Having turned Jack Sparrow into a piratical Keith Richards in "Pirates of the Caribbean", Johnny Depp now does odd things with a ruthless, three-armed CIA agent in Robert Rodriguez's ballistic action epic, "Once Upon a Time in Mexico".
What did you bring to your portrayal of Agent Sands that wasn't in the script?
Well, when I said I was in, I told him [director Robert Rodriguez] the kind of direction I would like to go with the character. I said, "Tell me if this feels alright. I don't want to
go somewhere you don't want to go." I brought up the idea of the eternal tourist. The unhappy tourist. The bitter tourist. Of someone who has a penchant for bad T-shirts and fanny packs.
I saw him as a guy who's such a badass, he would wear obviously fake disguises just to try to make someone comment on his disguise, so he could kill them. [Points his fingers like a gun] Pop! It's over.
Did you base him on anyone?
Yeah, there was a part that reminded me of someone I had known in Hollywood. He was very, very soft-spoken, and on the outside very, very charming, but at his very core, at the base of his very existence, he was a monster. So that's the kind of direction I went with the guy. I thought every
word would be measured, and he would never say a curse word because that would send him to Hell, but he can kill somebody, no problem.
It seems like you're keeping your integrity by doing your own thing even in big budget movies...
Well, you know, when I started "Pirates" there was plenty of whispering on the
sidelines and confusion, with people saying, "What is he doing with the character? Why is he saying those words? They're not in the script!" My whole point was: "You hired me to do the part. You hired me to inhabit and invent this character. You've seen the stuff I've done before, what did you think I was going to do?" They must have had some idea.
Rodriguez shot the film using digital cameras. Did that affect the way you worked?
I felt very puritanical at first and thought, "He's shooting in high-def, that's got to be weird; 35mm, that's the way to go. It's celluloid. It's got depth, textures." But he just made it sound so experimental. It's almost like getting together with a bunch of guys with a video camera and saying, "Let's see what happens."
I really like that approach where it's so loose that anything is possible. That's kind of what I got from Robert: that it was going to be loose, that he'd use the script as a structure, as a skeleton, and go in and play around. I was shocked, man, about the high-def. The quality's really up. It's amazing.
