BOSTON ILLEGAL
Johnny Deep finally returns to form as notorious Boston criminal-turned-FBI information Whitey Bulger. Total Film interrogates the cast about brutal gangster pic Black Mass...
Johnny Depp is recalling his first day on set of
Black Mass, playing real-life Boston mobster James ‘Whitey’ Bulger. “I got looks,” he says, sitting opposite Total Film in a London hotel in ripped denim, boots and open-necked shirt. “The first time I walked out of my trailer, done up as Jimmy Bulger, I got these looks on the street.” Sporting slicked-back hair, piercing blue eyes, Aviator sunnies, white T-shirt and black leather jacket, Depp’s transformation struck a nerve. “Associates of his were initially pretty freaked out.”
It’s hardly surprising, given most probably thought they’d never see Whitey again. A ruthless mobster who ruled the Boston underworld in the 1970s and ’80s, Bulger is 83 years old now, serving two life terms plus five years in a Florida penitentiary after being found guilty on 31 counts, including involvement in 11 murders. “He was an extremely notorious figure in Boston,” admits
Black Mass director Scott Cooper ( Out Of The Furnace). “For those people in South Boston who suffered under Whitey Bulger, it’s going to be a real shock.”
Fans of Depp are likely to be equally taken aback. His post- Pirates career has been mired with flops like
The Tourist, The Lone Ranger and Mortdecai. But Bulger is a comeback of epic proportions: callous and coldhearted, this “tightrope walk” makes Depp’s previous forays into the crime genre – gangster John Dillinger in Public Enemies, coke dealer George Jung in Blow and the titular undercover FBI agent in Donnie Brasco – look schoolyard-tame by comparison.
When Bulger’s attorney J.W. Carney visited the set, he used words like “chilling” to describe the effect of seeing Depp recreate his most famous client. “Your blood goes cold when you look at the man,” concurs his British co-star Benedict Cumberbatch. Far removed from his “extremely
soft-spoken and gentle” self, as his director puts it, such is the power of Depp’s disappearing act, when Cooper screened a print of Black Mass at Warner Bros, an unwitting projectionist asked, ‘Who’s that playing Whitey?’
The physical aspects were essential. “I don’t think anyone could’ve gone out there and played Bulger without ‘finding’ him,” says Depp. “We worked from the outside in.” Collaborating with make-up artist Joel Harlow, who previously turned him into Jack Sparrow in Pirates Of The
Caribbean, the 52-year-old actor spent weeks perfecting the look before he even showed Cooper, experimenting with prosthetics, stained teeth, hand-painted blue contacts (for that icy killer stare) and a receding hairline.
While Depp’s outward appearance is shocking – even distracting, initially – it’s just the start. Depp absorbed stories about Bulger’s personality, says Joel Edgerton, who plays FBI agent John Connolly, a childhood friend of Bulger’s from ‘Southie’ – the working-class Irish-Catholic neighbourhood in South Boston that forms the film’s evocative backdrop. The real triumph, he says, is showing “the way he operated, how still and silent he was, [ how] venal and coiled. The calm before the storm was a really malevolent force that he had.”
While the film doesn’t hold back on violence, one dinner-party scene at Connolly’s house shows Bulger at his most simmering – as he turns on a dime in a seemingly innocuous discussion about a secret family recipe. “He could be charming, cunning, chilling and deadly… all within a matter of seconds,” says Cooper. A show of force was simply all part of the business. “The language of his work was violence,” shrugs Depp. “It was the only way to stay on top.” After his redneck-country tale Out Of The
Furnace, it was clear Cooper had no plan to compromise the film’s edgier moments. “Anybody who gets in business with me understands that I have an unflinching eye for violence,” he says. “And I do for important reasons. We live in an extremely violent world… But I never want to glamorise or have the violence feel gratuitous. It’s important to me that it’s portrayed realistically.”
Still, feared or fêted by locals, there’s more to Bulger than bloodshed. During an early spell in jail, he subjected himself to LSD experiments to commute his sentence. “And they say that didn’t have an adverse effect on the man,” laughs an incredulous Cooper. Then there was the time he and three associates won the lottery – sharing a $14.3 million pot from a ticket bought from a liquor store controlled by Bulger. Was it genuine? “Let’s just say he collected his winnings.”
Then there are his blood ties. His brother is high-ranking politician William ‘Billy’ Bulger, former President of the Massachusetts Senate. “There was this immediate suspicion that Billy had something to do with how his brother remained untouchable,” says Cumberbatch, who plays Billy. “Personally, I remain more and more convinced that he didn’t; it’s just this extraordinary story of a family who produced two brothers, with political polarity… and that’s equally fascinating and equally Shakespearean.”
Did Billy know of his brother’s activities? “It’s definitely not for me as a silly actor to comment on it, beyond what the Warner Bros lot have decided to show and not show,” says Cumberbatch, cautiously. “I think it’s subtly done, as it was very subtle in their lives.” Referring to the time when Whitey went on the lam for 16 years before he was finally caught in 2011, Depp differs: “I’ll step out on the plank… I think that it’s likely. I couldn’t imagine it any other way… my instinct tells me they would’ve spoken.”
Yet most shocking of all was the deal Bulger pulled with Connolly, who convinced his old friend to turn informant – a situation Whitey soon turned to his advantage, as he began using the Feds to eliminate rival gangsters, allowing him “to operate with impunity”, as Cooper puts it. “In a way, it was made to look worse than it was,” says Depp, who spent time combing through Bulger’s surprisingly slim FBI case file.
‘ everyone pulled their hearts right out of their chests’
johnny depp
“He definitely did some things that one wouldn’t really approve of… I don’t know. I never saw him as a rat but I guess I couldn’t.”
Already, Depp has been on the receiving end of criticism for comments made at the film’s Boston premiere. “There’s a kind heart in there,” he said. “There’s a cold heart in there. There’s a man who loves. There’s a man who cries. There’s a lot to the man.” It left Bill St. Croix, brother to Deborah Hussey, one of Bulger’s victims, apoplectic. “I wonder how Johnny Depp would feel if his sister got strangled and buried in the basement with two other corpses? There’s nothing humane about Jimmy Bulger.”
Depp felt it was crucial to show Bulger as multi-faceted: a committed brother, son and father, who was well-liked in Southie; a Robin Hood figure even known for carrying old ladies’ groceries. “I thought the more interesting way to approach the guy was not as a gangster, not as a criminal, but as a guy who did have those very strong familial ties. He was always very close with his brother, with his mom, he was very generous to the elderly in the neighbourhood, the kids… all that stuff.”
Others have questioned the film’s accuracy. In particular, Kevin Weeks, Bulger’s right-hand man, who, according to Depp, “was out on the periphery [ of the
shoot], looking from a distance.” Played by Breaking Bad’s Jesse Plemons, Weeks disliked his own depiction as a “knuckle-dragging moron”, dismissing an early scene where he gets pummelled as a fabrication. Likewise, he claimed, the showing of another Bulger cohort Steve ‘The Rifleman’ Flemmi (played by Rory Cochrane) as rather meek was false. “Stevie was a psychopath.”
Cooper, on board after Barry Levinson and Jim Sheridan both backed out, claims he undertook “a great deal of research”. With the script based on 2001’s Black Mass: The True Story Of An Unholy Alliance Between The FBI And The Irish Mob, Cooper worked with the authors, Boston Globe reporters Dick Lehr and Gerard O’Neill. Pouring over real-life surveillance footage of his subject (some can be glimpsed in the credits), he also met with Fred Wyshak, the Federal prosecutor who ultimately brought down Bulger and his so-called Winter Hill Gang. Others took a different approach. Edgerton reports that Rory Cochrane ingratiated himself into Southie society. “Every fucking spare moment he had, [ Rory] was down in South Boston, going into all the bars that had the shamrock out the front, and meeting people, talking to people. And he found his way very quickly to certain people who knew the players in the story. I would tag along, Jesse would tag along, but Rory led the charge… he’s almost part of the furniture down there now.”
Edgerton also spent time with an FBI agent who knew Connolly. “He said that John was whoever he
needed to be with whoever he was with, which I think is true of all people. But when you think about the different worlds that John had to navigate, he had to be a real shapeshifter.” Increasingly lured into the mob lifestyle, Connolly was also a peacock. “That was such a great image, when you see him there with his gold jewellery and his expensive suits. He started to take on this aura of [ mobster] John Gotti.”
The nub of Black Mass is the Connolly-Bulger relationship – the “doomed love affair” as Cooper calls it. When Whitey was serving time in Alcatraz for bank robbery, Connolly was sent back to Boston by FBI director J. Edgar Hoover to clean up the Italian Mafia – until hubris brought him down. “But what’s really fascinating about Connolly,” adds the director, “is that he really lives by the South Boston code: these bonds of loyalty.” When Whitey’s gang began to rat him out, Connolly was the only one not to give evidence – a silence that cost him 40 years in jail.
While Edgerton comes close to stealing the film, Black Mass’ strength lies in its ensemble. Dakota Johnson as Bulger’s wife Lindsey; Corey Stoll, Kevin Bacon and Adam Scott as various FBI members; Juno Temple as aforementioned victim Hussey; Peter Sarsgaard as coke-fiend Brian Halloran and Boardwalk Empire’s Julianne Nicholson as Connolly’s wife Marianne. “Hopefully people will look back and go, ‘Look at that cast!’” marvels Edgerton. “In the way I look back at The Outsiders, and go, ‘How the fuck did they know?’”
He attributes the collective strength of the cast to Cooper, a former actor who, remarkably, steered Jeff Bridges to his first Oscar with his 2009 debut feature, country music drama Crazy Heart. “I don’t really know how he does it, but with a certain ease and grace, he gets really good performances out of already good actors.” He remembers Out
Of The Furnace, watching Christian Bale and Casey Affleck excel in another violent sibling tale. “I knew in that moment, if I get a chance to work with Scott, I’ll take that opportunity.”
Complementing Black Mass’ performances are the marvellously muted visuals. Shooting on film, in a misty grey palette influenced by the work of photographer Joel Sternfeld, Cooper didn’t want a film drenched in darkness. “I spent time driving around Boston in three different seasons, looking at how the light would shine off the Mystic River in the warehouse district. Whitey Bulger would oftentimes kill people in broad daylight. He was very brazen.” Citing films like Francis Ford Coppola’s The Conversation and John Cassavetes’ The Killing Of
A Chinese Bookie as influential, Cooper told his cinematographer Masanobu Takayanagi and his production designer Stefania Cella that it was critical they approached Black Mass as if they were making it in the ’70s. As for the decade’s typical over-the-top costumes and colours, “I wanted them to completely recede into the background.”
The result left Depp flawed. “Everyone pulled it right out,” he says. “They pulled their hearts right out of their chests.” Whether the Academy will agree is another matter – the violence may make voters balk. But surely the performances merit recognition? “Johnny is remarkable,” agrees Cooper. “As is Joel, as is Benedict, Dakota, Julianne and on and on, down the line.” He’s just elated by this perfect storm. “In a very sincere way, this is the film I set out to make.”
Black Mass opens on 27 November.
How did you approach Black Mass?
This is the first actual real woman I’ve ever played, so there is an amount of information that is available to you to mould the character. And also if you’re lucky enough to have physical footage, you can study mannerisms. Which is a bit different to creating something out of thin air.
Was there much you could find on Lindsey?
I gathered as much as I could from the Internet and what Scott [ Cooper] and I discussed. There were a few things I couldn’t get because there wasn’t anything that was written personally about [ Whitey and Lindsey’s] relationship. So it was hard to try and… it’s always difficult when people are real. You want it to be accurate but at the same time you want it to fit into the story. It was our version, our telling of those characters.
How was it to work with Johnny Depp?
He’s just really a phenomenal actor and a truly gifted artist. And just the man.
The film is set in Boston. Were you familiar with the area?
Well, I grew up in the mountains really. I was in Colorado. That’s where I belong. I prefer the mountains! My childhood I spent outdoors riding horses. It’s the most comfortable place for me. I grew up travelling. I grew up on sets. I grew up going to new places. And I like it all.
What is it that draws you to a character?
It depends. Sometimes I just get excited and then I stick with it. I become obsessed with stories or events or people or personalities. Characters that are thoughtprovoking. I find it difficult to find a common theme in all of my characters. I haven’t figured it out yet. My body of work isn’t that substantial yet.
How did you decompress after
Fifty Shades Of Grey?
I’m trying to think. It came out in February. Where are we now? Wow – it feels like a lifetime ago. I feel like I’ve been five different people since then. What did I do afterwards? I was working – I kept going. The night that I hosted Saturday Night
Live was the end of promoting the movie… and then.. I think I blacked it out. I went into an emotional void!
Your mother, Melanie Griffith, famously said she didn’t want to see Fifty Shades. But do you talk to your parents about work?
Sometimes. I keep it separate but I want them to see Black Mass. JM