This looks gorgeous.
Download the Sweeney Todd trailer in small-ish, middling and huge-ish sizes of lo-def, as well as 480p, 720p and 1080p hi-def versions.
Right-click to save and rename the file something like nicehair.wmv to ensure it works.
The below Sweeney Todd poster turned up for auction on E-Bay. Naughty but nice and well outside of my price range.
In other Todd news, a piece in Variety has confirmed that an R-rating is indeed expected for the film, with no mention of any plans to cut it down to PG-13. Which suggests either that Baz Bamigboye is a liar, or he's mistaken or he was telling the truth and, in his world at least, an 18 translates to an NC-17 and a 15 to an R.
The Sweeney Todd site has gone live and contains the official synopsis:
Johnny Depp and Tim Burton join forces again in a big-screen adaptation of Stephen Sondheim’s award-winning musical thriller Sweeney Todd. Depp stars in the title role as a man unjustly sent to prison who vows revenge, not only for that cruel punishment, but for the devastating consequences of what happened to his wife and daughter. When he returns to reopen his barber shop, Sweeney Todd becomes the Demon Barber of Fleet Street who “shaved the heads of gentlemen who never thereafter were heard from again.” Joining Depp is Helena Bonham Carter as Mrs. Lovett, Sweeney’s amorous accomplice, who creates diabolical meat pies. The cast also includes Alan Rickman, who portrays the evil Judge Turpin, who sends Sweeney to prison and Timothy Spall as the Judge’s wicked associate Beadle Bamford and Sacha Baron Cohen is a rival barber, the flamboyant Signor Adolfo Pirelli.
The Boy Who Heard Music is an 'intensely autobiographical' musical by Pete Townshend that will be receiving it's bizarrely low-key premiere this summer at Vassar College's Powerhouse Theater. Michael Riedel reports on this incongruous debut for the NY Post.
The most interesting detail he shares? That originally, the plan was for the musical to go straight to the silver screen, be directed by Terry Gilliam and to star Johnny Depp. Depp's derailed many a Gilliam project of late, either intentionally or not (let's say not and give him the benefit of the doubt) and I have to wonder if his failure to commit might be why the film version didn't happen.
Or at least, hasn't happened yet. Of course, if The Boy is a smash, the film will surely be back on again. We can only hope that Gilliam is kept in the frame.
Here's a bunch of links for you - some of which will look mighty familiar to regular film ick readers.
- First familiar story: Johnny Depp may play Alexander Litvinenko. We told you about this in January.
- Second familiar story: Guillermo del Toro is to make a movie of Tom Manning's Runoff. We told you about this in April.
And now some less directly familiar stories.
- Michael Madsen is doubtful about the future of the Sin City franchise. Maybe this is a familiar story after all - I've been doubling my bet on this one never appearing every week or so for the last few months now. Everything I hear tells me we'll be very, very lucky to ever see another Sin City film. I've also been told today that Rodriguez is locked for Land of the Lost (with Will Ferell) as well as the previously announced Barbarella, but I've yet to confirm this with a second source so... watch this space.
- Indiana Jones and the City of Gods starts shooting this week. I found this link at Coming Soon.
- Some pics of Kate Winslet playing dress-up for hubby have appeared online.
- Not everybody is enjoying the guerilla marketing campaign for The Dark Knight.
- A remake of A Tale of Two Sisters is about to start shooting, so why do we know so little?
- Eli Roth slightly misrepresents the BBFC and praises the MPAA.
- BroadwayWorld have gone behind the scenes of the Finding Nemo musical.
- Catweazle (the thinking child's Worzel Gummidge, I feel) is to be a 'major motion picture'. John Henderson is to direct, but Catweazle creator Richard Carpenter is on board in some capacity.
- A Captain Thunder... sorry, Thunder Captain promo reel has popped up online. Don't expect too much.
- No link for this last story, I'm afraid - it appeared in print, but Home Media Magazine have announced that the deleted scenes on the Inland Empire DVD have been edited into a 90 minute parallel story. They also report that Lynch's original cut of the film was nine hours long.
Sacha Baron Cohen's publicist has made it crystal clear that he won't be playing Freddie Mercury in a biopic. The story started in The Daily Mirror and spread like wildfire, and it took VH1 to put a stop to it. The last actor linked to The Barry Bulsara Story aka The Great Pretender aka Freddie! was Johnny Depp, and despite no official denial from his people, don't hold your breath for that one either.
Anybody else in the Sweeney Todd cast look the part?
In a new interview with The Sydney Morning Herald, Gilliam covers all of the typical bases from his interviews of late: Spamalot, Tideland, upcoming projects.
Do go read the whole thing, but here are choice excerpts. Firstly, on Tideland:
What's been interesting is I go on the web and look at Rotten Tomatoes and see that 70 to 75 per cent of the critics don't like it. Then you read the public comments and it's just the opposite - 70 to 75 per cent of the public who write in like it. So I'm not sure who's out of touch.
It's totally innocent. What's interesting about it is all the reviews I read that use the word pedophile. I think, 'What are they talking about?' They're not talking about what's there on the screen. They're talking about how they've been brainwashed by the media.
On Depp being The Man Who Killed Don Quixote:
We can't make it without him and we can certainly make it a lot more easily now with him. It's quite extraordinary because at the time, Johnny meant nothing to the studios. Now they'll kill to have him there.
The article, not Gilliam, says:
But first - finance permitting - comes The Imaginarium of Dr. Parnassus, set in a travelling show which has an attraction that allows patrons to go inside a man's mind.
For more on that one - a LOT more - read film ick's exclusive script review.
[EDIT: Josh Tyler at Cinema Blend has this morning seen fit to slate Parnassus, calling it a Being John Malkovich knockoff. How very, very wrong he is. Again]
Mike Markus is like a bloodhound. Tonight he's sniffed out for us a new Pirates of the Caribbean 3 featurette. You can right click to download and save, should you desire.
Speaking at the Amsterdam Fantastic Film Festival (only yesterday, I believe) Terry Gilliam has admitted that he still doesn't have the rights to his The Man Who Killed Don Quixote script back. He describes negotiations as being in their "final final final final" stages (unless I lost count) and that he's still planning to cast Johnny Depp.
Will it ever happen? Blimey - I certainly hope so. If only cosmic ordering could conceivably work... I'd get Terry his script back, me a nice big pile of money so I could protect against future working, and have Noel Edmond's lose his job presenting Deal or No Deal.
There's a rumour sweeping the web like wild fire tonight. Apparently, a fourth Pirates of the Caribbean film is on the cards with Johnny Depp but without Keira Knightley and Orlando Bloom.
Some versions of the rumour have filming set to start in August. I find that harder to swallow, even, than the idea in general. Let's see how this pans out, but I, for one, remain steadfastedly cynical.
Speaking to VH1, Robert Rodriguez got round to the small matter of Sin City casting and whipped out a couple of surprises:
[Johnny Depp] was interested in doing the Jackie Boy character that Benicio played, but he was doing that movie Libertine in Europe and it just kept getting pushed and delayed and went right through our shooting schedule. But there is a better role for him in [Sin City 3, based upon Hell and Back]. I kept going, 'Gosh, Jackie Boy is a small part, he could be really good [as Wallace].' When he wasn't available, I thought maybe it was meant to be.
When I showed [Antonio Banderas] the first sample of the work, he went, 'Man I'll do anything in that. I'll be the hunchback. You have to bring me onboard, that looks amazing. So Frank met him that time too and he said, 'I have got to find something for that guy. I've never met him before. He's amazing.' [We're] looking at the cast of characters and to see where he can fit.
There's plenty more in the full interview - but nothing on Ava Lord casting, more's the pity. Rosario Dawson will make fetishists very happy, however, with her comments on the costuming. Bring out the gimp indeed.
Peter at Slashfilm has more from Rodriguez, this time about the feature behind the trailer, Machete. In brief, the plan seems to be to shoot it quickly and cheaply in the middle of the Sin City 2 production, and release it straight to DVD at the same time as Grind House arrives on disc.
This year, the Venice film festival is to award Tim Burton the Golden Lion for 'Career Achievement' and hold a special day in his honour. Expect this to be where Sweeney Todd is first unveiled, though obviously not in complete form.... assuming, of course, there still is a Sweeney Todd by then - the production is plagued with delays and problems.
The Venice Fest head honcho is quoted in Variety as saying Burton has "a more insolent pop sensitivity than most new directors today" and is also "less needy of approval than most of the older masters." I agree wholeheartedly.
Congratulations Tim, you've definitely earned it.
Yahoo are hosting an 'exclusive' Pirates 3 clip, ahead of the official trailer launch tonight.
You simply have to love Depp and Rush but... er... yeah...
You can see the Pirates of the Caribbean 3 trailer now, if you don't mind the odd bit of dubbing into Russian. View it, or download it, or try for the HD version.
Just about every British tabloid is alive with the sound of BS, this morning. Well... I hope so, at least.
Reports pretty much across the board have it that, sadly, Johnny Depp has halted production of Tim Burton's Sweeney Todd while his daughter Lily-Rose is sick in hospital. So far, it would seem, they production has had almost two weeks on hiatus, and according to most of these reports, if Depp doesn't return at the end of this week, staff will be fired and the film is likely to be closed down.
I dare say that a temporary shut down is underway, but it seems unlikely that the film will be axed entirely because of this... doesn't it?
Where do your sympathies lie? With Depp? With the hundreds of cast and crew that could end up losing their jobs?
Maybe the curse of Terry Gilliam that supposedly crippled The Man Who Killed Don Quixote will now be reinterpreted as the curse of Johnny Depp.
TMZ sez: Johnny Depp is to produce and star in How the Dead Love, an animated compendium of four Charles Bukowski stories. Gabor Csupo, who hopped ship from The Simpsons to create Rugrats and, just now, direct Bridge to Terabithia is also producing, though nothing is mentioned about the directing duties.
Terabithia and Dangerous Lives of Altar Boys scribe John Stockwell is writing the new script draft.
For the longest time, Roger Corman's The Trip was without a certificate from the BBFC, effectively banning it from cinema and video in the UK. It was refused four times, the last in 1988, before it was finally permitted an 18 certificate on November 21st 2002. I'd already picked up an R1 DVD by then, but I'm glad that should I now ever want to book it into a British cinema, I won't need to appeal for special dispensation from the local council.
The rationale behind the 'banning' was that the film was "instructive" in the arena of drug use - wheras, say, Easy Rider is not or The Matrix is not or Go is not or... I could go on... for hours. To make sure his 'instructions' were at least adjacent to reality, director Roger Corman reportedly experimented with hallucinogens during the writing and production of the film. It's this acid-streaked shoot that will provide the basis for Joe Dante's upcoming The Man With Kaleidoscope Eyes.
The real Corman is to cameo in the film, alongside Martin Scorsese, John Sayles and Jonathan Demme. No idea who will be playing the young Corman role, the moviemaking protagonist, as yet but it's tempting to imagine he'll be introduced to the real man in a scene not unlike Johnny Depp and Hunter Thompson's moment together in Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas. As for Scorsese, it strikes me as essential that he is cast as the slacks wearing, cufflink adorned uptight Itallianamerican cameraman of the Woodstock era.
Dante's out at Berlin at the moment, russling up cash, interest and partners for the $7 million film. Shooting is scheduled for later in the year and hopefully we'll see this living up to it's immense promise sometime in 2008.
I've been sent a pretty good scan of the 'Sweeney Todd is shooting' poster, so I thought I'd share it. They're a week into principal photography now, so that's only... oh... about twenty months until we get to see it.
Click on the image above to get a good look at how the credits are... for now, anyway.
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