I’ll drink (Don Q) to that!
A more complete review:
Johnny Depp explores sex and journalism in Puerto Rico
By Bob Thompson, Postmedia News October 19, 2011
LOS ANGELES — When Johnny Depp makes a commitment, he follows through. Depp promised his good friend Hunter S. Thompson he’d do a movie version of Thompson’s novel, The Rum Diary, and he has.
Sadly, the renowned “gonzo” journalist committed suicide in 2005, so he won’t be able to comment on the results when the film version opens Oct. 28.
But Depp is hopeful he’d approve, after the actor initially persuaded the writer to publish his unpublished book in 1998, nearly two decades after he wrote it.
“The beauty with Hunter was that there was a very profound element of trust between us,” said Depp during a recent Beverly Hills hotel interview.
Of course, they became best buddies when Depp was researching his role of the quasi-fictionalized Raoul Duke in the movie version of Thompson’s Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas, which was released in 1998.
In The Rum Diary, the Bruce Robinson-directed comedy-drama based on Thompson’s book, Depp is the pseudo-Thompson character, Paul Kemp. He’s a burnt-out New York reporter who escapes to the Caribbean island of Puerto Rico to land a job at the San Juan Star in the early 1960s.
When Kemp arrives, he meets a desperately defeated editor (Richard Jenkins) and a newsroom full of oddballs and misfits, including a jaded photographer (Michael Rispoli) and a spaced-out writer (Giovanni Ribisi).
When a corrupt land developer (Aaron Eckhart) tries to co-opt Kemp into writing some favourable stories about a dubious hotel development, Kemp’s anti-establishment attitude kicks in, even as he’s falling for the crook’s sexy girlfriend (Amber Heard).
What might surprise fans is that The Rum Diary’s Kemp-as-Thompson comes across as an even-tempered, though often inebriated, passive observer to all the craziness around him. And that’s not a coincidence.
“Well, the one side that sticks out to me about Hunter is the side that not a lot of people recognized or had the opportunity to see, which was that he was a southern gentleman,” said Depp of the writer born in Louisville, Kentucky. “He was very chivalrous, very polite, very giving.”
Mind you, there are glimpses in the movie of the familiar tripped-out, alternative fellow whom readers came to celebrate through his Fear and Loathing books and his many self-involved magazine pieces.
“These other aspects of Hunter sort of come through in The Rum Diary,” agreed Depp. “Force of nature is a great description, because he really was. And he had trouble with authority all his life.”
But with the book (and in movie), “he was trying to discover exactly who he was going to be, and where he was going to go.”
However, the initial concern was finding a director who could manage that difficult tone. Before the writer died at the age of 67, Depp and Thompson discussed potential directors for The Rum Diary. And in the great tradition of radical, counter-culture thinking, Depp said that they had agreed on English filmmaker Bruce Robinson.
Robinson had earned a 1985 Oscar nomination for The Killing Fields script, and won raves for his writer-director efforts on 1987’s Withnail & I and 1989’s How to Get Ahead in Advertising, but he had dropped out of the Hollywood scene after some “miserable” studio experiences in the early 1990s.
Gentle persuasion by Depp, a fan of both Withnail & I and How to Get Ahead in Advertising, put Robinson back in the game to write and direct the less flamboyant Thompson vision.
“He was the only one that I could think of, and that Hunter could think of, who could even come close to grabbing hold of Hunter’s spirit,” said Depp.
Cautious at first, Robinson eventually delved into the challenge on the Puerto Rico set, impressed by Depp, and the enthusiasm of the cast and crew “shooting a low-budget movie.”
“I wanted to do a raging, non-joke comedy, and (Depp) got that,” said Robinson. “He also understood that I wanted him to be like Cary Grant in this pre-Hunter time.”
In the end, Depp wants The Rum Diary movie to pay tribute to his mate.
So what does he miss most about him and his assorted jags?
“Everything,” said Depp, smiling. “I miss the 3 a.m. phone calls, asking me if I’m familiar with the hairy black tongue disease. I miss sitting there talking, getting him riled up about some sports event or a team, or something.”
Even when the actor became a rich movie star after 2003’s first Pirates of the Caribbean movie (which earned him an Oscar nomination), they remained close.
“He understood the game, the racket that I was in, for sure,” said Depp. “But he always felt that was, you know, my day job.
“So when things started, yeah, getting a little larger scale, I guess, he had a big concern. But he was very proud at the same time.”
Would Depp dare to guess what kind of review Thompson would give The Rum Diary movie?
“I think first he would come up with something slightly sarcastic and a little bit cutting,” Depp said. “But I think he would have been very happy with it.”
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