Tim Burton, Stephen Sondheim, and Helena Bonham Carter during rehearsals for Sweeney Todd Leah Gallo/Courtesy of DreamWorks

He must have seen a lot of your work and trusted you to give it that kind of feel that he wanted.
Yeah. I think he did. Because otherwise — yeah, it wouldn't have happened, I don't think. But I mean he knew that, he could sense — because we ended up cutting out a lot, and doing a lot of different things — and I think he sensed that my heart was in the right place. I love the material and even if I changed something, from my point of view, it was only to still maintain the spirit of it, just make work as a movie.

Was it painful to part with the some material? One song that was taken out was "The Ballad of Sweeney Todd," which is very beloved by fans of the musical.
Well, it was painful in a couple of ways, but… we worked quite hard to try to make it work. I mean we never shot it, but, you know, we hired great actors for it. We recorded it, we spent a lot of time making wardrobe tests and things like that. But as I started shooting the movie, it just didn't feel right. I kept putting it off. I finally realized that, you know, because the song tells the whole story of the piece, and because it's a fairly simple story, and because it's a movie, and because the actors are so good, I just didn't feel like you wanted to be being told or sung the whole story that you're seeing! It just didn't fit; it didn't feel right to do that to Johnny. Because for the movie, the characters — Sweeney here is such an internal character, and what Johnny's doing kind of goes back to those old horror movie actors — you don't want to know everything that they're thinking. You just like to see them thinking and sort of see the pain or the anger without hearing about it. I wanted to maintain that opportunity for Johnny.

Yeah, because the song does tell the whole story.
Well sure. It works great on stage.

It's not like the "Moritat" from The Threepenny Opera, where it just describes the character…
No. It's a narrator, and it tells everything. And again, it works fine on stage, but when you're looking up close into Johnny's eyes and Helena's eyes, you don't want to hear, or have heard, the whole thing. And that's why then I also cut out any choruses, any extras or people singing and dancing on the streets. That didn't feel right either. It was an interesting sort of organic process for me to kind of figure that out.

Did the "internalizing" of the story also spur the cutting of the theatrical piece's political points?
I thought that what the movie version had was a potential to focus on the story in the way you couldn't in the stage version. Because in the stage version you were far away from the characters; here we can get up close and look in their eyes and kind of feel the pain and feel the loss and feel the longing. And I feel I took advantage of that opportunity, to just to kind of make it a bit more of a tragic romance, in a different way than you could get on stage.

The ending seems almost kind of hopeless, because you've got the child so traumatized at that point, even though he's the survivor, that it's like it's almost as if he's been infected by them. Did you think in those terms?
No, I mean, again, I was basically just going by the sort of tragic melodrama potential of what was in the original. I kind of went back to, weirdly enough, the first short film I did, Vincent, where the kid kind of keels over at the end. I remember the studio going, "Well, can't you do something else and have him get up and go out and play or something?" I just thought "Well no, you know what? That's the whole thing about a tragedy: It's a tragedy."