Talking to Parade Magazine, Depp says that “Sometimes you fall in love with who you’re playing. As filming winds down, you hear the clock ticking because you know you’re going to leave your character behind and a kind of odd separation anxiety kicks in. You get irritable and just sort of melancholy. That’s what happened to me when we wrapped the first “Pirates of the Caribbean”. I realised I was going to miss Captain Jack. I had felt so comfortable being him and being in that skin. Suddenly you go, “Am I ever going to see him again?””

Therefore, of the upcoming sequel, he freely admits “I can’t wait to get back in costume. Some people will say “Aha, Depp sold out by doing the sequels”, but it was never an issue for me. I love Captain Jack so much I’d do “Pirates 7” if they asked me.” His children have a different favourite character of his, however. “They love “Edward Scissorhands”,” he smiles. “It’s funny because they have a difficult time watching it because it’s their dad. But they just connect with the character and also I think they see something – you know, their dad feeling that isolation, feeling that, you know, loneliness. He is a tragic character. So I think it’s hard for them. They bawl when they see it.”

If you are one of those people, you’re in good company – because Johnny Depp, star of the new 3D “Alice in Wonderland”, directed by Tim Burton, can’t see it either. “I’ve got a weird thing where I don’t see properly out of my left eye, so I truly can’t see 3D,” the star told Entertainment Weekly. According to an ABC News article, he’s not alone, with anything from five to twelve percent of the US population also unable to see the effect. “I don’t sense that I’m looking at a 3D image,” notes Rafe Needleman, editor of tech web site CNET. “It’s far more tiresome than convincing, because mostly, I see double images, or ghosting. Either it doesn’t work and I don’t see anything, or I see two images where I know I should see one.” Needleman notes that the new 3D craze – with even 3D TV sets now in production – may leave some out in the cold, and wonders “What are they going to do for us? How are they going to deal with the social division?”

Perhaps unsurprisingly, he’s one of many not all that impressed with the gimmick. “3D adds to the spectacle,” he notes, “but I don’t think it adds to the story.”

Comingsoon.net caught up with the actor at an “Alice” press conference to talk about the film and what he’s going to be doing next, where Depp revealed that taking the part of the Mad Hatter was something he didn’t have to think twice about. “Well, I mean to be honest, (Burton) could’ve said Alice and I would’ve (said) yes. I would’ve done whatever character Tim wanted, but yeah, certainly the fact that it was the Mad Hatter was a bonus. It was because of the great challenge to try and find this guy and not just to sort of be (a) rubber ball heaved into an empty room and watch it bounce all over the place. So to try and find that part of the character but also a little more history or gravity to the guy… He’s physically damaged. He’s emotionally a little obtuse… he could go from one second being very highfalutin’ and then straight into some kind of dangerous potential rage and tragedy… Trying to map it out was really interesting.”

Playing such extreme characters has become a trademark for the actor. “That’s the great challenge,” he admits, “that you might get it wrong. There’s a very good possibility that you can fall flat on your face but again, I think that’s a healthy thing for an actor.”

The film, set to be directed by Serbian filmmaker Emir Kusturica, has a completed script from Kusturica and regular co-writer Gordon Mihac, though if Depp does take the part (as seems increasingly likely), filming will not be able to begin until 2011 due to the actor’s prior commitments. Depp has worked with Kusturica before, on the 1993 film “Arizona Dream”. Entitled “Seven Friends of Pancho Villa and the Woman with Six Fingers”, the biopic will be filmed in Spanish and shot at least partly in Mexico and is being funded by French studio Fidelite, which also handled producing duties on the director’s “Maradona” biopic. It is believed that Salma Hayek is also close to signing on to appear in the picture.

Villa has previously been played in films by Antonio Banderas, Telly Savalas, and even by Villa himself in the 1914 film “The Life of General Villa”, which was produced by D.W. Griffith. Given the likely 2011 start date, Kusturica is set to shoot another new film prior to “Seven Friends”, in the form of “Cool Water”, a dark comedy set during the conflict in the Middle East and focusing on Palestinian woman who is working as a stripper in Germany, who is forced to return to her homeland in order to bury her father. That film is being produced by the independent German film studio Brave New Work.

Image: nicogenin

Johnny Depp won’t be a part of Terry Gilliam’s second attempt at making “The Man Who Killed Don Quixote”. The quirky director and former Monty Python collaborator confirmed to The Independent that while he had hoped Depp could find his way back to the project, in which he was originally cast as a marketing executive who was thrown back to the seventeenth century, Depp’s busy schedule has now made that an apparent impossibility. “I can now honestly say that I’m not working with Johnny on “Don Quixote”,” Gilliam admitted. “He’s booked himself up on a lot of other films… I want to shoot “Don Quixote” next year… He said he’s not available and we have both agreed that I’m going to die soon, so it would be nice to get this film under my belt,” he added ironically.

At Comic-Con in San Diego, Gilliam told fans that the project was otherwise fully on schedule, saying “We’ve written it and we’re out there hunting actors and money as we speak.” Gilliam’s first attempt at helming “The Man Who Killed Don Quixote” in 2000 was beset with disaster after disaster so severe that the project was eventually cancelled altogether, with lead actor Jean Rochefort seriously injured one week into filming, together with flash flooding on location that crippled equipment and altered the location so severely that everything that had been already filmed would no longer be usable. Gilliam will no doubt be praying to the movie Gods that that this attempt to bring “Quixote” back from the dead goes rather more smoothly.