“He’s a genius in creating these characters” — Jerry Bruckheimer talks about Johnny Depp’s Tonto

Calendar January 31, 2013 | Posted by Part-Time Poet

Jerry Bruckheimer previewed the Lone Ranger Super Bowl trailer for Yahoo’s Movie Talk and answered questions about his latest project. Here’s what Mr. Bruckheimer had to say about Johnny Depp and The Lone Ranger:

Q: Johnny Depp created such a unique and such an iconoclastic character with Jack Sparrow. What sort of process do you go through with Johnny for creating a character like Tonto, in this case?

JERRY BRUCKHEIMER: Well, I mean, it’s his process. He’s a genius in creating these characters. He found a character that he wanted to play in Tonto, conceptualized the character, created the makeup and worked with his makeup artists and sent me some photographs of how he thought Tonto should look. Again, he created another iconic character, and I can’t [wait] for you and the audience — well, you’ve seen him on the trailer, but I can’t wait for you to see the relationship between the Lone Ranger and Tonto. This is the origin story of the Lone Ranger. So, we’re telling how the Lone Ranger became the Lone Ranger.

Q: Westerns, lately, have had kind of an up-and-down — and mostly down — success rate at the box office. How do you find the balance between the sort of classic Western archetypes and also modernizing it for today’s audience?

JERRY BRUCKHEIMER: We heard the same thing about pirate movies. They hadn’t been successful for 30 years or so, if not longer. With Gore and our writing teams and Johnny and Armie, I think we created something very special. It’s still a Western but, you know, Django [Unchained] is a Western, too, and it’s doing quite well. I think it’s the characters that you fall in love with and the story, and I think we’ve got both [characters and a story] that are very interesting. Hopefully, we’ll have the kind of surprise for the audience who they got when they saw Pirates.

The Zone thanks Lou Lou 63 for sharing the Bruckheimer interview and a beautiful new Lone Ranger still that you can see HERE; you can read more on the Zone’s Porch General Discussion forum. The Movie Talk interview is available HERE.

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