Italians are passionate about many things: food, wine, love and, apparently, Johnny Depp.
Fansite Johnny Depp Italia (via ComingSoon) have posted a new look at Tim Burton's "Dark Shadows" from a publication in the country, showing everyone's new favorite vampire (sorry Eric Northman) throwing some shade on Michelle Pfeiffer. He also kind of looks like a goth Win Butler from Arcade Fire. Anyway, in case you forgot, the film is a big screen adaptation of the cult ‘60s show that centers on the playboy Barnabas (Depp) who breaks the heart of the witch Angelique Brouchard (Eva Green) in 1752 and, in her fury, she turns him into a vampire and buries him alive. When he reawakens in 1972, he returns to Collinwood Manor to find his estate and family in ruins. Pfeiffer plays Elizabeth Collins Stoddard, the matriarch of the clan who has not left her mansion in the decade following the disappearance of her husband.
Speaking with MTV, Burton described the difficult tone he's trying to nail with movie. "It's got such a strange vibe. And it's not something that a lot of people necessarily know. You're trying to do a weird soap opera," he said, also praising the cast for rising to the challenge. "It has a weird sense of heightened melodrama. There was a generation of us who would run home from school to watch it. That's probably why we were such bad students. We should have been doing homework; we were watching 'Dark Shadows' instead. It was hard to put into words the tone it was. It had a weird seriousness, but it was funny in a way that wasn't really funny."
And while there wasn't any time for rehearsals, this group photo, taken a couple days before the start of shooting, helped get the cast in the right frame of mind. In addition to being set in the '70s, Burton reveals that it mostly takes place inside the massive mansion. "…the thing about 'Dark Shadows' was it was a very hermetically sealed world. It's mainly the internal family melodrama. You get a little bit of the sense of the world, but it's like 'Grey Gardens,' where these people are in their own sort of world."
So a Bouvier family style, goth, heightened melodrama soap opera that is funny in a way that isn't really funny? Okay, then. We'll see the results on May 11th (hopefully with a new trailer for "The Dark Knight Rises").