The only movie Johnny Depp called perfect cinema: “It was unbelievable”
Before Johnny Depp became a world-famous movie idol, he was a cinema fan like the rest of us. Over the years, the Edward Scissorhands star has often been asked about his favourite films, and certain titles come up repeatedly. His love for Withnail and I is well-known, as is his admiration for Jim Jarmusch’s work, particularly Down by Law. However, the only film Depp has ever called “perfect cinema” is a mostly forgotten 1984 crime picture—one that starred an iconoclastic actor he’d go on to work with nearly two decades later.
In 2003, Depp starred in Robert Rodriguez’s Once Upon a Time in Mexico, the third instalment in a trilogy that began with El Mariachi in 1992 and continued with Desperado in 1995. The film brought back Antonio Banderas and Salma Hayek from the previous movies but added Depp, Eva Mendes, Willem Dafoe, and a resurgent Mickey Rourke to the cast. It was Rourke’s most high-profile movie in years, and he’d follow it up with Man on Fire and Sin City, solidifying his return to the A-list.
Around the time of the film’s release, Depp interviewed Rourke for Interview magazine. The actor, who had always had a troubled relationship with balancing art vs commerce in Hollywood, admitted therapy had helped him change his mindset. “I’m not as angry as I was ten years ago,” Rourke revealed. “I blamed a lot of other people for shit that I shouldn’t have, and I became famous for my notoriety off the screen instead of for my work.”
Rourke began talking with Depp about the sort of actor he wanted to be when he first burst onto the scene in the early ’80s. He wanted to be thought of in the same breath as his heroes Montgomery Clift and Marlon Brando, the latter of whom made dangerous choices with his performances. He wanted to approach his characters from a similar perspective of, “OK, I can fall on my ass or I can be really good—it’s going to boil down to the choices I make. And if you make interesting choices where you put your ass on the line, the results are either going to be really special or really terrible.”
Interestingly, it was one of Rourke’s dangerous early performances that Depp had been dying to talk about for the whole interview. When he got his chance, he mused, “One thing I’ve always wanted to ask you about is The Pope of Greenwich Village because, to me, it was perfect cinema. Your work in it was unbelievable. Eric Roberts’ work was unbelievable.”
Rourke seemed genuinely happy that Depp was such an admirer of the film, which came out in 1984 and landed Geraldine Page a ‘Best Supporting Actress’ nomination at the Oscars. Despite this, it hasn’t lasted in the public consciousness as one of the era’s greats, but Depp has always name-checked it as a formative text for him. In fact, to illustrate that he wasn’t blowing smoke up Rourke’s ass, in 1990, he told Sassy magazine, “The Pope of Greenwich Village was one of my favourite movies ever”.
“It was the most fun I’ve ever had on a movie,” Rourke revealed. “It was one of the happiest times in my life. I was living in New York, and I really enjoyed acting at the time.”
He also waxed lyrical about Roberts, who played his cousin and safecracking partner in crime, noting, “Eric’s another guy I wish they would judge on his work instead of his reputation. To me, he’s one of the best actors around.“
Sadly, though, as with everything associated with Rourke, there was a sad flipside to his amazing experience on The Pope of Greenwich Village. The movie failed to set the world alight at the box office, and Rourke claimed this was because the studio changed ownership around the time of release, and it got lost in the shuffle. This truly hurt the young star, who was proud of the film and felt it deserved more. Its failure was, therefore, devastating to his mental health, and he confessed, “That’s about the time I started to short-circuit because I had high aspirations for the film. I never told anybody that.”
