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Now he's taken on an American icon, Ichabod Crane, in Tim Burton's exquisitely phantasmagoric adaptation of Washington Irving's "The Legend of Sleepy Hollow," titled, simply, "Sleepy Hollow." He's given it his usual (that is, unusual) Depp charge. He transforms the icon into a complicated modern figure while staying true -- in some mysterious, intangible fashion -- to its post-revolutionary America sardonic grotesquerie. (Irving set his fable in the 1790s and published it in 1820; the movie takes place specifically in 1799.)

The Crane of Irving's story is a Connecticut schoolteacher who ventures into the haunted rural New York spot called Sleepy Hollow in search of a well-off wife with a well-set table. What he gets is a terrifying confrontation with a spectral Hessian trooper known as the Headless Horseman.

Crane becomes, in Burton's movie, a progressive policeman exiled from New York City and ordered to test his theories of deduction on a series of horrific beheadings. The Headless Horseman is the obvious culprit, but Crane suspects a human of manipulating the monster for his or her own gain. This is still the tale of an outsider obtruding on the customs of a close-knit hamlet, with harrowing results. But in the film, Crane's main characteristics are rational intellect and swooning effeminacy -- not, as in Irving's story, petty pedantry in the classroom and over-eagerness to please outside of it.

Michael Sragow Michael Sragow's column appears every Thursday in Arts & Entertainment + Archives

"One of the original images in my mind was a character who lives in his head versus a character with no head," Burton writes in his introduction to "The Art of Sleepy Hollow" (Pocket Books, 1999). But Burton and Depp's Ichabod wants to break through his solipsistic mind-set and arrive at the truth, even if it blasts his preconceptions. That's part of the reason why, for all their camping, Burton and Depp succeed in making Crane come off as a good marital catch. In the story Crane is a ladies' man only in comparison to country bumpkins; he merely dreams of wooing comely farmer's daughter Katrina Van Tassel. In the movie he wins pretty Katrina (Christina Ricci) fair and square.

Surprisingly, as Depp told the press last week at a conference to promote the movie, he initially envisioned Ichabod along the lines of Irving's story or the old Disney cartoon. When he first thought of playing the lead in a Tim Burton version of the Sleepy Hollow story, he says, "I started sort of doing Snoopy dances thinking, 'Yeah, I get to wear a long snipe nose.'"

"Long snipe nose" is not a phrase you expect to pop out of a contemporary movie star. But as Depp says, "In the classic Ichabod Crane from the book, Washington Irving's description is really beautifully written. And it is, in fact, a long snipe nose and huge ears, and it talks about his hands being very far away from his body, and long feet." (Depp's memory is spot-on: "The cognomen of Crane," writes Irving, "was not inapplicable to his person. He was tall, but exceedingly lank, with narrow shoulders, long arms and legs, hands that dangled a mile out of his sleeves, feet that might have served for shovels, and his whole frame most loosely hung together. His head was small, and flat at top, with huge ears, large green glassy eyes, and a long snipe nose, so that it looked like a weathercock, perched upon his spindle neck, to tell which way the wind blew.")

Depp admits, "There was a fairly hefty silence when the upper echelons found out" that he wanted to create a crane-like Crane. So instead he molded himself into a male ingenue, mixing the aura of a tortured poet with the unisex glamour of late Carnaby Street.

How, I wonder, would the earlier look have fit Crane's actions in the film anyway? After all, in Burton's version, Crane may not be conventionally romantic ("I hope not!" Depp interjects), but he does still get the girl.

"There were stages," Depp explains, somewhat obliquely. "The initial script was very good, very solid, but Tim and I talked about this early on -- we knew we were going to throw in as much humor as possible. There were opportunities that had been missed." Screenwriter Andrew Kevin Walker ("Seven," "The Game") hit the comedy "on a couple of notes, here and there," but in general was more somber than Burton. It was playwright Tom Stoppard's uncredited polish (he did similar, credited work for "Shakespeare in Love") and Depp's collaboration with Burton (his third, after "Edward Scissorhands" and "Ed Wood") that caused the black comedy to bloom.

Next page | From TV boy to Tim Burton's boy