Johnny Depp's Into The Woods

IT HAS TAKEN INTO THE WOODS 27 YEARS TO TRAVEL FROM STAGE TO SCREEN. HERE, AN EXCLUSIVE LOOK AT THIS WINTER'S MOST WICKEDLY BEAUTIFUL FILM.

THE WOLF WAS THE PROBLEM. IN A FILM BRIMMING WITH WITCHES and princesses (and one cow), Johnny Depp and costume designer Colleen Atwood faced a dilemma while planning his latest outre transformation, into the seductive Wolf who crosses Little Red Riding Hood (Lilia Crawford) in the sprawling movie musical Into the Woods: How do you not lose the man inside the beast (and vice versa)? *1 Depp, who conneccted Capt. Jack Sparrow as a mash-up of Keith Richards kPepe Le Pew (and based part of his Willy Wonka on |in Kangaroo), found inspiration for his lupine lothario JtOs animation. "I just had this burning vision in my t and all I could think of was the wolf in the Tex Avery Sftoors: a hip big bad wolf with a fedora and zoot

“If it’s too real, then it’s not a fairy tale,” says production designer Dennis Gassner (Sky/rill). But they didn’t want the film to look too unreal, either. “We set off to create a stylized forest that had a sense of magic but was also grounded, so there’s a lot of real locations fused with the forest we built on our big stage,” says cinematographer Dion Beebe (Memoirs of a Geisha). “\ou never know if you’re in our make- believe stage or reality outside.” About one-third of the film was shot on location in wooded areas in Surrey and Kent, and the rest at London’s Shepperton Studios, where an artificial forest was built and rebuilt. (Spoiler alert: The film includes at least one destructive, pissed-off Giant.) Marshall wanted to avoid green- screen whenever possible. Blunt welcomed the chance to creep through real foliage. “Having things to touch and lean upon and fall over and get caught up in is infinitely more helpful than trying to pretend with some green- screen pole,” she