Australian Deppheads are celebrating an interview in the Sunday Herald Sun in which Johnny Depp confirms that part of the epic movie SHANTARAM will be filmed Down Under. “We’ll definitely have to film in Melbourne,” Johnny said during an interview on Paradise Island last weekend. Melbourne is the hometown of SHANTARAM author–and former “Gentleman Bandit”–Gregory David Roberts, and the site of Pentridge Prison, where Roberts was incarcerated and from which he escaped. Filming of SHANTARAM is expected to begin sometime next year, when Johnny has completed the sequels to PIRATES OF THE CARIBBEAN.

Johnny hasn’t been to Australia since 1988, when he visited Melbourne to promote his television series 21 JUMP STREET. “I was on ‘Hey Hey It’s Saturday’ with that puppet,” Johnny told the Herald Sun. “What was his name? Yeah, Ossie Ostrich.” SHANTARAM promises to be a very different experience–a sprawling saga of an escaped prisoner’s life on the run. Johnny is full of praise for Roberts’s book: “He’s written this absolutely beautiful, poetic, allegorical, super thick, 1000 page novel that tore the top of my head off when I read it,” Johnny said.

Roberts is writing the screenplay for the film of SHANTARAM, in which Johnny will play the leading role. “[W]e just got our first draft of the screenplay and it’s very, very exciting,” Johnny said. “It’s going to be great.”

In other SHANTARAM news, author Roberts is currently living in south Mumbai, writing another novel and hoping to obtain Indian citizenship. The author is presently outfitting a mobile clinic to aid the “downtrodden and poor who no one else wants to help,” including street children, prostitutes, and the homeless who live along the railway tracks. Roberts wants to give something back to the city that “nourished and loved him.” Current plans have SHANTARAM filming in Mumbai as well, and Roberts hopes to see many of his favorite Bollywood actors in the cast.

The Zone thanks emma for posting the interview with Johnny and DeepinDepp for the article on Gregory Roberts; you can read both on the News & Views forum.