A TALE OF "SWEENEY TODD"
"I think the reason 'Sweeney Todd' has endured for 150 years is that it's a really good story…a very gripping tale. It's a story about revenge and how revenge eats itself up," says Stephen Sondheim, the creator of the acclaimed stage musical "Sweeney Todd: The Demon Barber of Fleet Street," which has been adapted into a film directed by Tim Burton. "In that sense it's a tragedy in the classic tradition about someone who goes out for revenge and ends up destroying himself."
"Beyond the fact that it has the arguably has the greatest score of any musical in last 50 years, the reason why Sweeny is such a classic is that for all of its murder and mayhem, it is about lost love," adds Walter Parkes, one of the film's producers. "It combines our most violent impulses with our most tender. It is from the collision of these qualities that it derives its overwhelming power."
What sets "Sweeney Todd" apart from other stories is the solid emotional core of the story. "The key to 'Sweeney Todd' is emotion," says screenwriter John Logan. "It is a very passionate story about a man who is wronged, who seeks revenge. And, in the process of achieving that revenge, goes mad. It's also about a woman who's in love with him, who yearns for him but can't make a connection with him. And it's about a young girl, raised by a brutal stepfather, trying to find love and happiness. All these emotional through-lines collide in 'Sweeney Todd,' and the fact that it's heightened by music and singing makes it all the more lushly romantic. But at heart it's a very passionate, dark love story."
Although there are some who claim that Sweeney Todd really existed and was responsible for 160 murders in 18th century London, it's more widely accepted that he's a fictional creation who first came to prominence in a story called "The String Of Pearls: A Romance," written by Thomas Peckett Prest and published in The People's Periodical in November 1846. According to legend, Todd would cut his customers' throats while they sat in his barber's chair, then send their bloody corpses down a chute into the cellar below, where they were chopped up and used as the filling for meat pies by his accomplice in crime, the widowed baker Mrs. Nellie Lovett -- pies that were then sold to an unsuspecting public.
A year later, Prest's story was adapted as a play that bore the subtitle "The Demon Barber of Fleet Street." Pretty soon, Todd's notoriety was rivalling that of another infamous 19th century London serial killer -- Jack the Ripper.
While the Todd story has been the inspiration for many theatrical shows, as well as a number of films for both cinema and television, it was British playwright Christopher Bond's 1973 stage play, "Sweeney Todd," that first introduced the Barker/Turpin revenge plot now considered part and parcel of Sweeney's legend. Then, in 1979, using Bond's play as his template, Stephen Sondheim, the legendary American lyricist and composer -- one of a very select group to have won an Academy Award®, a Tony, an Emmy, a Grammy and a Pulitzer Prize -- brought the story of Sweeney Todd to a wider audience, with his and Hugh Wheeler's acclaimed stage musical, "Sweeney Todd: The Demon Barber of Fleet Street."
Debuting on Broadway on March 1, 1979, and starring Len Cariou as Sweeney Todd and Angela Lansbury as Mrs. Lovett, Sondheim's "Sweeney Todd: The Demon Barber of Fleet Street" was quite unlike anything then seen on stage. Bloody and terrifying, with a score inspired by the work of legendary soundtrack composer Bernard Herrmann ("Psycho," "The Birds"), it initially startled audiences, but quickly became recognized as Sondheim's masterpiece, with the production swiftly transferring to London and later being revived on Broadway in 1989 and 2005.
"It was so original," observes one of the film's producers, Laurie MacDonald. "Witty, and dark, and yet ultimately moving and tragic. And the music is so otherworldly and beautiful." She and her producing partner, Parkes, were so taken by it that, when they headed production at DreamWorks Pictures, they secured the film rights from Sondheim.
"There's a strange kinship that exists between the lovers of Sweeney Todd that borders on the fanatic," Parkes adds. "It's almost an instant barometer of a shared sensibility."
"I saw the original Broadway show three times with Angela Lansbury and Len Cariou," recalls Logan. "I'd never seen anything like it in my life. I fell in love with it and it's stayed with me until now."
Although director Tim Burton didn't see the original Broadway production, he did attend an early performance in London while he was a student there. "I'm not a big musical fan, but I loved it," he recalls. "I didn't know anything about Stephen Sondheim. The poster just looked kind of cool, kind of interesting. It's like an old horror movie but the music is such an interesting juxtaposition, being very beautiful while the imagery is kind of old horror movie. And it was interesting to see something bloody on stage, too. I went to see it twice because I liked it so much."
A film version of "Sweeney Todd," seemed like a logical step to Sondheim, since its genesis was, in part, a movie - with a score by Bernard Hermann. "I've been a movie fan since I was a kid," admits Sondheim. "I've always like melodramas and suspense movies. There was a movie I saw when I was 15, 'Hangover Square,' with a Bernard Hermann score. It's a flamboyant Edwardian melodrama about a composer who goes crazy when he hears a certain sound and goes out and murders the nearest beautiful girl. I remember just loving that score, and I thought it would really be fun to scare an audience and see if you could do it while people are singing."

ACT ONE: ADAPTING "SWEENEY TODD" TO THE SCREEN
When Parkes and MacDonald acquired the movie rights to "Sweeney Todd: The Demon Barber of Fleet Street," they turned to long-time collaborator and the writer of the studio's Academy Award®-winning "Gladiator," John Logan. Before Logan began writing the script, he spent six months studying Sondheim's score, "just by myself, to be absolutely familiar with what the beast was," he reveals. "I also read the original Chris Bond melodrama and compared it to the Hugh Wheeler book for the musical, and really got to know the music backwards and forwards. Then I went to New York, and Stephen and I worked through it."
Adapting a three-hour stage musical into a two-hour movie clearly meant changes. Some songs were exorcised completely, others merely truncated. "We cut out verses, but also expanded certain areas," Logan explains. "A fair amount of work was done cutting and shaping."
Story wise, too, he made substantial changes. "We wanted to keep it very tightly focused on Sweeney Todd's journey, so other secondary or tertiary elements fell away. In the show, Johanna, Todd's daughter, sings a lot more; she and Anthony are more musical characters, but I felt that the focus of the story really needed to be on Sweeney Todd and Mrs. Lovett, and Toby to a certain extent. I wanted to focus on that triangle as much as I could."
For Stephen Sondheim, a film version of "Sweeney Todd The Demon Barber of Fleet Street" offered the chance to change certain lyrics that, as well as to write new ones that tally with certain structural and narrative changes imposed by the script. "Stage time and movie time are different," Sondheim explains. "You accept on the stage somebody sitting and singing for three minutes about one subject, but in film you get the idea very quickly and you suddenly have two and a half minutes too much. The problem is how do you keep the integrity of the score and yet cut things? But John maintained much of the score and still kept the cinematic value of the songs going."
Contractually, Sondheim had approval over the casting of Sweeney Todd and Mrs. Lovett, as well as the choice of director.
"He's a formidable character," notes Burton of the legendary composer. "He's very intelligent, very passionate, he's a genius at what he does, but the thing that I have really respected and felt very grateful for is him letting it go. It's not a stage thing. It's a movie. Go for it. I felt very supported by that.
"The other thing that impressed me and immediately made me like him was, when I first met him, he was talking to me about how he wrote this like a Bernard Herrmann score," Burton continues. "And what's really interesting, when you take away the singing, and it happened when we were recording it, it is like a Bernard Herrmann score -- it's really amazing. As soon as he said that I thought, 'I'm in, completely.'"
"He's a perfect fit," says Sondheim of Burton. "In many ways it's his simplest film, his most direct film, but you can see that he's telling a story he really likes. It's a story that has enough incident in it so he doesn't have to invent extracurricular stuff. He has enthusiasm for the piece and he just goes--forgive me-- straight for the jugular."
"Tim is the perfect director for 'Sweeney Todd,'" agrees producer Richard D. Zanuck. "There is such an affinity between the subject matter and Tim's style and sensibility. He is a stylist but also at his heart he's a dramatist who just wants to tell a simple, human love story. Tim Burton was born to direct the movie of 'Sweeney Todd.'"

ACT TWO: THE CAST
"'Sweeney' has had a long and successful career on stage, and yet, in a way you've never had the opportunity to get emotionally close to Sweeney," says producer Parkes. "It's the nature of the stage. You don't have close ups. But when you bring Tim, and particularly Johnny (Depp), to the mix, you have an opportunity to get inside Sweeney emotionally. In a way, it almost redefines the way you look at the play."
While on stage Sweeney Todd and Mrs. Lovett have usually been played by actors in their 50s and 60s, Burton was determined to skew the cast younger for his film. "It just felt that part of the energy on this was to make them a bit younger, in their 40s, and have the kids be kids, so the ages were a bit more appropriate to what the story really was, and it's not a teenager being played by a 30-year-old," he explains. "That, to me, was an energy that was very filmic as opposed to a stage thing when you could get away with it."
"Tim very much wanted there to be a potential for romance, two people who had a moment and lost it," observes producer Walter Parkes. "I think Helena does as much as Johnny to deliver that. There's a moment at the end where she sings one of my favorite songs, 'By the Sea,' in which she is imagining the life she and Sweeney and little Toby could have if they could just let this all go. It's so poignant and so beautiful because it's simple, direct, unadorned and legitimately emotional - and made all the more so because you know this cloud of tragedy is hanging over these three peoples' heads."
"The absolute core of Mrs. Lovett is that she's in love with this man who never notices her," says Bonham Carter. "He doesn't even look at her, except when she comes up with the genius idea of how to dispose of his bodies when, suddenly, she's visible. And she is a good partner, a good foil for him, because whereas he's a total introvert, she's extroverted. She's practical and, I think, a lot cleverer, frankly. She was Sweeney's landlord 15 years ago, when he was married. So when Sweeney comes back from Australia and finds her, she gives him back his old room, above her pie shop. But the thing is, she's always been in love with Sweeney. And I don't think he gives two hoots about Mrs. Lovett. He's so obsessed with avenging his wife's death. But there's something quite crucial she fails to tell him…"
"When we first meet Sweeney Todd he's a very mysterious character," says Logan. "He doesn't say a lot but you know from his eyes that there is something haunting him, that he has a secret, that his past is haunting him, literally haunting him. As the story goes on, we learn what led him to this very dark place. He's just escaped from penal servitude in Australia. He was floating on a raft in the middle of the ocean, trying to make his way to London because he is on a mission of revenge. He wants revenge on the people who essentially destroyed his life."
To play his Sweeney Todd, director Tim Burton had only one actor in mind. "Johnny Depp plays Sweeney Todd as only Johnny Depp can," says producer Richard Zanuck. "Talk about a risk taker. The bigger the risks, the more attractive a role is to Johnny. He's built his whole career on pictures and roles that most actors have turned down or would turn down. He's the master of disguise. He's the master of doing something unique every time out. He has a different look, a different personality, and in this case, he'll have a voice that people will be absolutely astounded by."
Considered to be one of his generation's finest actors, Depp's stock has skyrocketed in recent years thanks to his starring role as Jack Sparrow in "Pirates of the Caribbean: The Curse of the Black Pearl," a global box office smash for which he received an Academy Award® nomination for Best Actor, which was followed by two enormously successful sequels. "I've always admired Johnny because of his choices as an actor, and because he's always done things according to his own lights," says Bonham Carter. "He's never done anything according to any sort of pattern or formula or to create a career, or because he was relying on his looks. I think, in a funny way, we're a bit similar, in that we don't have much respect for what we look like, we rather like camouflaging and getting away from ourselves."
"Sweeney Todd" marks Depp and Burton's sixth film together, after "Edward Scissorhands," "Ed Wood," "Sleepy Hollow," "Charlie and the Chocolate Factory" and "Corpse Bride." "They are like any good team with almost an unspoken way of doing things, and can practically read each other's minds," says Zanuck. "Johnny looks to Tim for guidance and Tim looks to Johnny for taking what he has outlined and pushing it a little further. They really love each other and would do anything for each other. It's a deep friendship, and they're both lovely people, fun to work with and hard-working. And they're both at the top of their game. So the combination is wonderful in terms of freshness and inventiveness."
"Every time Johnny and I work together we try to do something different - and singing for a whole movie is not something we're used to," says Burton. "You never just want to feel like, 'Okay, that was easy. What's next?' Johnny and I are always wanting to stretch ourselves, and this was a perfect outlet for that."
In late 2001, before Burton was even attached to direct "Sweeney Todd," he visited Depp at his house in the south of France and gave him a copy of the Angela Lansbury stage production on CD. "He said 'I don't know if you've ever heard this. Give it a listen,'" Depp recalls. "I gave it a listen and thought, 'Well, that's interesting.' Then, five or six years later the question comes. 'Do you think you can sing?' The answer I gave him was, 'I don't know. I'll see if I can.'"
"I know he's musical," says Burton, "because he was in a band. But I think I saw him so clearly as Sweeney Todd, in a way. And I know he wouldn't just do anything with me just to do it. That's all I needed and I just knew he could. It was just a feeling I had that he could do it."
In the 1980s, Depp had played guitar in a band in Florida called The Kids, although he says he never actually sang an entire song. "I was the guy who would come in and sing the harmony, very quickly," he laughs. "It would be all of like three seconds and then I was out, and I could find my way back to the dark and continue playing guitar. So I had never sung a song, certainly not. I said to Tim, 'I'm going to go into the studio with this pal of mine and I'm going to investigate and try and sing the songs, and if I'm close then we can talk about it, or I'll just call you and say, you know what, I can't do it. It's just impossible.'"
To find out whether he could sing or not, Depp called his former bandmate Bruce Witkin, who had been the singer and bass player in The Kids, and the pair went into Witkin's Los Angeles studio to record Depp singing "My Friends." "That was the first song I ever sang in my life," Depp explains. "It was pretty weird and scary." But Depp trusted his friend to be honest enough to deliver a verdict on whether he could sing or not. "I was like, 'Do you want the good news or the bad news?'" Witkin remembers. "He goes, 'Well, give me the bad news.' And I said, 'The bad news is you're going to have to do this.'"
"I was in my office on the phone," recalls Zanuck of the day he first heard Depp's singing voice. "Tim bursts in and lays down a little cassette player and his headphones and he walks out. So I got off the phone, put them on, and listened to Johnny sing for the first time. I went into Tim's office, and we both just stared at each other with great relief. We had the biggest smiles because we knew we had a great voice with Johnny Depp, and we knew he could really pull this off."
"It's very sexy," says Bonham Carter of Depp's singing voice. "It's very sexy singing, and it sounds like him, that's what's exciting. He really sings from the gut, and it's a very emotional role. So it's very naked and very sexy and very touching and brave and beautiful, very beautiful, and soulful."
Agrees Burton: "Johnny's got a nice timbre to his voice. It's coming from within and that's what's so great about it."
For Depp, the key to Sweeney Todd was to think of him not as a killer but as a victim. "Sweeney's obviously a dark figure," he reflects, "but I think quite a sensitive figure, hyper-sensitive and has experienced something very dark and traumatic in his life, a grave injustice. But I always saw him as a victim. I mean, anyone who is victimized to that degree and then turns around and becomes a murderer, can't be all there. I always saw him as a little bit slow. Not dumb, just a half-step behind. The rug was pulled out from under his perfect life, his perfect world. He was in a 15-year hellhole. The only reason he came back was to eliminate the people who had done him wrong."
"Johnny Depp's performance is quite remarkable," says Sondheim. "Sweeney's desire for revenge and the simmering anger and hurt that he feels carry the story forward, and Johnny finds the most remarkable variety within that narrow set of emotions. The intensity is at a boil all the time and he never drops it. It's real anger."
"He's incapable of feeling happy," says Depp, "unless this corner has been turned and he's that much closer to his objective, which is slaughtering the people who have wronged him."
Sweeney's favored instrument of death are his cutthroat razors, the shiny implements that are also his tools of trade as a barber, and which we learn Mrs. Lovett held on to while Todd was in jail in Australia. "I think it's an indication of how much she loves him because she could have easily sold those razors," says Bonham Carter. "They're worth a lot. But she doesn't. She keeps them. I think she's been holding on to the hope that he might return. His razors are a completion of his self."
Once back in Sweeney's hands, they become both his lifeline and his means of revenge, and he serenades them in the song "My Friends." "These blades are his family," explains Depp. "They're an extension of him, the only love in his life now that his family's gone."
"When Johnny picks up the first razor and holds it, it is a pure moment of love," remarks Logan. "And when he sings to his razors, it's a love song, and he holds them very close. He keeps them in a special sheath, a special holster, the entire movie."
Sweeney's one connection to the real world is Mrs. Lovett, who "is one of the great dramatic creations of 20th century theater," says Logan. "She's a counterpoint to Sweeney, because Sweeney is very grim and brooding and very, very, very serious about what he's doing. Mrs. Lovett brings life and energy and has a sort of twinkle in her eye. Together she and Sweeney are an unstoppable combination."
"There were a lot of people who wanted the role," says Richard Zanuck. "A couple of major stars who wanted to do it came in and exposed themselves, singing the score with just a piano player. There were about eight in all. We did several auditions in London, several in New York, and there were major people who didn't come in but made their own recordings and sent them in."
Bonham Carter ("Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix") has been enamoured of Sondheim's musical since she was a teenager. "I remember sitting in my drawing room looking at the score, going through the lyrics and listening to it," she says. "I got completely hooked on the music. I've always loved Sondheim. He's such a genius to be able to write both lyrics and music." But her love extended further than just an admiration for Sondheim's music and lyrics. "I wanted to be Mrs. Lovett since I was thirteen," she laughs, "and I went around, apparently, in Mrs. Lovett hairdos." READ MORE

ACT THREE: MUSIC AND SONGS

ACT FOUR: DESIGNING SWEENEY'S WORLD/ EPILOGUE: FIRST SCREENING/ THE LEGEND OF SWEENEY TODD/ THE MEDIA AND PENNY DREADFULS/ THE GRAND GUIGNOL TRADITION

THE CREATIVE TEAM: TIM BURTON/ JOHN LOGAN/ STEPHEN SONDHEIM

SONDHEIM DISMEMBERS 'SWEENEY'

THE ART OF ADAPTATION

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