Johnny Depp’s bizarre reason for abandoning his passion project: “What the fuck does that mean?”
Picture the scene: Julian Schnabel, the maverick director of The Diving Bell and the Butterfly, is on the phone to one of his many contacts in the movie business. The volatile New Yorker, known for speaking his mind and putting reporters on edge, is complaining to this contact about the frustrating disappearance of Johnny Depp off the face of the earth. You see, instead of signing up for a film they agreed to make years prior, Depp had been ghosting him.
Then, the contact revealed they were actually driving with Depp in their passenger seat at that exact moment. A taken aback Schnabel, who hadn’t been able to get Depp to respond to any of his calls or emails in years, took the opportunity that had bizarrely presented itself. “Why don’t you put him on the phone?” he asked the contact, but to his chagrin, was told Depp didn’t want to chat. Feeling confused and more than a little upset that someone he considered a friend was refusing to speak with him, he offered a nervous, “Well, tell him I love him”.
However, when the contact relayed Depp’s response, “Tell him I love him too, but I’m riding another wave now,” Schnabel couldn’t stop his blood from boiling. “What the fuck does that mean?!” he raged when he speaking to The Guardian in 2023, but was met with a stunned silence by a nervous interviewer who had sparked the entire anecdote with an innocent, “You’re collaborating with Johnny Depp?”
Schnabel had expected to collaborate with Depp on an adaptation of Nick Tosches’ In the Hand of Dante, a 2002 metafictional novel. It told the tale of Dante writing the Divine Comedy in 14th-century Italy, and the story of Tosches himself authenticating a black market manuscript of the ancient narrative poem in the modern day. Depp had actually suggested five books that he liked for their second collaboration after Before Night Falls, and the director chose Dante, but then Depp pulled his vanishing act.
“I don’t know what happened,” Schnabel lamented, “But we haven’t talked for years.”
A straightforward explanation for Depp going radio silent on Schnabel would be that he had bigger fish to fry in the last several years. After all, he has been persona non grata in Hollywood ever since he lost a libel trial to The Sun newspaper in 2020 after it published his ex-wife Amber Heard’s allegations of domestic and drug abuse. Since then, he has been embroiled in a messy and very costly legal battle with Heard, while being forced to leave Hollywood to seek acting roles.
For his part, Schnabel sympathised with Depp’s plight and firmly put his support behind the embattled actor, which likely won’t have gone over well in Hollywood. “I thought it was a tragedy, all this stuff that he was dragged through,” Schnabel raged. “He loved going to the hospital and being Captain Jack Sparrow for the kids there.”
If anything, though, Schnabel’s very personal connection to Depp and unwavering support for him in his time of need may have made the star’s vanishing act even harder to take. “I spent time with him and his family,” he despondently revealed. “I taught him how to paint.” He recalled a time when he was so close to Depp and his former partner Vanessa Paradis that he painted a portrait of their daughter Lily-Rose as a little girl, and went on walks with the family. Now that little girl is a fully-grown movie star, and he can’t even get her father to return a call.
“Anyway, Oscar Isaac has got the role now,” Schnabel explained, tearing himself away from maudlin remembrances of the past. “Johnny’s not involved.”
Fascinatingly, Schnabel assembled quite the cast for the film, including Jason Momoa, Gerard Butler, Gal Gadot, Al Pacino, John Malkovich, and Martin Scorsese in a rare acting role as Isaac’s on-screen mentor. Will it make Depp wish he’d never abandoned his old friend? Only time will tell.
