Portraying boyhood hero

THIRTIES bank robber John Dillinger felt like one of the family for Hollywood star Johnny Depp, who portrays him in the new movie Public Enemies. The star of the Pirates Of The Caribbean movies connected with the man with a reputation as an American Robin Hood, who robbed the rich – banks – during Depression-hit America.

It wasn’t just that Depp grew up a mere 160 miles from Dillinger’s boyhood home of Mooresville, Indiana. As a boy, young Johnny was fascinated with Dillinger for a long period.

“No particular explanation why, I just was. He struck my fancy somehow,” he says.

“But looking back on that initial interest in Dillinger and the fact that it’s carried through for the majority of my life, it was his character.

“It was who he was as a man...

back at a time when men were really men. He was, for good or ill, exactly who he was, without any compromise whatsoever.”

What he became was something of a folk hero. It was the Depression and people were angry at the banks and businessmen whom they considered responsible for their plight. Along came Dillinger whose robberies symbolised their hatred of the financial system.

During one robbery Dillinger told a bank customer, “We don’t want your money, mister. Just the bank’s.”

As Depp says: “He didn’t see himself as a criminal in a bad way, he went out there as a rock ‘n’ roll star. On some level there was a sort of a Robin Hood in John Dillinger and he used that.

Dillinger was extremely savvy for a guy who basically came up from nowhere.

“He knew that his love for the people and the people’s love for him would work in his favour.

He spoke to the people and owned them. He was very, very charismatic.”

Co-star Marion Cotillard, who plays the nightclub hat-check girl he fell for, notes the close link between actor and character. “He really cared about Dillinger – I think he loves him a little, you could feel that,” she says of Depp.

Depp was able to handle some of the clothing and personal articles of Dillinger. He spent time in the haunts of “the gentleman bandit”, who put his coat around frightened female hostages during his bank raids.

“I read many books on him, but aside from all the research, more of it had to do with an instinct and understanding of the man,” says Depp.

“I related to John Dillinger like he was a relative. I felt he was of the same blood. He reminded me of my stepdad and very much of my grandfather.

He seemed to be one of those guys with absolutely no bull whatsoever. I think Dillinger had some idea of what he was doing.

I believe he had found himself and was at peace with the fact that it wasn’t going to be a very long ride, but it was going to be a significant ride.”

This isn’t the first time Dillinger has been portrayed in the movies. Warren Oates took the title role in Dillinger, the 1973 movie, directed by John Milius.

BUT Public Enemies, based on the book by Bryan Burrough, goes out of its way to be authentic. Director Michael Mann – whose past credits include Heat, The Last Of The Mohicans, Collateral and Miami Vice – went all out for historical accuracy.

He shot at the actual scenes of Dillinger’s famous jailbreak. He filmed at the Little Bohemia lodge in Wisconsin, scene of a gunfight between gangsters and FBI, and outside the Biograph cinema in Chicago, where Dillinger was shot down while coming out of a screening.

Mann grew up in Chicago and used to go to the Biograph as a kid. Now a theatre, he put back the cinema marquee and restored it to how it looked back in July 1934.

For those scenes, the filmmaker took over six blocks of North Lincoln Avenue, which were transformed into a replica of the night 75 years ago, when Dillinger was gunned down.

It was a fitting place to die, as he came out of a screening of Manhattan Melodrama starring Clark Gable “He became this big folk hero, so Hollywood began incorporating aspects of Dillinger’s character into their characterisations,” says Mann.

At the Little Bohemia Lodge, scene of an epic shootout, the film-makers turned back the clock to make it look exactly like it did in Dillinger’s day.

“We were able to shoot not just in the actual place where this happened, but in his actual room,” says Mann.

“As you can imagine, there’s a certain kind of magic, a kind of resonance, for Johnny Depp to be lying in the bed that John Dillinger was actually in.

When he puts his hand on the doorknob and opens the door, it’s the same doorknob that Dillinger put his hand on and opened.”

Then there were the guns, an important tool of the gangster’s trade. Depp has been shooting since he was five or six, so he reckons he has “a pretty strong advantage in that area”.

As Dillinger, for the most part, he carries a 1921 Thompson submachine gun and a couple of 45s. “When you’ve got a beast like that strapped to you and you’re emptying magazines, a 50-round drum, it’s a good feeling,” he says.

■ Public Enemies (15) opened yesterday.