, of course, feeds into the very themes of the book. People like Samarin and Balashov believed that it was possible to change the very nature of the human race within a lifetime - a view shared by all sorts of people, including Communists, Islamic fundamentalists and Christian evangelicals. I don't think it is.

JDR: Your book describes Samarin as well read and as coming from a fairly affluent background. However he had no real allegiance to any particular political group during his formative years at college. What were his motivations for declaring himself a revolutionary in the first place? What side was he fighting for?

JM: I take your question as a compliment, because one of the signs of a well-imagined novel, I believe, is the sense it produces in the reader that a larger world exists just beyond the novel's pages - a world that the novelist knows about, but simply has not written down. That's a very interesting boundary there. Samarin is my fictional creation. I invented him. But is there, it could be asked, is there more Samarin that I imagined, that I hold in my head, but which I chose not to tell the readers about? In one sense, yes - of course I thought a lot about him, I imagined scenes he might have taken part in, things which he might have said, experiences he might have had, which I didn't write down. But if I didn't write about them, if I didn't share them with anybody else, in what sense are they real? Once I finish a book, once it's published, I no longer own it, in anything other than a financial sense. There are no secret chapters. What is there is what there is, and what that means is that your notion of what Samarin did outside the pages of the book is, strangely enough, as valid as mine - the only difference being, perhaps, that I know a little bit more about Russia than you. I can tell you what I thought about Samarin when I was writing the bits you ask about. I thought that he was clever enough to let people believe he had no political allegiance, when in fact, from his early teens, he was, in the deepest sense, committed to a struggle for radical changes in society, and had joined a group of terrorist revolutionaries similar to the real-life group called Narodnaya Volya, People's Will. He simply had a genius for lying. The telegram Mutz receives about him, and his own description of himself as The Mohican which he gives to Anna, is the truth about him.

James Meek photo here: Click here: James Meek - UK Writers in Greece - Literature - Arts and culture - British Council - Greece

JDR: You have written many strong, rich male characters in this story. Samarin, Matula, Mutz and Balashov are all characters with a well defined base. Since Johnny Depp has purchased the film rights, what character would you like to see him take on?

JM: It's a long road from film rights to film, of course, but should it ever come to that, I guess I assumed Depp would play Samarin, although I'd love to see him as Matula.

JDR: I was once advised that when someone tells you who they are, believe them. On page 29 you have written a conversation where Samarin does exactly that, he clearly tells Balashov who he is with the advisory telling of the story of the Monk and the plague. Does Balashov not comprehend the warning? Or does he want to see how the situation will play out?

JM: Good advice. Balashov understands pretty well that Samarin is an exceptionally dangerous individual, but remember that Samarin quickly gains a hold over Balashov - he realises that Balashov is not only a castrate, but one who carries out the castration of others, and is able to gain Balashov's silence in exchange for not revealing this to others.

JDR: This story has moved many of us in so many different ways. What did you want the readers of your novel to take from it?

JM: I don't know if I had hopes, specifically, that something would be taken from it - if you set out trying to teach readers something, you end up sounding like a preacher or a politician or some bigmouthed wise guy in a bar. Or those guys who spend their time posting opinions to other people's blogs. What I hope when I write a novel is, first, that people will read it; second, that they will finish it; third, that they will like it; and fourth, that I can create in the readers the sense that they are living through a second, alternative time to their own, that mysterious process of narrative which is so difficult to build. I hope, I suppose, to introduce you to some people, to encourage you to watch and listen to them for a little while and see how they deal with some hard issues; so that in the end you might be left with some outlying markers in the same place your real world memories lie, and your memory richer, and your tolerance greater, and your wisdom more.

JDR: Could you comment on the character of Anna? She’s obviously devoted to her son, but suffers with the humiliation of “losing” her husband to the castrates sect. She seems to be something of a “flighty” character in that she sleeps with various men and in the end easily flips from going with Mutz to taking a photographer position. Is she doing what she feels is best for her child, or is she taking the selfish route, doing what’s best for Anna? Why was it important for her to be alone?

JM: She's torn, I would say. Don't you know somebody like that? Who is drawn to lightness and change and spur of the moment decisions, to the things which attract her in that instant - but who at the same time knows that it would be better for her and her child in the long run to make a sacrifice of freedom for the sake of stability? I don't know that the flip was so easy. And there are all sorts of factors to take into account. Crazy as her decision to take her wounded son off into the woods with the Red cavalry might seem, to leave Russia with Mutz would have been crazy too - a man she didn't really love, leaving her homeland, going to a country she'd never seen where they spoke a language she didn't speak, marrying a Jew in a profoundly anti-semitic world, as the world was then?

JDR: I've read interviews that lead me to understand that you consider Samarin to be one of the heroes, can you tell us why? Also that you consider the Castrate/Balashov to be a hero. Does "hero" refer to the character in the book that becomes ( as described on the dust cover as "the flash point" in the story) someone that is admired for achievements or personal qualities?

JM: I like to use hero in the sense of principal male character, rather as a comment on that character's virtues and defects. A hero without flaws isn't very interesting, of course. As I have said before, I'm in love with Anna, Mutz is my friend, I'm jealous of Samarin and I like Balashov but I wouldn't want to be stuck talking to him at a party for too long.

JDR: The relationship as described between Katya and Samarin is brief and sexually oriented as evidenced by the kiss and the description that he is not a proper suitor for Katya. Did the act of attempting to take the bomb from her illustrate his feelings for her or his desire to participate in the revolution? Did the arrest and imprisonment of Katya then influence Samarin to declare him a revolutionary and the motivation to participate in terrorism?

JM: Although I didn't say so explicitly, I wanted to imply that Samarin was already involved in revolutionary activity up to his neck, but had been successful about keeping it a secret. So in fact everything you mention - his taking the bomb from Katya, his reaction to her arrest and imprisonment - was not a spur to his revolutionary activity, but an obstacle to it. His love for Katya, and, subsequently, his relationship with Anna, are diversions from his Jesuitical monomania with revolution, and he despises himself for it. When he steals the bomb; when he tries to rescue Katya from the White Garden; when he turns back the train in order to save Alyosha; all these are signs of his emotional triumph as an individual, and, in his own terms, of his failure as a revolutionary. Where the two lines cross, of course, is in his act of cannibalism. For most of the book, it appears to have been his act of love for the future of the Russian people. In the end, we find out it is is act of love for one person, for Katya.

JDR: The chapter titled “ The Locomotive” was so powerfully written. Alyosha as the child in the novel seems to lose his innocence in this chapter. Seeing the events through his eyes was very emotional for me as the reader. There are some profound statements made by Alyosha in this chapter. Was it your intent to write this chapter in this manner to achieve that effect?

JM: All I can say is that I often find the chapters which have the most intensity and speed are those which are written with the most care, thought and trouble. This is where it is clearest that as the writer of fiction you are carrying out an act of controlled dreaming: both experiencing the events in your mind, and, at the same time, finding words to describe them.

JDR: Alyosha’s dialogue with the characters is so strong but in a simple manner. Is his character actually the symbol of seeing things the way they are without all the pretense, or is it just a symbol of the naïveté of people?

JM: I'm not sure. I do sometimes wonder whether there is a noticeable difference between writers writing about children who have children of their own, and those who don't. Those who don't, perhaps, are more inclined to make the effort to remember how they were as children themselves. That's the category I come into.

JDR: Samarin is in the forest when he comes upon the Castrate. Was he there to dismantle the railroad so that the Reds could not continue their infiltration into Siberia, which meant he was possibly acting for the Whites, or was he just lost and needed a place of refuge as he is described as dirty, long beard, hair with lice etc.?

JM: When we come across Samarin at this point, he is at the end of his journey through the wilderness, which involved the prison camp and the act of cannibalism and many months of walking. Remember the bundle he tries to get rid of, and what it contains. The point where he sees the train is the first moment for many months that he has seen anything resembling civilization and modernity. The train, this point, is a symbol of the interconnected, civilized world - those railway tracks which connect Siberia with Europe and Asia and, by ship, to America.

JDR: What do you think attracted Johnny Depp to A People's Act of Love?

JM: Ask Mr Depp!

JDR: If the purpose of castration was to create "angels" and to eliminate lust, hate, greed, etc. "all the games between the sexes" then why does the Castrate embody all these feelings when he kills Matula? What was the motivation of the Castrate to join the sect?

JM: Balashov, I think, undergoes two changes. One is when he is castrated. The second is just before he dies, when his relationship to God changes. His relationship to God becomes more like that of a brave young cavalryman to his general, or to a lover he wants to impress. He wants to perform an act of sacrifice so profound that it will move God to love him. In his final way of thinking, castration and the Castrate way of life is too easy; it's a guaranteed ticket to heaven. A real sacrifice would involve doing something sinful, which would save the lives of others (Anna, Alyosha, the other castrates) but would ensure that the man who did it would himself go straight to hell. That's why, I think, Balashov resolves to kill Matula.

JDR How do the events in this work relate to today's global problems?

JM: Each generation has to discover for itself the problems which previous generations suffered, and each generation thinks it's the first to suffer them. There have always been men - and, more often than not, they are men, rather than women - driven by their ideas and dreams and plans to commit acts of violence. For the people, but against people; for humanity, but against the human. That's the idea of the people's act of love: an act which, by itself, to the people who witness it immediately, seems criminal, murderous, insane; but in the minds of the people who carry it out, it is an act carried out on behalf of the inhabitants of a better future world. It is their love which drives them to do these things. In the minds of the September 11 hijackers - well, some of them, perhaps - the crashing of a plane into the World Trade Center was the people's act of love directed from a future Islamic world of peace and security. I could have explained to the young Iraqi boy I met outside Baghdad during the US-British invasion of the country in 2003, whose parents and sister had just been shot by US Marines, that it was all for the sake of a better, fairer, safer world - but I don't think he would have believed me.

JDR: Matula and his mistress Elizaveta Timirovna used cocaine freely, why did you choose to include drug and hallucinogenic mushrooms in the story?

JM: Magic mushrooms are a traditional method for shamans to experience the ecstatic visions which are a part of their role in native Siberian society. Cocaine, which was sold freely over the pharmacy counter in the US, Britain and Europe in the early part of the 20th century, was often abused during the Russian Civil War. It seemed like a good place to introduce it. What does it say about Matula and Elizaveta Timurovna? If you walked in on people like that snorting coke in a situation like that, it might be reasonable to think that Matula in particular was neglecting his duties towards his men, that he was more interested in pleasure and self-indulgence than wisdom or work, that he was selfish, egotistical, more frightened of boredom than of death. Cocaine for breakfast; it's not nourishing, is it? To me the idea of feeding yourself something which does not nourish your body or your mind, but gives you a brief thrill, suggests all sorts of personal weaknesses. Although I don't use cocaine, I don't say I'm immune to these weaknesses.

JDR: What book are you reading now?

JM No God But God, by Reza Aslan, and The Looming Tower, by Lawrence Wright, and the poems of John Donne

JDR: Do you view any one character as the most important character in the novel? If so, who and why?

JM: I see the book as having a quartet of characters of equal importance - Anna, Balashov, Mutz and Samarin. Anna is the first among equals, perhaps, for two reasons. One is that she is the axis around which the novel turns; the other three characters all have an intimate relationship with her, are all drawn to her. The other reason is that she is emotionally the fullest character in the book. Balashov and Samarin are deficient in common sense; Mutz is deficient in passion. Anna leans towards both poles at different times.

JDR: You have written such compelling characters and made us care about them, is there any chance that you would write a sequel that would take us through the 1930's and WWII?

JM: I have no plans to. The novel I'm writing, which is half-finished - it's called We're Now Beginning Our Descent - is set in Afghanistan, Britain and the US in 2001 and 2002, and I have at least three other book projects in mind after that. I have sometimes wondered what might have happened to the characters in the Soviet-Nazi era; Alyosha, of course, could still be alive today, although he'd be in his nineties. I'm afraid Mutz might have been too clever to see such a stupid phenomenon as the Nazis gaining power, so he might have got caught, and I'm afraid Anna was too free a spirit for Stalin's Russia, so she might have got caught, too. And after that, who knows? There could be a sequel in the Legion's journey across Siberia to the Pacific; there were some extraordinary events around the Tsar's gold reserves and the last days of Admiral Kolchak. But I don't think I'm going to write that sequel.

J.P. Donleavy, author, THE GINGER MAN

2008-08-12T11:04:00.000-07:00

"The Ginger Man" cover art © Atlantic Monthly

This is a telephone interview with J.P. Donleavy at his home in Ireland on June, 2006 and was originally posted on our main forum in June of 2006.

Photo of JPD and his cattle! © Bill Dunn @ The J.P. Donleavy Compendium

I was so thrilled as I had been waiting for this day to come. I had my desk set up and ready to go. I had the questions printed out and in front of me, I had stacks and stacks of 8 X 11 lined tablets and a new box of pens and I had the comp up and running with book marked reference works minimized on the bottom of the page. I had been told to have plenty on pens and paper and I took that advice seriously. OK...I was ready. I rang Mr. Donleavy at our scheduled time, after several rings, the voice mail picked up and I left a message saying I would phone back.. Hmmm I knew I had the right time and the right day and the right number. So I waited a while and rang back. This time he answered, it was about 6:35 pm his time in Ireland. He wanted to tell me where he'd been and why he was not at the phone. It seems that a mother cow was separated from her calf and he was driving (on foot) the cow back to her calf. He said he has a rather tame herd...and they answer him when he calls, he was concerned that the calf would not be able to find it's mother and he suspected she had been searching for it earlier in the day, which lead us to a conversation about the ways the older animals teach the young how to behave.We chatted quite easily about ourselves and got to know each other a bit as you do when first meeting someone. I told him how honored we were to have him take such a personal interest in us and in our questions and thanked him most humbly. He speaks with a combination of accents, he has a lovely British sound to his voice, with the occasional Irish inflection and then BOOM....his American roots pop out. His speech pattern is quite like his writing style and it comes in bits and snags and thoughts lead to others and to others often without completing sentences. He does NOT sound like anyone 80 years old. He sounds much younger and very robust. He is thoughtful of what he says and listens with great interest and laughs often. He shares thoughts and ideas and information in a very kind and caring way and is a lot of fun to get to know. I was told I would have a blast talking with him, and I did! We spent close to two hours together on the phone and when the time came for us to hang up, we had agreed we would speak again and meet!

This conversation could not have taken place without the assistance of Mr. Donleavy's business partner and I thank him most sincerely! OK..now for my conversation with Mr. J.P. Donleavy. I have added some things in parenthesis to clarify something now and then.

JDR I asked him how he became a writer, as we knew he had started out as an artist.

JPD I wrote at Trinity College, inspired by Jack Yates....friends of his (Yates) were painters who belonged to a group called the White Stag group..and was encouraged... continued painting and had some exhibitions and then gravitated back into writing and TGM because painting seemed to localize me too much --that you didn't reach too many people that might want to know about you. Couldn't get anywhere as a painter unless you first got famous. So I had to get out and get famous, certainly one or two people have heard the name. (meaning his own)

JDR You have been quoted as saying "once you lose your nerve, you lose your abilities to be a good writer." Does this apply to your art as well?

JPD Yes it does and you are right to think that, you can't be cautious at all, if you notice young people that draw a picture you don't know that they have nerve..but they have, they don't have an influence controlling them and it's actually very much, as you get older, you've got to be able to buck things...forge on...do what you want to you.

JDR About your art and your paintings, may I ask what medium you like to use?

JPD It's tough to get ..use an original technique..that I invented to accommodate me.....trying to get a new studio set up. I do watercolors mostly and with this technique that I have I like to work quickly with the (oil) paints. And my technique absolutely lasts. All these years.no colors fading...mostly the paint is locked in with linseed oil.... Paint on a masonite board.

JDR When did you start your art work, your painting?

JPD Young.... young... 21 -22 right after the Navy.

JDR You wrote TGM at 25...where did you get the wisdom to write such a character as Sebastian Balfe Dangerfield at that young age?

JPD I am not so sure that I have always thought that if you reach the age of 14 - 15 in America.. where children grow up very quickly.. there's not many insights that I've had since I was that age where it's changed my thinking. At the age of 18 I don't think that I thought very differently than I did at the age of 25. I think we instinctively have the knowledge and adapt the knowledge we need.

JDR The Ginger Man was published in 1955, how does this book fit in with, or "feed" the culture of the 21st century? Or how do you explain TGM's longevity?

JPD I'm not absolutely sure...it might have something to do with it's based on people who did live, Gainor Stephen Crist ( for example) who hailed from and lived in Ohio... and I think that the reality of Dublin and in Ireland in those days... somehow was unique in the sense that it was a country that was isolated, wasn't in the second world war and even to this day it's only now joining the general world as a country joining the EEC. Now Ireland is being totally transformed, it's no longer Ireland or Irish, its full of immigrants, Poles, Lithuanian, etc......the Irish are getting a bit alarmed that they don't exist anymore.

JDR This brings us round to something that I have read. Ten years ago in an interview with Thomas E. Kennedy, you spoke about the Darcy Dancer books: "…they are totally Irish, set in Irish houses, about the things that happened to the Anglo-Irish. This thing is disappearing in Ireland now. In another ten years, the term Anglo-Irish won't mean anything in contemporary usage." Ten years later, how do you see the term "Anglo- Irish"? Do you think you were correct?

JPD Yes indeed, they have actually vanished, yes they have vanished from anyone's consciousness in general terms, they are never brought up in newspapers or related to in any way, they've totally vanished, their manners their sort of general elegance. I still know a handful of them who are advanced in age now, but they are sort of dying out totally and their generation of growing up... say children 15 to 18 years of age -- they are totally different and they have to adapt to another world, they are still growing up with that sort of Anglo Irish sort of pattern, I guess that's a better word to use. That disappears from them now. What they have now is times where people are affluent. they let you know what they possess. It's a change...Ireland Isn't as attractive as it used to be. There is a lady physician here and she did say something, she treats people who come here now, like the Lithuanians, Poles and so on and she sees a lot of them as patients...she says that they are like the Irish used to be 30 years ago. They are thoughtful they are polite and so on and charming where as the Irish have lost that now.

As we continued to talk we visited about our grandparents and forefathers and JPD says that "it dawns on me that TGM is pirated in Russia and probably many translations may exist and circulate, the curious thing...the only formalized thing is that some years ago one of my books called the Unexpurgated Code..that's the only thing of mine that the Russians have published and they published it in the Moscow Literary Gazette. It's a kind of a curious thing about behavior somehow that struck their interest. There's the case of this book and a lady who took the book on some sort of aircraft ..was reading it and fell into the aisle of the aircraft laughing out of control and the people on the aircraft knew that she was making a connecting flight to another flight and so when she was making the connection and came to make the flight, they took the book away from her and wouldn't let her board. (I asked if they wanted it for themselves) and he said "No, they thought she was a danger to other passengers she was laughing so much and so uncontrollable. So it's my only book that's still rather banned. In fact it's locked up in all Britain...you can't get it in a British library...it's prescribed and under lock and key.

JDR I had to ask him what it felt like to have his books banned?

JPD Well it's not too much of a problem now...and helps authors because their books generally get better known but it was quite a serious thing in those days with TGM because there was a point where I could have been prosecuted ...and the book was sort of prosecuted in a couple of places in early days.

JDR: Many of our readers are women and some of them had problems with Dangerfield's neglect of his daughter and the way he treated the women in general in his life. He always stayed true to himself, but not was not always true to everyone else.

JPD I've always thought of it in terms of the fact that he's referred to as this sort of maverick husband and so on and reading between the lines that sometimes in the behavior in marriages in so on and so forth you find that these things in outbursts and so on...I suppose it's very graphic in Dangerfield's case but it could be a sort of normal sort of marriage kind of problem that crops up from time to time.... and see, the gentleman that he's based on Mr. Stephen Gainor Crist..he always absolutely a gentleman in every way ...never struck a woman and never misbehaved basically he was someone also that when a lady entered a room would always jump to his feet and even click his heels in the southern manner and so on and so it was always difficult to say "well this awful person you wrote about but to point out that this awful person wasn't quite so awful.

JDR What did you hope that your readers would take from this story?

JPD That's interesting...I don't know that as a writer you think in those terms you think... sometimes you write and you find yourself almost wondering how it will turn out.

JDR So does that mean that as a writer, you sometimes let the characters take you where you are going?

JPD I'm wondering as to how premeditated writers allow themselves to get... in that way that there is a point where they really don't sometimes know..I don't think every writer sort of almost admits that at some stage his books can take on their own kind of life it selves and simply lead away into directions that they're not kind of prepared for.

JDR Has that happened to you...that a story took you somewhere you didn't know you were going?

JPD Maybe that is the case yes...I mean I'm writing a thing now which is sort of highly complicated but set in New York city and so on... I find you know .. I'm surprised that the work will take itself off on various tangents that I hadn't firstly anticipated.

JDR So it develops a life of it's own?

JPD I don't know whether you ...happen to know the book "The Lady Who Liked Clean Restrooms"? It's the only book I've ever written which has one particular distinction about it ..no one to date (he chuckles) has ever, ever said a bad word about it or criticized it or received at bad review ... or a critical review. It's the only thing I've ever written which has totally ....I remember when it did get reviewed in America it received rave reviews coast to coast ...every single periodical .. and the New York Times sometimes used to wait to sort of trounce anything.. I think I had a lot of enemies sort of hidden on the New York Times without knowing it and I waited til the end I said it was the most extraordinary ...I had this book that's about these very attractive and they used the term rave reviews and I said this is the ideal time for the Irish, for rather the NY Times to finally ...absolutely crucify this work and suddenly there on the fax machine came this review with an accompanying letter isn't this fantastic? Read this! So I... got never....a discouraging word.

JDR How long ago did you write "The Lady Who Liked Clean Rest Rooms"?

JPD Well it's a fairly recent one along with another book called "Wrong Information Is Being Given Out at Princeton" ...it's another book that's rarely got a discouraging word

JDR We talked about other books of his and he added ...

JPD .."The Lady Who Liked Clean Rest Rooms" isn't too long you see...it's purely about a woman from start to finish and it's.. it's quite...I was surprised that it was received in the way it was.

JDR I asked if he like the character

JPD Oh well yes, it was someone that I sort of knew with stories that had happened to the person ...it was just an incident. And then the three books that I'm writing now about NYC, I've written two of them already.

JDR I commented that he was certainly a busy gentleman and thanked him for taking the time to visit with me.

JPD Well it's a nice contrast to have because life where I live here is so isolated that sometimes of you don't make a point to getting out..if you don't get outside the gates for a couple of weeks you don't see another human being.

JDR You grew up not far from Woodlawn Cemetery and you have had a cemetery and remains of a mausoleum on land that you own. I've read that you paint cemeteries and include them in your books...death is a focal point for you in many books. What is there about them that engages you?

JPD Yes I have a few paintings of cemeteries and indeed most gallery owners don't want to hang them for good reason I suppose. I did have a couple once turn up asking could they buy one because they couldn't ever find one. And they did buy one but they had to come here to get it. One of my gallery owners wouldn't want people to have any pictures like that.

JDR And you included a mausoleum in The Singular Man, is that correct?

JPD Yes indeed that's one of the big things about the book, I remember that's the thing that..you've heard of Mr Redford? Robert Redford... and at one stage Sam Speigel was thinking of making a picture of it and many years..well Sam's dead now he died a few years back and at some place where Redford , whom I know a little bit over the period of years...after Speigel died I wrote him a note and said to him "How would you like to give 'A Singular Man' a try again and his letter back was fascinating because "I'm getting to close now to having to build my own mausoleum"...and the reality of playing a role had got too .

JDR Since we are talking about death...death is a reoccurring theme through some of your books.

JPD Yes indeed because the only job I ever had in my life was to...on a summer vacation from school was to go and work in the cemetery cutting grass so that must have been a big influence and I lived ...where I grew up in a community called Woodlawn there's a cemetery, Woodlawn Cemetery and it's one of the world's famous cemeteries because it's so beautiful...rather like a great park and it'd full of mausoleums and so on. And so this must have had a long kind of influence, and I house I owned previously to the one I'm in, that had a cemetery, an ancient cemetery on the land and indeed today some lady friend was bringing it up that she wants to be buried in this cemetery and I'm actually putting a cemetery into this place I live at. (he chuckles, I reply, you might as well LOL) he says " it's not cheap to buy a plot now...I have the land here...thought maybe I'll put together a small cemetery.

JDR May we talk about the TGM being made into a film with Johnny Depp, who could introduce Sebastian to a whole new audience of people. How does it feel to have a character, who's been a part of your life for fifty years now become hugely popular character on film?

JPD Well I guess it's come up..you know a few actors have played the role ..Richard Harris played the role of TGM and one or two other people Nicol Williamson, some people know of his name...he's a brilliant actor and played this role tremendously well, a very eccentric gentleman...and it was always a worrying thing because some other people I saw attempt the role just simply couldn't play it ..where as the one thing one seems to find with Mr. Depp that he's a great perfectionist and anything I've seen of his being quite unbelievable and so I'm fascinated by the fact that he would tackle this. It's very hard for an actor to know just how they.....I always worry about the fact that authors, you know, kind of don't know what to say and in fact, the fact that they can deal with an actor to whom they don't have to say anything is tremendous because you know that he's going to think this out and play it and so it's a big lucky break as it were, because in some ways one always was worried about you know, who might tackle this.

JDR Sebastian Dangerfield will find new life today and a new audience after fifty years, what's it like to have your work as an author continue to find new audience?

JPD Yes, and indeed I've been a playwright and you know my plays would turn up in various places and be performed and I guess this would be the first film, actual film..a full length feature film to come out of one of my pieces of work. One of the problems has always been the fact that controlling my work and owning the rights and so on I've always been in a position to say "no" to something. So in the Hollywood tradition usually is most authors find their work is taken over and a lot of them regret that happening. In effect where I've come across it the author who is in the process of selling a film right have always advised to stick with his property and even tho must insist upon writing the screenplay himself and where this has happened the films have always to turned out to be fantastically good and so here is a case where it's almost ideal where you have this player whose one of the most brilliant actors of all time probably and it's just a lucky break for me and if things go wrong as things can..well then that's that, but on the other hand you are in sort of a position to have confidence in what you are doing. The lucky thing with someone like Mr. Depp is the fact that his power that he has just as a player allows you to actually go and make the picture as say the way that the director wants to make it and Mr. Depp wants to play it. They've got this freedom, that's the thing because of his box office power.

JDR Isn't it wonderful that it will stay true to your work?

JPD Yes that is the biggest and best characteristic you can come up with, because you just know that these people who are making the thing, the actors and players are the people I've always had great faith in actors and people and in fact always am

there to listen to anything they want to say and have always admired the way they can take words where they can turn something into a living thing.

JDR I comment that it's magical, the way two people, the actor and the writer, come together to make a character come to life on stage or screen..

JPD Yes and a actor does that and it's tremendous how the time they spend and devote ..it makes you realize that this is one of the great art forms, being an actor.

JDR When I was reading the last chapter of TGM it brought back memories to me of a children's story that my Mom used to read to me and that was The Gingerbread Man...and the last bit of the story goes "run run as fast as you can, you can't catch me, I'm the Gingerbread man" and it seemed to me that that was what Sebastian had done..run! Run from one situation into another. Was that something that you alluded to or was it just a coincidence?

JPD No curiously enough somewhere the very words that you've just recited..somewhere and it would have been some strange little strange kind of over tone and I'm sure that must has crossed my mind because when I named the book TGM we were looking for a title ...it was originally called just "SD" ..the initials and the publisher, which was Maurice Girodius of the Olympia Press wanted another title because he really wanted to go out and sell it as a pornographic book or any title that could be more of less cover that kind of quality that he thought his readers or his buyers required. And so I just simply suggested the title be The Ginger Man.

JDR In TGM, other than death, sex is a really strong theme..Sebastian gets plenty and poor O'Keefe can't get any at all from anyone. Surface was prudish yet under neath...

JPD I'm dealing with my archive at the moment so someone has actually gone through manuscripts and things and we have his letters and it's based on a actual character...... his letters actually were laid out sort of showing this archival matter along with the fact of people know what The Ginger Man is all about. And there are these letters actually practically laying our Kenneth O'Keefe's life....from the actual man himself.. so it was very kind of , I suppose factually reported..his life. He didn't marry, is retired and still lives in Ireland.

JDR I read that in the writing of the script for TGM that you are including Brendan Behan.

JPD Yes this is quite true because he's not.. he ...just makes an appearance in the book in the catacombs as Barney Berry, and when Shane McGowan got interested in this role in part, I realized that one had to actually write! So TGM will be one of the few films where a character is expanded upon in the film, where he doesn't exist in the book. If Shane McGowan is anything like you know he can play a brilliant Brendan Behan, so we are looking forward to seeing..they are pals together I think - Mr. McGowan and Mr. Depp. One of my books which isn't a novel, it's called "The History of the Ginger Man", in it there's a great deal about Brendan Behan, some of his conversation and behavior and everything else. So I have a book already that can be used as some base for him drawing his character. Things he would say and how he behaved so he was quite a character.

Photo © 2005 Maike Schulz

JDR Sebastian and the guys were all running amuck in the city, in the catacombs ..that was run by a gay man and we wondered what the view towards gay people was at the time?

JPD In Ireland, curiously, a very repressed country, so repressed that if you were gay in Ireland in those days it just simply didn't matter. It was quite the opposite thing...you know they were just strange people and were accepted as just strange (different) Curiously Ireland as permissive in the sense that gay people became quite a society in Dublin, because a lot of..um..during the war Ireland was the only place left in Europe which had food after the war (no rationing) so people could come to it (Ireland) and enjoy life. Dublin actually became a sort of homosexual meeting ground. People would come from long distances and visit in Dublin...it had two or three pubs which were gay pubs and things. (Because there was no rationing after the war) Dublin had everything then.

JDR In TGM you sent O'Keefe off to Paris and that city was also a part of "The Beastly Beatitudes of Balthazar B." Was Paris "the" place to be then - just like it was in the 1920s?

JPD Yes a lot of people gravitated to Paris after the war and it had the sort of quality about it.

JDR Did you and your friends go there?

JPD Yes I would go there and spend time in Paris and one or two friends at Trinity, in fact the model for Balthazar is in fact a Frenchman as is described of course and he was a friend of mine at Trinity and I knew him very well, in fact I had to go, I was invited to Paris to attend this enormous dinner of 400 -500 people and I was up on the stage and my friend was .... on stage to introduce me and he said "that I just want you to know that Mr. Donleavy is an author who has written a book called "The Beastly Beatitudes of Balthazar B" and I'd like everyone here to understand that my Nanny never did all those things to me that he said that she did.And there was a scene which you couldn't believe would ever happen that a character in a book....(and the inspiration ) was up on stage coming out with this surprising remark. I nearly fell through the floor.

We soon after concluded our discussion with promises to be kept and with his best wishes to us and his thanks for our interest in his book.I visited with Mr. Donleavy for close to two hours and the time sped past with much laughter, many stories and a shared love of the written word and respect for a man named Mr. Johnny Depp.I am profoundly grateful to Mr. Donleavy and his business partner for his constant support and encouragement in making this Q&A become a conversational dream come true.I hope we will be blessed with more from Mr. Donleavy as time goes by.

2007 post script. I was invited to attend an exhibit of JPD's artwork in New York in May of 2007. I did attend and was also invited to the private dinner afterward. JPD is a fascinatingly brilliant wordsmith and artist. He was most gracious and very entertaining to be around. His business partners were very inclusive and a blast to party with! I am forever in their debt.

Jason Surrell, author, Pirates of the Caribbean: From the Magic Kingdom to the Movies

2008-08-11T19:26:00.000-07:00

Artwork copyright Disney

JDR: I've read your HAUNTED MANSION and loved it, I read that you approached the Disney people about writing the book you'd like to read about the ride and it's progression into a film. Was writing the POTC book also your idea and how did writing it differ from the Haunted Mansion book. Do you have a favorite of the two rides?

JS: Believe it or not, I pitched the Haunted Mansion and Pirates books at the exact same time in the summer of 2002. Since a book that focuses on just one attraction was a new concept at the time, they felt more comfortable testing the waters with one book, and went with The Haunted Mansion primarily because that’s what I pitched first. The fact that it would come out as a direct tie-in to the film also helped. The Pirates book is identical in format, with the first section focusing on the history of the attraction, the second section offering a scene-by-scene “ride-through” of the show, and the third section focusing on the making of the film – in Pirates’ case, the first film. I love both of the attractions – they’ve always been my two favorites – but if I had to pick one, The Haunted Mansion has a slight edge thanks to my lifelong love of ghost stories and horror movies. It’s a photo finish, though!

JDR : I was born and raised in Northern California and our family visited DL every summer. As a little girl I remember the excruciating wait for POTC to finally open and it did but only after the death of Walt Disney. What do you think would be his reaction if he knew that 35+ years late POTC is more popular than ever and now the basis for a series of incredibly popular films?

JS: I don’t think Walt would actually be SURPRISED by either one of those things. If you listen closely to the way he talked about Disneyland – and virtually everything else he did – it’s clear that Walt built things to last, so to speak. One of the most common adjectives used to describe Disney entertainment is “timeless,” and that’s by design. That’s why you don’t see pop cultural references or a ton of slang in the Disney animated features. Walt wanted his films to be just as accessible to audiences fifty years after they premiered in theaters – and they are. The same thinking applied to Disneyland, although in the three dimensions of the so-called “real world,” he’d finally have the freedom to change things that weren’t working and “plus” things that were. So the fact that Pirates is just as successful today – with a couple of changes and additions here and there – wouldn’t come as much of a surprise to him. As for Pirates getting turned into a film, I can’t say that that would surprise him much, either. Walt was a filmmaker, and so were all his original Imagineers. The Disneyland experience is derived from the motion picture experience, and its attractions are three-dimensional films in which guests can live the story. It’s no stretch at all to think that characters and situations that were originally developed for Disneyland would prove rich and compelling enough to move in the opposite direction and get translated into film stories.

JDR: This has probably been asked before, so please excuse me, but do you have a favorite of all the POTC rides in the different Disney locations? Do they, or how do they differ from park to park?

JS: The Disneyland original is, hands-down, my favorite version of Pirates of the Caribbean. The Walt Disney World version is quite similar once you hit the open sea, but it’s half as long because you don’t spend nearly as much time in the haunted caverns. Tokyo is even closer to the original; I believe only one of the haunted cavern scenes was cut. The Disneyland Paris version is the most drastically different, with the story told in “reverse.” There the skeletons in the grotto appear at the END of the attraction, putting the story in “chronological order.” There we get to see the pirates pillage and plunder and then pay for their crimes by spending eternity in the haunted caverns. The ultimate message there is a very clear “crime doesn’t pay,” along with the classic “Dead Men Tell No Tales.” But, for me, the Disneyland version is still the one to beat, partially because it was Walt’s swan song, but mostly because it represents Imagineering at its finest.

JDR: The rides have been updated several times, is there a part that has been removed that you really miss?

JS: To be honest, none of the changes have bothered me very much, including the controversial update of 1997, in which Disney was criticized for bowing to political correctness. The content of that scene may have been tweaked to come more in line with social mores, but it also got BETTER in the process. The Chase Scene, as it’s called, is much more detailed and dynamic now, with less emphasis on figures spinning around on turntables. There’s more going on in the scene now, the gags are funnier and the animation of the figures is much better. Beyond that, nothing has really been REMOVED from the ride that changes the experience all that much.

JDR: There has been internet "chat" about including Capt. Jack Sparrow in the ride and while in DL recently, we overheard kids wondering where Capt. Jack was. Without breaching any confidences, what is your "take" on this happening in any of the parks?

JS: The Pirates of the Caribbean movie is one of those once-in-a-generation things that any studio head would KILL for. The upshot of that is we now have literally millions of kids (and not just young ones) whose first frame of reference when you say “Pirates of the Caribbean” is the MOVIE and not the attraction. They love the story and they REALLY love the characters. That being said, it would be tough for us to ignore that as we move into the future of the Disney theme parks. I think it’s safe to say, to use my book’s subtitle, that Pirates of the Caribbean will be the first Disney attraction to go “From the Magic Kingdom to the Movies” and back again. Dead men tell no tales...but keep a weather eye open...

JDR: While you were researching this book, was there anything or any fact that you learned about the ride that surprised you?

JS: I was most surprised by the fact that the original Imagineering team – and even Walt Disney himself – really was concerned about how some of the pirates’ behavior would be received. Because when you think about it, these aren’t nice people and they’re not doing nice things – it’s right there in the song lyrics – so they really had to be careful in terms of how some of the subject matter was presented to guests. Even Walt, when he was reviewing the mock-up of the Auction Scene, turned to his Imagineers and asked, kind of sheepishly, “Well, this’ll be okay, won’t it?” In fact, Marc Davis’s first reaction to the concept was “This isn’t ‘Disney.’” His characters and gags, along with X. Atencio and George Bruns’s song, really helped defuse any potential controversy over the subject matter. The fact that the Chase Scene is the only one that’s really been tweaked over the years is a testament to the fact that they nailed it right out of the gate.

JDR: Have you been able to be on set for any of the filming of the original movie and/or the sequels? If so are there any ride details that they left out?

JS: I’ve been fortunate in that I’ve been on the sets of all three films at this point: the treasure cave on Isla de Muerta, the bayou from Dead Man’s Chest, the Captain’s Cabin aboard the Black Pearl, and the ships themselves down on Grand Bahama. It’s absolutely amazing. For someone who grew up with the attraction, it’s like experiencing the ride on a massive scale. There are plenty of direct and indirect references to the attraction in all three films, and plenty that didn’t make it in. The important thing is that they have preserved the SPIRIT of the attraction while crafting a whole new world all at the same time. You don’t need to have even HEARD of the attraction to completely love the films, and that’s the biggest compliment you can pay to the filmmakers: they made a movie – soon to be movies – that pay tribute to the attraction while standing entirely on their own. I wouldn’t have minded seeing the “Dunking of the Magistrate” vignette during the Tortuga sequence in the first film. It was shot – and you can see it on the DVD – but didn’t make it into the final cut.

Photo copyright wdwradio.com

JDR: I have a question about something we think we saw in the Haunted Mansion, there is a painting of the young woman who turns into the Medusa head and then we rode POTC and think that we saw a resemblance to her in the picture of a young girl in one of the pirate room areas where this is a pirate skeleton. Did we imagine this?

JS: There may be a similarity between the two figures because both paintings are based on Marc Davis sketches, which explains why they might look a bit alike. It’s not the same CHARACTER by any means, but the fact that it’s the same artist accounts for the resemblance.

JDR: We recently visited Disneyland for the first time in a long time and we think that the voice of the pirate skull at the beginning of the ride is not the same as it originally was. Can you help us? Thanks

JS: It’s funny how our memory can play tricks on us, but the voice of the talking skull remains the same, and it’s supplied by none other than X. Atencio, the Imagineer who wrote the script for the attraction and the lyrics for “Yo Ho (A Pirate’s Life for Me).”

JDR: As a Disney Imagineer, what is your favorite part of the job?

SJ: There are so many things I love about being an Imagineer that it’s hard to pick just one, but I have to say there’s nothing like seeing guests enjoy something you worked on. After spending so much time with a concept, alone in my office or with a group of Imagineers in a brainstorming meeting, it’s a thrill to finally see the idea living and breathing and people enjoying it, because that’s what it’s all about for us.

JDR: I have to ask this, did you get to meet Johnny Depp, and if you did, was he able to provide any stories to you about riding POTC when he was growing up?

JS: I was very fortunate in that I got to meet a number of the people involved with the movies, behind AND in front of the camera. They all share fond memories of the ride, wherever they may have experienced it – Disneyland, Walt Disney World. I actually got to watch Johnny play scenes as Captain Jack Sparrow, and that was one of the true highlights of my time on the set. It’s one thing to meet someone, or interview someone, it’s another to watch one of the best actors of his generation bring one of the most beloved characters in movie history to life before your eyes. Johnny’s a big fan of the ride – in fact, he even asked about getting the plans for the headboard of the bed the pirate captain is lying in in the Captain’s Quarters scene. I think he’s really embraced the “pirate lifestyle!” I also got to meet Keira while she was in costume – a wedding dress of all things – and I literally almost passed out.

JDR: Where you able to work with or interview any of the original Imagineers that opened the park in '55?

JS: I actually dedicate the book to a number of the original Imagineers – X Atencio, Harriet Burns, Alice Davis and Blaine Gibson – who came to Imagineering throughout the ‘50s and ‘60s and worked on the original attraction. That’s one of the joys of doing these books, spending time with the Disney legends who inspired me to become an Imagineer. It’s also a way for me to feel close to Walt, because these folks talk about him as though he’s still around. They get a kick out of the fact that their work has been turned into a movie, too. X even got to visit the set of Dead Man’s Chest. There are some great pictures of X and Johnny taken on the bayou set.

Stephen Jeffreys, author, screenwriter THE LIBERTINE

2008-08-10T20:06:00.000-07:00

This Q&A with Mr. Jeffreys was originally posted on our main johnnydeppreads.com forum and took place in November, 2005.

JDR: THE LIBERTINE was first published and performed a bit over ten years ago. Did you ever see the property one day being turned into a film? And what was it like adapting your own play into a screen play?

SJ: I hadn’t thought about the play being a film until John Malkovich sidled up to me in the second week of rehearsals in Chicago and said “Do you want to make a movie out of this ?” It’s the sort of question which doesn’t require an answer, although if I’d known it would take almost ten years from that moment to get the film onto the screen I might have said no. Every single phase of the film seems to have been dogged by ill luck. We lost Johnny a couple of times and financial backers came and went. Worst of all, on the very day that we had the read through of the script, the UK government changed its laws on tax refunds for film financing. It looked to me as though we were dead in the water, just a few hours after hearing Johnny Depp reading my lines. Fortunately Malkovich, in his producer role, pulled some strings and we rescheduled to the Isle of Man which has different tax laws. The Isle of Man film people were incredibly responsive and helpful.When you adapt a play into a screenplay you have to go back to what made you want to write the play in the first place and try to put the play out of your mind. But with a biographical subject, you are, to a certain extent, stuck with the key events in the life of the person you’re writing about and it’s hard to re-write them without being aware of what you did before. So I went through a process of trying to shed material and then finding it working its way back in.

JDR: Since you began the play with the "you will not like me" admonition, after all the research you did on Rochester, did you end up liking Rochester?

SJ: I was interested to read your discussion on the website about these lines. I’d been researching Rochester for a few months and working on the shape of the play and it suddenly occurred to me that audiences would be repelled by him and find him an unsympathetic companion for a journey through a play. So I decided on a strategy: I figured that if I told the audience they wouldn’t like him, then they would. Audiences don’t do what they’re told. They listen to Rochester giving them that line and say to themselves “Hell, I’m not going along with that.” That was the starting point. Then I realised I could keep this idea in play and bring it back, on (I hope) a deeper level at the end.Of all the books I read on Rochester, the most useful was Jeremy Lamb’s book SO IDLE A ROGUE. I met Jeremy (who died around three years ago and was a complete Rochester fanatic) and talked with him about the Earl. Jeremy was a recovering alcoholic who saw Rochester’s behaviour as completely conditioned by his relationship with drink. Broadly I followed this line and recommended the book to Johnny. When I visited him in his trailer on set, the only object on his table was Jeremy’s book, worn through with constant re-reading. I bring this up in answer to your question because there are huge problems in ‘liking’ alcoholics. You can love them, but there are times when they will be very hard going indeed: a sudden mood swing will bring in its wake very unattractive and obnoxious behaviour. So with Rochester, I would have appreciated his company when he was being witty, but when he turned a corner and became dangerous I would want to be somewhere else. But you can’t pick and choose with alcoholics: you have to take the rough with the smooth.

JDR: Is there any evidence that Rochester really did propose marriage to Barry and consider divorcing his wife?

SJ: Divorce was very difficult at the time, but for a friend of the King’s it would have been possible. I think I made this up . I wrote most of the original play in 1993 so I’m no longer entirely sure of the line between fact and fiction. But the scene required a concrete action: offering marriage is about as far as you can go in a scene such as this and Rochester always went as far as he could go.

JDR: How close to the play were you able to stay when writing the film's screenplay?

SJ: I didn’t want to stay close to the play. Stage and screen are very different and I wanted to create something filmic. For instance I didn’t include the play’s opening speech which is very theatrical in the first draft of my screenplay. But Russ Smith, the producer, was very emphatic that it had to be in. He showed me the long speech at the start of PATTON and convinced me it would work. Similarly I cut down the two long scenes between Rochester and Barry in the Dorset Gardens Theatre. But Johnny and Samantha Morton got hold of the play and said “You can’t possibly cut out this line. Or this one. And I have to have this line” until they became quite long scenes again. Johnny’s favourite line is the one which begins “Life is not an urgent succession of ‘nows’” I cut it out of the screenplay but he liked it so much it went back in and he had some tee-shirts made up with this line on the front. For me the juxtaposition of filmic sections and longer theatrical scenes is very satisfying. But there will be critics who’ll see the credit at the end ‘based on his play’ and lazily attack the film for “betraying its stage origins.” Actually the most ‘theatrical’ scene, the speech to the House of Lords, wasn’t in the play at all.

JDR: Why did you choose to have the characters break the fourth wall?

SJ: It’s a technique which works well in plays where you have to change the scenery. Rather then have the audience watch a bunch of guys in black sweaters shifting stuff around, you put an actor at the front of the stage with a speech and use the time more creatively. It’s also something which works well at the Royal Court where the play was performed in London. I noticed Timberlake Wertenbaker having some success with this technique in a couple of her plays and followed her example.

JDR: Congratulations on September's production of I "JUST STOPPED MY TO SEE THE MAN." Did you know that Johnny Depp is very fine guitarist a huge fan of southern blues artists such as Robert Johnson, And that he performed Johnson's "They're Red Hot" in his film "CHOCOLAT"?

SJ: Yes. When we were filming on the Isle of Man and waiting in Johnny’s house there for him to change and come out for dinner, I got the chance to play his guitar which was fun. Johnny told me that doing the long scenes in THE LIBERTINE had made him want to do a play, so I gave him a copy of I JUST STOPPED BY TO SEE THE MAN. He would be great in the role of Karl, but the chances of getting him to do a play would be remote, I think.

JDR: We found it interesting that John Malkovich has had the opportunity to portray both Rochester and Charles II. Having worked with Malkovich before, did that affect the way you were able to adapt the part of Charles for Malkovich?

SJ: John has very distinctive vocal mannerisms . The way he arranges clauses in his sentences is complex. He loves to construct long sentences conveying subtle shades of meaning and then deliver a real knock-out punch right at the end, often offering some outrageous and provocative opinion as a conclusion. It was very helpful to have his voice in my head when writing the role of Charles. Charles was extremely intelligent and had, in my view, the same ability to assess the delicacy of a question and then be very decisive. I was pleased with the scene right at the start of the film when Charles’s advisors are throwing all sorts of questions at him and he keeps coming up with quick, deep replies. I think it shows that Charles was good at running the country. That scene wouldn’t have been possible without the contribution of John’s intelligence.

JDR: Did you ever envision Johnny Depp playing Rochester? As the screenwriter, what was it like working with him as an actor?

SJ: I didn’t really have an actor in mind when I wrote the role. John Malkovich was brilliant as Rochester on stage but he was always doubtful about playing the Earl on film. He felt he wouldn’t be able to do the physical decline of the character. John always looks physically strong on screen. But when it became clear that Johnny was interested – which happened way back in 1996 when he came to see the play in Chicago- it was hard to envisage anyone else. No-one else on the planet can appear so flamboyant and attractive and yet be so eager to embrace physical decay. Working with him as a writer was a complete joy. He’s always alert to what’s going on and he’s incredibly quick and responsive. In the House of Lords scene when he has a speech which (before cutting) was eight minutes long I realised I needed to change a couple of words around. When I suggested this, he immediately agreed, but then pointed out that this would entail changing another word two pages later. The speed of his thought processes in working this out was alarming. We had some very good conversations about Rochester, but I always felt he was more on the case than I was. By the time we came to shoot the film, my research was a long way in the past while his was fresh in his head.

JDR: Congratulations on all the many BIFA award nominations that THE LIBERTINE has gotten. We suspect that these are just the beginning of nominations and awards for this work this year. As a long time, established author, was this ever a dream of yours when you first began writing?

SJ: Yes. It’s nice to win awards. But you have to learn – and I admit it’s been hard for me to do this as I’m quite competitive – that mostly such things will not come your way.

JDR: In retrospect, is there anything you might have changed, left out or added to the screenplay for THE LIBERTINE that you did not?

SJ: Quite a lot of material ended up on the cutting room floor – which will, I hope, make for a very interesting out-takes section on DVD when it eventually comes out. But I had a close relationship with Laurence Dunmore the director and was generally very happy with the choices he made. I’ve done two different versions of the stage play, a radio version (where the role was played by Bill Nighy) and several drafts of the screenplay. After all that you simply accept that there are so many choices and that there can’t be a perfect version of Rochester’s life. So no: no regrets. It’s wonderful to have the film out there and for there to be so much interest in it.

This is where our initial Q&A ended. After seeing the film, I asked Mr. Jeffreys a follow up question that I had while watching the film. I realized that there was no "smashing of the sundial" and yet it appears prominently earlier in the film. So I emailed to ask about it and hoped he could tell me. This is what I got back from him. Thanks go out again to him for his constant interest in us.

SJ: Regarding the cutting of the scene where the sundial gets smashed there was a problem with thatparticular day's shooting (which happened at Blenheim Palace). We spent alot of time shooting the very short scene where they're playing Pall Mall. There was a great deal of aircraft noise and we had four burners beltingout smoke the whole time to get the misty atmosphere you see in tht scene. (In fact there was so much smoke it showed up as a forest fire on a weathersatellite and we got an anxious call from the Metrological Office!) Gettingthe right levels of smoke without any aircraft noise meant an awful lot ofwaiting. This cut into the time allotted to shoot the sundial scene, whichwas another set-up. We didn't actually get rolling until around twentyminutes to midnight and, since we could only do one take (as the sundialreally had to get smashed and the cast and crew had to go home), it was abit hit and miss. In the end we weren't really satisfied with the result and it seemed sensible to cut it. It's a bit of a loose end because the sundial is set up so carefully earlier in the film. I was especially disappointed because our historical researcher Mona Adams had managed to dig out the designs of the original sundial, something no-one had managed before. Still, these things happen when you're on a tight schedule and we had such a great crew that we mostly avoided problems like this.

We thank Mr. Jeffreys for his time and his candor.

Copyright JohnnyDeppReads 2005

Nick Hornby, author A LONG WAY DOWN

2008-08-07T07:54:00.000-07:00

JDR: When writing a story, do you always know how you want the ending to be or do you decide as the story goes along?

Mr Hornby: I don't know what's going to happen really in terms of narrative; I do knowthe kind of tone I want the ending to have. I knew with this book, forexample, that I wanted the characters to live; I also wanted to convey thefeeling that their decision was a tentative, delicate one - the first tinybuds of optimism, with no guarantee that the first breeze wouldn't blow themoff.

JDR: Now that Infinitum Nihil will produce A LONG WAY DOWN, how involved will you be in the whole creative process? Are you the screenwriter for this film? If not you, do you know who is?

Mr. Hornby: So far in my movie 'career', people have been nice to me, and wanted to involve me in their thoughts and decisions. I don't want to adapt my books -when I've finished writing them, I'm done with them, and the thought of spending another couple of years taking apart the thing I've just spent acouple of years putting together fills me with horror. But producers, including Johnny, in this case, tend to email me with their ideas, and ask if I have any of my own. No screenwriter has been appointed as we speak.

JDR: What character in your book, A LONG WAY DOWN, do you see Johnny Depp playing if he decides to take an acting role in the film?

Mr Hornby: I think you'd have to ask him this question. He could play either of the male parts, though, I'm sure.

JDR: I hear you are a big fan of a USA band from Philly called Marah, what other US bands do you enjoy?

Mr Hornby: A lot of stuff. I like Rhett Miller and the Old 97s, Ben Folds, the Pernice Brothers, Brendan Benson, Kathleen Edwards, the Eels, Bright Eyes, ShelbyLynne...I like songwriters. And singers. Singer/songwriters.

JDR: In your BBC Breakfast interview, you equated writing books to writingmusic. How much music have you written? Would we know any of the music?

Mr. Hornby: I've written no music. I just meant that it performed the same function forme - or rather, as I don't write music, I imagine that it comes from the same place in me as music does from musicians. The words are, I think, supposed to convey feelings rather than ideas.

JDR: When you interviewed Bruce Springsteen for the Guardian you said: "A Long Way Down was fuelled by coffee, Silk Cuts and Bruce (specifically, a 1978 live bootleg recording of 'Prove it all Night', which I listened to a lot on the walk to my office as I was finishing the book)."What was it about that piece that helped you finish, or maybe a better phrase would be, what about it put you in the right frame of being to finish "A LONG WAY DOWN"?

Mr Hornby: For a start it has fantastic, angry energy - the long, long introduction,with the piano and then the ginormous, beastly guitar. And then - and I don't want to be pretentious or overdramatic, but I fear it might be unavoidable - Springsteen's little spoken intro, about saying his prayers is inspirational for me. It's a long job, writing a book. And you really do have to prove it all night, every night. Or in my case, all day. Every day.

JDR: What was the last bit of music you listened to before opening, or while reading this email?

Mr Hornby replies: She Loves You, by the Beatles. My kids....They have to listen to it thirty times a day at the moment.

JDR: Can you please tell us about the song your wrote for William Shatner and how can we hear it?

Mr Hornby: It's on Shatner's album 'Has-Been', which came out last year. Ben Folds emailed me and asked me if I wanted to contribute anything, and I submitted a couple of lyrics, and they liked one of them. It's about an extremely bad father who's been out of touch with his kids for decades, and wants to meetup - but he doesn't want to talk about any difficult stuff.

JDR: In your job as a teacher, did you have any students like Jess and how did you deal with them? Did you decide what happened to Jess's sister or is it a mystery to you too?

Mr. Hornby: Yeah, I had two or three Jesses. I didn't deal with them very well. But they went in very deep, and I never forgot them - mostly, I think, because I learned something about writing from them. Wherever they went, things happened, and they could definitely start a fight in an empty room, as we say here. And that, of course, is exactly what you're looking for as a novelist - you need people who you can just follow around and write down everything they do. Jess's sister: nah, I don't know. I know less than Jess knows, and she doesn't know either.

JDR: Are any of the characters in A LONG WAY DOWN modeled after people you know?

Mr. Hornby: Well, Jess, a little - see above. And JJ...Well, he wasn't really modelled on anyone I know. But once I knew various things about him - that he was American, that he read a lot, that his band played kind of rootsy, souly music - I realised he was beginning to resemble a friend of mine. So I warned the friend in question. He was cool about it. That happens sometimes. You imagine a character from nothing, but once you have imagine him fully, you see that he isn't so different from someone you might know. And this isn't because you have unconsciously modelled your character on someone real; it's because many of us correspond to a type, despite our personal indiosyncrasies.

JDR: Did you have an opportunity to discuss your book with Johnny Depp and get his view on it's content?

Mr Hornby: We've had email exchanges. He's been very nice about it. I think he gets why I wanted to write it.

JDR: Since suicide is such a difficult topic for so many people, what was your goal or mission on writing about these four characters who really, in the end, didn't want to jump?

Mr. Hornby: My goal was to take people with real problems away from the dark and towards the light. The older I get, the more I value books, films and pieces of music that offer consolation to people whose lives might be difficult; for me, there's too much art that goes the other way, wants to tell us that life isn't worth living. I wanted to find realistic reasons why it might be.

JDR: Finally, what's up next for you?

Mr. Hornby: I have a couple of screenplays of my own I'm working on. One's an original screenplay that I've co-written with Emma Thompson; we're looking for a director for that one. The other is an adaptation of someone's else's work -it's a short autobiographical essay that the English journalist Lynn Barberwrote for Granta, a literary magazine. And then I'm going to write a book about and possibly for teenagers.

JDR thanks Mr. Hornby for taking the time to answer our questions and for being so flexible with us!

Photo from http://www.nicksbooks.com/index.php/archives/16

Joseph Gangemi, author INAMORATA

2008-08-06T11:06:00.000-07:00

Copyright Viking Books

In early 2005 Graham King's Initial Entertainment Group bought the film rights to Joe Gangemi's book INAMORATA for Depp's production commpany, Infinitum Nihil. Depp's IN and King will co-produce. JohnnyDeppReads.com broke the news in May of 2005 here.

That news lead us to our interview with the INAMORATA author Joe Gangemi.

JDR: Many of our readers seemed to have very similar questions for you and
the one that appeared the most often is: Have you planned a sequel to
Inamorata? Is that the reason for the ambiguous ending? Or did you
have another reason?

JG: No sequel in the works, I'm afraid. The ambiguity was for thematic and
dramatic reasons: If I'd said conclusively that ghosts exist, it would have
become a ghost story shelved in the horror section of Borders; if I'd said
conclusively ghosts don't exist, it would have collapsed into a simple con
artist/mystery/crime story. By keeping my ending ambiguous, the story
remained (to my mind at least) truer to real life, where we don't have
answers to the big metaphysical questions. Also, I wanted to put readers in
the same position as Finch: Forced to take a position on what's going on,
without enough conclusive evidence one way or the other to make it an "easy"
choice. (Because in life answers aren't easy.) My hope was that after
readers close the book they form their own opinion about whether or not Mina
was genuine, a fraud, or an unconscious fraud (suffering multiple
personality disorder)... realizing of course that the opinion you form says
a lot about the bias and beliefs you bring to the puzzle.

JDR: Of all your writings, including fiction and screenplays, which is the one
most satisfying for you to see produced? Did it or do you think it will
meet your expectations

JG: Film and fiction deliver some of the same satisfactions (writing a good
sentence, coming up with a surprising or true bit of observation or
dialogue). Also some of the same frustrations (the fickle taste of the
marketplace, the thickheadedness of some editors and movie execs.) Novel
writing is the more solitary endeavor, and perhaps more satisfying to the
ego: when writing a novel, I'm writer, director, producer, set designer,
etc, all rolled into one. And there's only one name-- mine-- on the cover!
That said, I really enjoy the collaborative side of filmmaking, working with
talented actors, directors, and creative executives. When you work with
artist-friendly folks like Infinitum Nihil (JD's company) it's a dream. And
when you work with other talented and experienced artists who are as
perfectionist and painstaking as yourself, it raises your game. I'm a better
novelist as a result of being a screenwriter and working with world class
directors and actors.

JDR: We know from the backstory on your website that you did quite a bit of
research into the real "Crawleys", the Crandons. In addition to researching
the written documents, were you able to speak to any of the participating
peoples' descendants about any tales that had been passed down?

JG: Not really. Everyone directly involved is long dead. I was contacted by the
real Mina Crandon's great-granddaughter after the book was published. She
was surprised by the number of small real life details I'd managed to work
into the story, and was curious how I'd uncovered them. Which was a spooky
moment for me, because by and large I didn't research the real story too
much-- I wanted to allow my imagination free reign to reinvent the tale for
my purposes. So perhaps I'm a little psychic myself!

There are memoirs by various participants in the true life story, but I made
a point of not reading them. The only books I read that directly related to
history were one on "Margery" by Thomas Tietze, and another recent title
about the friendship between Conan Doyle and Houdini. (And I was just at
Borders today and noticed someone else has just published this week a novel
about Houdini, spiritualism, and "Margery." Sure am glad I beat him to the
bookstores & film producers.)

JDR: Since I know you were a fan of Johnny's first, what did you think when
you first learned that Johnny Depp and Infinitum Nihil were attracted to
your novel?

JG: Well, I should say first that I have been working in Hollywood for eight
years now, have sold a script to (and spent time with) Mel Gibson, having a
movie about to go into production produced by Steven Soderbergh and George
Clooney, and have worked for all the major studios at one time or another,
so it wasn't quite the giddy "winning the lottery" experience other first
time novelists might have. A lot of the mystery of the Tinseltown biz is no
longer a mystery for me, since I've been to film sets and met celebrities.
And Johnny came very close to starring in another film of mine that's being
made early next year by Mel Gibson's company, "Eliza Graves." That said, I'm
not yet so jaded as to not have been over the moon when Johnny responded to
my work. I've admired his offbeat choices for years, especially the smaller
films like "Don Juan De Marco" and "What's Eating Gilbert Grape" and "Dead
Man" and "Finding Neverland." So it was an extraordinarily flattering and
gratifying moment to know an artist I admire enjoyed one of my works enough
to want to produce it... and maybe play a cameo role.

JDR: Have you had an opportunity to visit with Johnny about turning your book
into a screenplay and then a film? Did he tell you what attracted him to
INAMORATA? Can you share with us any little titbit about your discussion
please?

JG: Alas, not yet: Johnny's been a busy guy over the last year, and we haven't
managed yet to connect. Whenever I'd be in L.A. it would turn out he was
off, say, promoting "Finding Neverland" or shooting "Pirates" 2 & 3. And
complicating matters further was the fact that I usually live in Philly and
spent a big part of the year living in Italy. Fortunately, my wife and I are
spending the summer here in Hollywood, so I'm told I'll be meeting JD at
some point in the very near future. So I'll be sure to ask him your question
when we finally do connect!

JDR: If you had your choice of any actor and actress to play Finch and Mina,
who would you choose, and did you have them in mind when you wrote the
screenplay?

JG: Well if it were up to me, I'd create a time machine and bring a 23 year old
Johnny forward in time to play Finch! But failing that, I'd love to see
Cillian Murphy (BATMAN BEGINS, 28 DAYS LATER) play Finch, and Kate Winslet
play Mina. But there are a lot of interesting actors and actresses out there
who I think could do justice to the parts, and at the end of the day I defer
to folks who are expert at spotting actorly excellence. The trick will be
finding people who are both artistically gifted yet also represent the kind
of box office draw that the producers need to get a film seen by as large an
audience as possible. Even for a movie of modest budget like this one, the
practicalities of the marketplace are always considered. It is "Show
Business" after all-- not "Show Hobby."

JDR: I loved the book, but the whole part about the pigeon got me confused.
Finch was so thorough in his investigation, so it seemed strange that he
would let Crawley take charge of getting the substance on the pigeon tested.
Also, the pigeon flew well enough when Finch released it, but it was dead by
the time he reached it, along with all the others. It couldn't have been
starving or it would have eaten at the Crawley's house, and if it was very
ill, would it have been able to fly back to the coop? I am wondering if I
maybe missed something, or if the pigeon was just used as a way for Finch to
meet with Stanlowe.

JG: The pigeon appeared quite mysteriously out of my subconscious imagination --
it wasn't in the outline. So I can't say exactly why or how it came to be.
But I seem to recall wanting something in the story you wouldn't find in a
traditional procedural mystery or private eye novel: a more intuitive,
spooky, slightly unexplainable "clue" the hero would have to follow on
faith, that would lead him on a journey into the seedier parts of town and
Mina's backstory. And I wanted to unsettle Finch -- a man of science -- by
having this unexplained coda to the sequence occur: finding the pigeon dead.
Why? I don't know. Can pigeons die of a broken heart? (He returns to the
roost to find his fellow pigeons dead.) I know goldfinches have notoriously
weak hearts and, when domesticated, are often found dead after large parties
due to overstimulation.

So my answer is: No, you didn't miss anything here, it was meant to be
slightly "off" and intentionally ambiguous, like so much else in the book.
Hope this doesn't seem like a cop out. I've written plenty of more
procedural works, so I could've cooked up a more unambiguous bit here. But I
was trying to walk the tightrope between playful ambiguity and readerly
frustration.

JDR: How soon can we expect your next novel, the one set in the 1950's?

Are there other projects that you are working on now, can you share anything
about them with us?

JG: The 1950s novel is on hold, alas. Found out there was another novel out
there with too similar a plotline. I am cooking up a new novel, but it's too
early to discuss. (I'm superstitious; don't want to jinx it.)

However, I'm pleased to be able to discuss several upcoming film projects.
"Eliza Graves," a romantic drama set in an asylum in 1895, and based on an
Edgar Alan Poe story called "The System of Dr. Tarr and Prof. Fether", is
scheduled to begin shooting in April, under director Mike Van Diem, for Icon
Films and Lions Gate. And a tiny little snowbound ghost story "Wind Chill"
(which may undergo a title change) will start shooting in late-January in
Candada under the direction of Greg Jacobs; it's being produced by Stephen
Soderberg's & George Clooney's company Section 8.

Unfortunately, I'm not at liberty yet to mention the name of the director
who will be shooting "Inamorata" (hopefully around January or February) just
yet. But I'm very excited about the fellow who's been chosen-- so keep your
eyes peeled on the trades, as I expect there will be casting and other
production news announced in the coming months.

JDR: Knowing that novel adaptations for the screen can sometimes be difficult
for the author, is there anything not in the INAMORATA screenplay that you
would have liked to have carried over from the novel?

JG: The funny thing is, much of what I cut out -- the surgery scene, the
Christmas shopping expedition -- Infinitum Nihil and the director asked me
to shoe-horn back in! I was trying to be a good screenwriter and economize.
So this note from the producers was a fun one to implement. But I was forced
to cut the long scene where Finch ventures to Kirkbride asylum, and I think
that one will remain on the cutting room floor. However, there will be a few
new surprises for readers, though, in the movie version, including at least
two scenes that aren't in the book.....

JDR: My grandmother was a spiritualist when I was a young child, and while
in California with her, I did watch what was later identified to me as a
seance. I have to admit I remember very little about this, but I do
remember the fervor of belief in the seances and being able to speak with
those no longer living. In the course of your research, did you participate
in seances, and if so, what is your opinion of them? What was the strangest
one?

JG: I did almost no hands-on spiritualist research during the planning and
writing. However, a few years earlier I had visited a parastudy group
(during a very atmospheric thunderstorm), and once I took my mother to a
famous Philly psychic as a Christmas gift (she seemed to be a
well-intentioned fake... the psychic, not my mother). And I did drop in on a
Theosophists meeting once, just for kicks, though theosophy is only
tangentially related to the 1920s spiritualist movement.

JDR: What part of the Inamorata story are you most excited to see translated
to film?

JG: I have my own favorite little moments that just make me laugh, like Dr.
Munson, the chiropodist who demonstrates the dexterity of the "pedal
extremities." Also the Dr. Vox scene. But I think the sequence/scene I'm
proudest of is the one where Mina meets Finch in the hotel room, and he
hypnotizes her. It may be the best scene I've every written, in anything.
I'd love to see that filmed...

JDR: We know this story was based on fact, how did you decide how much of
the factual info to put into his book? Obviously some facts were left out,
what key fact or facts did you decide to leave out and why?

JG: I decided early on to leave Houdini out -- He was actually part of the real
investigating committee -- because I thought he'd be distracting for
readers, a kind of cutesy historical cameo. Unless you are a genius, like
E.L. Doctorow, that kind of thing can read "silly." Besides this, I wanted a
more sympathetic and complicated Mina than the real life version, who seemed
a rather sad and slippery customer, more of a fame-seeker and seductress.
(Though a more cynical reader could argue my Mina is all of these too.) I
tried to cram as much period detail as possible into the story to make it
feel real, and to use details that you don't typically find in period
fiction: food, brands of cigarettes, slang. Also to weave it as artfully
into the narrative as I could, so it didn't stick out as PERIOD DETAIL!!! In
fact I hired a friend who is a costume designer/clothing historian just to
design a detailed period wardrobe for my characters, since I don't know
crepe du chine from crinoline.

JDR: You left the ending of your book very open for us to make our own
decisions, but I would like to know if you think the Real Mina was genuine?

JG: Sorry, I don't answer that question when people ask (and everyone asks)! Not to be coy. Truth is, I honestly don't know. I realize you're probably
rolling your collective eyes as you read this, but I swear it's true:
Whenever I found myself making too strong a case one way or the other while
writing the book (Walter is Real, or Mina's a Fake) I made certain to shore
up the opposing argument in the very next scene or soon thereafter. This "Is
she or isn't she?" dynamic was the engine under the hood of my story, and
the reason I embarked on the book in the first place, so I tried to remain
true to it and trust it throughout.

However, if you're asking me whether or not I believe in ghosts, I can say
this: I've never experienced one myself, but I remain cautiously optimistic
I may do so someday. I'm a true skeptical inquirer.... not unlike Houdini.

JDR: It appears that Houdini was convinced of Mina Crandon's fraud, yet he
apparently firmly believed that he would reappear after his death. Did you
formulate or find any reason why he felt he could succeed while others could
merely pretend? In your opinion, was he somewhat attracted to Mina, as many
appeared to have been?

JG: Well if Houdini was convinced he could come back, he's been proven wrong.
His wife held seances for many years after -- until her own death in fact --
on the appointed night (Halloween), at a hotel here in Hollywood, and never
heard a peep from the Other Side. As to whether Houdini was attracted to
Mina or not... I can only assume he held her in respectful professional
admiration, as a gifted and clever con. (Which is what the real Mina seems
most certainly to have been.) I believe the real Mina had affairs going with
several members of the committee, perhaps even with her husband's blessing.
Again, this was why I decided to take a sharp left turn from the truth,
because I wanted a Mina my Finch, my readers, and I myself could believe in,
and love.

JohnnyDeppReads thanks Mr. Gangemi for his time and thoughtfullness.

Interviews copyright JohnnyDeppReads2005, 2008
No reprinting, copying or posting of interview. Please linkback here to share on other forums or sites.

Larry Karaszewski, screenwriter ED WOOD

2008-08-05T06:23:00.001-07:00

Copyright Buena Vista Pictures
Ed Wood meets Orson Wells -

In January of 2005 we were able to conduct our first Q&A thanks to the help of a friend. We knew how lucky we were and I asked for questions from our members. Here is what Ed Wood screenwriter Larry Karaszewski had to say.

JDR: In writing the screenplay for Ed Wood, Larry, I'm assuming you had to do quite a bit of research. What were the sources you used to be able to create such a character in Ed Wood?

LK: Primarily Rudolph Grey's book "Nightmare of Ecstasy"... it's an oral history of Ed Wood's life told by his friends and drinking buddies. Also Danny Peary's "Cult Movies" books as well as the Cult Movies magazine put out by Buddy Barnett and Mike Copner. The Medved's Worst movie books were also looked at, but we chose to go for a more sympathetic tone. Scott and I knew the story we wanted to tell and used research to fill in the blanks.

JDR: I'm curious about the role of a screenwriter and how much control you have. Did Tim already have the story mapped out and you just filled in the dialog? Or did he give you a sketchy story that you ran with? Or was it somewhere in between?

LK: We came to Tim with the story. We wrote it with very little contact with him. He responded to what we were doing and shot our first draft. We never made any real changes.

JDR: If you had more control over the "look and feel" of the finished film, would you have kept it more in the darker mood that you alluded to on the DVD commentary?

LK: I don't remember that comment. I'm quite happy with the final version. Tim did an amazing job. If I have any regrets... the middle backer party sequences could have been condensed a bit.

JDR: Larry, was there a specific scene cut from the movie that you would have liked to have left in and why?

LK: No. In the shooting script there was a few more times when Ed ventured a little darker... a drunk moment. But Johnny and Tim preferred a happier Ed and I'm fine with that.

JDR: Were you on the set and able to do rewrites as the film was being shot?

LK: Scott and I were on the set almost every day. They shot what we wrote so very little rewriting was being done. Occasionally a production problem would need to be addressed.

JDR: In a nutshell, what process do you go through in adapting books to films?

LK: We don't do books too often. In adapting a real life we look for the reason a person should be remembered. With Ed Wood it was his relationship with Bela and the making of Plan Nine. We structured the film around those incidents.

JDR: Larry, do you always write as a team with Scott, or would you tackle something alone?

LK: Pretty much always as a team. It works.

JDR: What is the main point that you think makes a good movie script?

LK: Does it engage you??? Are you interested in the story??? Do you want to see what happens next???

JDR: How close to the screen play was the finished film? Did Tim alter much? Did Johnny ad-lib much?

LK: The screenplay is published in book form. You can read the book and follow the film at the same time. The finished product is very close to the original first draft.

JDR: What was it like working with Johnny Depp?

LK: Johnny is the nicest most talented man we have ever worked with. A beautiful soul.

JDR: Did you and Scott have any specific Director in mind when you wrote the screen play, and were you happy that it was Tim Burton who took it on?

LK: We started writing it for Mike Lehmann. he was coming off of "Hudson Hawk" and we were coming off of "Problem Child" and we laughed that we knew what it took to make the world's worst movies.

JDR: How much of the screen play was known facts about Ed Wood and how much was speculation?

LK: We tried to stay true to the spirit of the facts, but we knew very little. All the ways Ed meets people in the film are made up... we just didn't have the info.

JDR: What do you think drives Ed's blind optimism?

LK: A passion for movies. Scott and I worked on a lot of no budget films... these people work 18 hour days on crappy material for no money because they love love love being a part of the movie world. Ed was a patron saint of this kind of behavior.

JDR: On the DVD commentary Larry, you and Scott made a fascinating point about how Ed wasn't so much concerned about the actual movie as > much as the fact that he was making a movie with a camera, a megaphone, and all that hoopla. Any more thoughts on that?

LK: I know some friends who love film so much that they can see good points in almost any movie ever made. Ed was that kind of guy.

JDR: Where did you grow up, and what did you want to be?

LK: Very early on I knew i wanted to be a film maker. I grew up in Indiana and knew no one in the industry. But I wanted it bad.

JohnnyDeppReads thanks Larry Karaszewski.