Johnny Deppth

When a reporter asks whether he'd ever participate in a "21 Jump Street" reunion, Depp replies, "It depends on the director." With the right person Depp feels it could be funny, surreal, strange, with undercover cops turned into plainclothes Norma Desmonds, "still trying to look like high school students -- loads of pancake makeup, plastic surgery. You'd have to get David Lynch or Harmony Korine, someone with a real solid sense of humor."

The mention of Lynch reminds me that, watching "Sleepy Hollow," I thought of it as an 18th century "Twin Peaks," and Depp's Crane as a fey ancestor of Kyle MacLachlan's Agent Cooper. Like "Twin Peaks," "Sleepy Hollow" accepts the irrational and uses rational, Sherlock Holmesian means to explore it. But Depp sees constable Crane more like vampire-hunter Van Helsing in the Dracula movies.

"It is exactly the formulaic structure of that type of movie. We're twisting it here, bending it there, pushing it around and bullying it a bit. We're trying to take it a step further but at the same time not being disrespectful to that structure and formula and saluting the people who have done good work in it." Among those he counts Christopher Lee, who plays Crane's law-and-order boss, the Burgomaster. Depp says he found it "frightening" to act with Lee. "You are looking into the eyes of Dracula and he's about to jump down your throat, and it's real, and it's scary."

Depp treasures the memory of his collaboration and friendship with another mainstay of movie horror, Vincent Price, on Price's final movie, "Edward Scissorhands"; the aged actor, like his young friend a Gemini, sent Depp a birthday card every year. The last time Depp saw him was shortly after the death of Lillian Gish. "We lost Lillian this week," Price said. "I'm the only one left." But when Depp told him, "I've got a feeling you're going to outlast us all," Price's eyes widened and he exclaimed, "Oh, shit!" "He was tired," Depp says. "He wanted to go somewhere else. But he was amazing."

However, Depp balances his reverence for the ghosts of movies past with a taste for the cutting edge (Nicolas Roeg's avant-garde terror flick "Don't Look Now" reduced him to making "some horrible involuntary noise") and for outright kitsch (he cites Barnabas Collins, the vampire hero of the '60s vampire soap "Dark Shadows," as a major childhood obsession).

And he does keep looking for outside stimulation. Although he's directed a film himself ("The Brave" -- which I, like most people, haven't seen), he's not the kind of star who wants to direct his directors. John Travolta walked off a Roman Polanski film, "The Double," and effectively scuttled it, reportedly because he wouldn't take Polanski's direction. Depp, on the other hand, leapt at the chance to star in Polanski's forthcoming "The Ninth Gate": "Polanski made some of the most close-to-perfect films that I'd ever seen, like 'Chinatown' and 'The Tenant' and 'Repulsion' and that stuff. It was a long time ago but it can't go away; it's got to be there somewhere, and I think it is. I just thought it would be a great experience to get into the ring with him and see what it was like. And it was interesting. No shit."

The actor jokes that he's not a fan of Johnny Depp's: "I don't buy into him; he's overrated." He's petrified of complacency: "I think that, as an actor, if you get to a place where you're satisfied and happy with it, you're dead, it's over, you're not hungry anymore, you won't try things any more."

When asked to name a scene he'd love to play, he says, "My brain is making a connection between two things. You can see how my sick mind works. Did you ever see 'The Execution of Private Slovik'? It's unbelievable, with a really beautiful performance from Martin Sheen. The last couple of minutes of the film has Slovik walking toward his execution, saying, 'Hail Mary, full of grace.'" What Depp would like to do is apply the workings of that scene to the last moments of an entirely different character -- Rasputin, imperial Russia's mad, seemingly unkillable monk, who defied diverse modes of assassination (guns, poison, bludgeons) before being dumped in a river and drowned. What interests Depp would be playing Rasputin "beating death for all that time" and charting "what his thoughts might have been during the last moments of his life, kind of what Martin Sheen was doing" for Slovik.

Throughout the "Sleepy Hollow" press conference, Depp politely asked younger reporters if they understood his references. Depp may still have a way to go before his presence infiltrates the movie mainstream, but he's elastic enough to bridge generation gaps. I called the director of "The Execution of Private Slovik," Lamont Johnson, to pass on Depp's good words; I wondered whether Johnson, a staggeringly vital 77-year-old who has helped launch performers as varied as Jeff Bridges and Molly Ringwald, had formed an opinion of Depp's acting. This director had to admit that he knew Depp mostly from reviews and reputation. "Johnny Depp?" he laughed good-naturedly. "He's been praised to me by my granddaughters."

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