Tim Burton directed the 2007 film musical Sweeney Todd: The Demon Barber of Fleet Street. The movie adapts Stephen Sondheim and Hugh Wheeler’s stage musical, which follows the vengeful barber Sweeney Todd after he returns to London following wrongful exile.
Johnny Depp plays Todd, whose original identity was Benjamin Barker, while Helena Bonham Carter plays Mrs. Lovett, his accomplice in the grim pie-shop scheme. Alan Rickman portrays Judge Turpin, the man whose abuse of power helped destroy Todd’s family. John Logan wrote the screenplay, adapting the stage production into a more compact cinematic form.
Burton first encountered Sondheim’s musical as a student in London in 1980 and was drawn to its combination of gothic atmosphere, dark humor, and operatic storytelling. The film was Burton’s long-developing attempt to bring that vision to the screen. Although Burton is strongly associated with gothic fantasy, Sweeney Todd is also a full musical, with Depp and Bonham Carter performing the characters’ songs themselves.