New York Times
April 11, 1999
'Sleepy Hollow,' on the Thames
By MATT WOLF
LONDON -- It was a clear, brisk March morning in the Chilterns, a pastoral stretch of England's Thames Valley, to the west of London, and film director Tim Burton was looking skeptically at the sky. "What we really want is lousy weather," said cinematographer Emmanuel Lubezki, who shared Burton's concern over glimpses of sun in a country where clouds can prevail for weeks on end. Before long, the elemental status quo was restored, the skies darkened and an essential gray returned to "Sleepy Hollow," a movie being freely adapted from Washington Irving's American classic.
The Irving tale, of course, is set in a relatively new America, so it may seem odd to find a movie version shooting not in the Hudson Valley of New York state but in the home counties around London. That is where Burton and his stars, Johnny Depp and Christina Ricci, playing Ichabod Crane and his beloved Katrina Van Tassel, have been for more than four months, as Burton creates another of the singular and self-enclosed worlds for which he has become known.
Much of that time has been spent here at Shepperton and Leavesden Studios. But on a recent day they were finishing a monthlong location shoot outdoors on private English grounds that had been transformed into the fearsome (and rain-soaked) turf of Irving's legendary Headless Horseman.
Burton, 40, is of course highly regarded for constructing elaborate environments, even if the period setting of "Sleepy Hollow" couldn't be further from the futuristic (and often forbidding) splendor of Gotham City in "Batman" and "Batman Returns" When location manager Keith Hatcher came upon it, the Sleepy Hollow site consisted of an unspoiled meadow with a pond in what is known as Lime Tree Valley on the Hambleden Estate. Now, on some 20 acres (the entire estate covers 4,000), a picturesque version of a Dutch colonial town, circa 1799, has been built.
Lining the main street are a covered bridge, a blacksmith, a general store and pub, and a doctor's residence and office, among other structures. And as Depp's Ichabod Crane makes his corpse-strewn way through the village, this cerebral man who lives inside his head comes up against a vengeful figure on horseback who goes his terrifying way without a head.
"You don't often get the opportunity to do an entire town," said Rick Heinrichs, the production designer, who has worked with Burton in varying capacities for much of the past 20 years. At a cost estimated by producer Scott Rudin at $1.3 million, and over a period of four months, 12 structures were built, several with detailed interiors as well as exteriors.
But because "Sleepy Hollow"(due for a Nov. 19 release) is a horror film as well as a fantasy and a romance, the houses aren't simply what they seem. "We wanted a sort of portentousness," Heinrichs explained, "houses with growths on them: tumorous, interesting shapes growing out of other shapes all kind of huddled together." So without giving too much away, one can reveal that Burton's famously angled, skewed vision -- the apparent doziness of a town that holds within it a nightmare -- remains intact. (Remember the Necco-wafer-colored, manicured suburbia of Burton's 1990 fable, "Edward Scissorhands"?) The result, Heinrichs said, could be described as "colonial expressionism: a sort of pastiche of Dutch and English and some French domestic architecture, and that all feels oddly American because it is a pastiche of different influences."
The value of the location, however, has exacted a price in a climate where rain, not sun, is the norm.
"This is the perfect setting for a hollow," Heinrichs continued, "but what makes it a hollow is the fact that there's a basin, and all the water from the hill runs from the center down." That's why Burton spoke wryly of a farming community that resembled Woodstock revisited. "One day we went location scouting, and I couldn't get out of the mud," he said. Had he not been hoisted out, "I would have still been there."
Why not then shoot "Sleepy Hollow" in its actual East Coast setting, or entirely on a soundstage? "We came to England because we couldn't get a combination of locations and stages in New York," said Heinrichs. "There was no way we could have gotten this anywhere else." For his part, Rudin spoke of a level of craftsmanship in period detail, painting and costuming that was available in England.
"And then for me," he added, there was the bonus of who got to be in it" -- such Britain-based character actors as Ian McDiarmid, Michael Gambon, Michael Gough and Miranda Richardson, all of whom work regularly in the London theater. (Gough also played the solicitous butler, Alfred, in Burton's "Batman" movies.) "That, for me," said Rudin, who also produces plays, "was a big draw."
McDiarmid, the co-artistic director of London's Almeida Theater, has a supporting role in "Star Wars: Episode I -- The Phantom Menace." And since that film was also shot at Leavesden Studios, in suburban Hertfordshire, north of London, McDiarmid was able to compare the esthetics of the two films. "Having come from the blue-screen world of 'Star Wars,"' he said, referring to the monochrome backdrops that can be filled in later digitally, "it was wonderful to see gigantic, beautifully made perspective sets and wonderful clothes, and also people recreating a world. It's like the way movies used to be done."
At Leavesden a week later, Burton was busily assembling yet more British theater talent (including Simon McBurney, the director of last season's acclaimed Broadway revival of Ionesco's "Chairs" ) for a scene early in the film in a New York City watchhouse, the police station of its day. There, in a sonorously spoken cameo appearance, was none other than Christopher Lee. A veteran of the same horror movies from England's Hammer Films that Burton said he had long admired, Lee plays the official who sends Depp's Ichabod to investigate the murders at Sleepy Hollow.
Like a French painter in his beret, Burton checked out a motorized torture device, known as "the confessional," into which the actor Michael Feast would soon be strapped. "Making a film, you certainly feel as if you're in one of those every day," Burton said. Weighing about a quarter of a ton, the instrument, Burton said, "was very symbolic for all of us; we've all got our head in a vise."
Other similarly grim and imposing contraptions were evident around the room, including a "Venus flytrap in four parts" that, said Joss Williams, the special effects supervisor, "is supposed to make you confess to whatever it is you haven't done."
Nearby, Depp, 35, who is making his third film with Burton after "Edward Scissorhands" and "Ed Wood," sat quietly, tapping his fingers on his knee as if to maintain his concentration. He was dressed for two early scenes in a policeman's outfit deemed "incredibly chic" by the film's costume designer, Colleen Atwood, who was nominated for an Academy Award this year for "Beloved." "Uniforms of the period were really beautifully made," Ms. Atwood said. "They weren't the polyester we have today; it was a whole other thing."
Otherwise Depp wears more or less one costume, sporting a waistcoast shot through with gold thread. "Johnny is a design element in this movie as much as any piece of scenery," Rudin said. "He looks like an Edward Gorey drawing, as if there's some string inside him, pulling him up."
Depp, his neck stiffened by his constable's suit, said cheerfully during a break: "It feels like 'Scissorhands'; they've got me locked in."
(In the current version of the tale, Andrew Kevin Walker's screenplay -- tweaked by Tom Stoppard, who in March won an Oscar for "Shakespeare In Love" -- presents Ichabod Crane as a forensic detective, not the schoolteacher of Irving's story.)
"This is what it must have been like to work on the set of 'Frankenstein' or 'Dracula' or 'The Phantom of the Opera,' with Lon Chaney," Depp said.
"It's a pleasure to see somebody change from one film to the next," Burton said of his star, though to Rudin there is one constant: "Basically, Johnny Depp is playing Tim Burton in all his movies."
Wolf is the London theater critic for Variety and a regular writer on the arts from London.
