“Tragic,” he told Tom Thurman in the 2006 documentary Buy the Ticket, Take the Ride: Hunter S. Thompson on Film. “Shocked but not shocked. Angry but understanding. A zillion different emotions flying around all the time. It was like somebody had removed something from your body. It was a heavy hit.”
Mourning the loss of his brother, mentor, hero, and friend, Johnny’s mind flashed back to the 1978 BBC documentary Fear and Loathing in Gonzovision, in which Thompson described in minute detail how he would like to be sent off from this world into the next: he wanted his remains cremated and shot from a cannon on his land in Woody Creek, Colorado.
“When I got the news that Hunter had made his exit, obviously I was devastated,” Depp said. “I remember thinking almost immediately, ‘The cannon. We’ve got to do the cannon.’”
For Depp, this wasn’t a writer’s fantasy; it was Thompson’s final command. “That bastard,” Depp said. “I know somewhere in his crooked mind . . . he knew that I was the only one perhaps loyal enough, perhaps insane enough, to attempt it.”
Over the years, Thompson had spoken about what would be called “the death cannon,” Depp said. “You know, he brought it up every now and again; ‘Oh, yeah, I’ve got to have—I need the cannon, you know. . . . I may have even said, ‘I’ll send you off.’”
Thompson’s son, Juan, was determined to make it happen, too. Only Juan envisioned a twelve-foot cannon, costing a couple of hundred dollars. Johnny wanted something bigger, grander. “A few days later, Doug Brinkley, Hunter’s good friend and editor of his letters books, came over to our cabin and said Johnny Depp had called and said he wanted to pay for the construction of the cannon,” Juan wrote in his 2016 memoir Stories I Tell Myself: Growing Up with Hunter S. Thompson. “We were astonished . . . it is one thing to be a friend; it’s another thing to volunteer to build a friend’s death cannon.
