Tim Burton was born on 25 August 1958 in Burbank, California, the first son of Bill and Jean Burton. His father worked for the Burbank Parks and Recreation Department, while his mother ran a gift shop called Cats Plus in which all the merchandise featured a feline motif. They had one other child, Daniel, who is three years younger and works as an artist. The Burtons’ house was situated directly under the flight path of Burbank Airport and Tim would often lie in the garden, gaze up at the planes flying overhead and time the exhaust fumes floating down from them. Between the ages of twelve and sixteen, he moved in with his grandmother, who also lived in Burbank, and then later into a small apartment above a garage which she owned, paying the rent by working in a restaurant after school. Situated within the Los Angeles city limits, Burbank was then, as it is now, an outpost of Hollywood. Warner Bros, Disney, Columbia and NBC all have their studios there, but in every other way Burbank is an archetypal working-class American surburb. It was an environment, however, from which Tim Burton felt alienated at an early age, one that he would later portray in Edward Scissorhands. Indeed, it’s easy ta see the young, introverted Tim Burton in Edward’s stranger-in-a-strange-land, removed from his hilltop castle home to a pastel-coloured version of suburbia. As a child, Burton was, by his own admission, moderately destructive. He would rip the heads off his toy soldiers and terrorize the kid next door by convincing hint that aliens had landed. He would seek refuge from his surroundings in the movie theatre or sit in front of the television watching horror movies.
If you weren’t from Burbank you’d think it was the movie capital of the world with all the studios around there, but it was and still is very suburban. It’s funny, the areas around Burbank have gotten less suburban, but somehow Burbank still remains the same. I don’t know how or why, but it has this weird shield around it. It could be Anywhere USA.
As a child I was very introverted. I like to think I didn’t feel like anybody different. I did what any kid likes to do: go to the movies, play, draw. It’s not unusual. What’s more unusual is to keep wanting to do those things as you go on through life. I think I was the quiet one at school. I don’t have a real perception of myself. I don’t really remember. I kind of floated through things. I didn’t consider them the best years of my life. I didn’t cry at the prom. I didn’t think it was going to be all downhill. I had friends. I never really fell out with people, but I didn’t really retain friends. I get the feeling people just got this urge to want to leave me alone for some reason, I don’t know why exactly. It was as if I was exuding some sort of aura that said ‘Leave Me The Fuck Alone’. For a while I looked like I could have been on a casting call for The Brady Bunch: I had bell-bottom pants and a brown leisure suit. But punk music was good, that helped me, it was good for me emotionally. I didn’t have a lot of friends, but there’s enough weird movies out there so you can go a long time without friends and see something new every day that kind of speaks to you.
There were five or six movie theatres in Burbank, but systematically they got taken away. And so for a few years when I was a teenager, there weren’t any. But there used to be ones where you could see these weird triple bills like Scream Blackula Scream, Dr Jekyll And Sister Hyde and Destroy All Monsters. Those were the good days of cinema, those great triple bills. And I would go to the cinema on my own, or with a couple of kids in the neighbourhood, whatever.
Recently I went back to Catalina Island. I hadn’t been there since I was a kid. I used to go there a lot, and there is this really cool theatre there, The Avalon, and it was done out in these incredible art deco shells. I remember seeing Jason and the Argonauts there. I remember both the theatre and the movie, because they seemed to be as one, the design of the theatre, that movie, and the kind of mythology it evoked. It was incredible. That was one of the first movies I remember. It was sometime early, somewhere before I was fifteen.
There was also a period in time when they’d show movies on television on Saturday afternoons, movies like The Brain that Wouldn’t Die, where the guy gets his arm ripped off and rubs his bloody stump along the wall before he dies, while a head on a plate starts laughing at him. They wouldn’t show that on TV now.
I’ve always loved monsters and monster movies. I was never terrified of them, I just loved them from as early as I can remember. My parents said I was never scared, I’d just watch anything. And that kind of stuff has stuck with me. King Kong, Frankenstein, Godzilla, the Creature from the Black Lagoon – they’re all pretty much the same, they just have different rubber suits or make-up. But there was something about that identification. Every kid responds to some image, some fairy-tale image, and I felt most monsters were basically misperceived, they usually had much more heartfelt souls than the human characters around them.
Fighting Ray Harryhausen’s skeletons in Jason and the Argonauts
Because I never read, my fairy tales were probably those monster movies. To me they’re fairly similar. I mean, fairy tales are extremely violent and extremely symbolic and disturbing, probably even more so than Frankenstein and stuff like that, which are kind of mythic and perceived as fairy-tale like. But fairy tales, like the Grimms’ fairy tales, are probably closer to movies like The Brain that Wouldn’t Die, much rougher, harsher, full of bizarre symbolism. Growing up, I guess it was a reaction against a very puritanical, bureaucratic, fifties nuclear family environment – me resisting seeing things laid out, seeing things exactly as they were. That’s why I think I’ve always liked the idea of fairy tales or folk tales, because they’re symbolic of something else. There’s a foundation to them, but there’s more besides, they’re open to interpretation. I always liked that, seeing things and just having your own idea about them. So I think I didn’t like fairy tales specifically. I liked the idea of them more.
For a while I wanted to be the actor who played Godzilla. I enjoyed those movies and the idea of venting anger on such a grand scale. Because I was quiet, because I was not demonstrative in any way, those films were my form of release. I think I was pretty much against society from the very beginning. I don’t know any children, I don’t have any children and I don’t like the phrase ‘remaining like a child’, because I think it’s kind of retarded. But at what point do you form ideas and at what point are you shaped? I think these impulses to destroy society were formed very early.
Godzilla venting his anger
I went to see almost any monster movie, but it was the films of Vincent Price that spoke to me specifically for some reason. Growing up in suburbia, in an atmosphere that was perceived as nice and normal (but which I had other feelings about), those movies were a way to certain feelings, and I related them to the place I was growing up in. I think that’s why I responded so much to Edgar Allan Poe. I remember when I was younger, I had these two windows in my room, nice windows that looked out on to the lawn, and for some reason my parents walled them up and gave me this little slit window that I had to climb up on a desk to see out of. To this day I’ve never asked them why; I should ask them. So I likened it to that Poe story where the person was walled in and buried alive. Those were my forms of connection to the world around me. It’s a mysterious place, Burbank.
Vincent Price
Vincent Price was somebody I could identify with. When you’re younger things look bigger, you find your own mythology, you find what psychologically connects to you. And those movies, just the poetry of them, and this larger-than-life character who goes through a lot of torment – mostly imagined – just spoke to me in the way Gary Cooper or John Wayne might have to somebody else.
Together with a group of friends I would make Super 8 movies. There was one we made called The Island of Doctor Agor. We made a wolfman movie, and a mad doctor movie, and a little stop-motion film using model cavemen. It was really bad and it shows you how little you know about animation at the beginning. These cavemen had removable legs – one was in the standing position, and the other was in a walking one – and we just changed the legs. It’s the jerkiest animation you’ll ever see. I used to love all those Ray Harryhausen movies – Jason and the Argonauts, The Seventh Voyage of Sinbad – they were incredible, I loved stop-motion animation as a kid. And as you get older, you realize that there’s an artistry there too, and that’s what you’re responding to.
I got through school, but I wasn’t interested in the curriculum. I’m of that unfortunate generation that grew up watching television rather than reading. I didn’t like to read. I still don’t. So what better way to get a good grade than to make a little movie? I remember one time we had to read a book and do a twenty-page book report, but I decided to do a movie called Houdini instead. I shot myself on black and white Super 8, speeded up. It had me escaping from the railroad tracks and then being dumped in a pool and escaping again – all these stupid Houdini tricks. It was really fun to do. I didn’t read any book, it was just me jumping around in my backyard. It was an easy way to get an A, and I certainly got a higher grade than if I had attempted to talk my way through a written report. That was in early junior high. I must have been about thirteen. And then I did one on psychology for high school. I just took a lot of pictures of books and played them to Alice Cooper’s ‘Welcome To My Nightmare’; deeply psychological. And I shot a bean bag chair in stop-motion attacking me in my sleep. That was the ending, I think.
I never actually thought about making films for a living. Maybe somewhere deep inside, but I never consciously said I wanted to be a film-maker. I liked doing it. It helped me get through school. Before Universal Studios became what it is now, they used to have a tour which was very low key and I remember being young and going to see the streets where they shot Dracula and Frankenstein. It was a powerful feeling, and I think that enhanced the romantic aspects of it. I never consciously thought of making films; it’s something I lucked into after a couple of years at Disney. Maybe I was just protecting myself, because I don’t like to make proclamations. I prefer to be a bit more stream-of-consciousness about things.
While he showed no particular aptitude for schooling, Burton’s artistic potential soon began to reveal itself. In the ninth grade he won ten dollars and first prize in a community competition to design an anti-litter poster which adorned the side of garbage trucks in Burbank for two months. At Christmas and Hallowe’en he would earn extra money by painting and decorating Burbank residents’ windows with either snowscapes or jack-o’-lanterns, spiders and skeletons, depending on the season.
In some ways I’m all over the place. I can get hyper and kind of unfocused about things. But there are things that help focus you, and make you feel good. If I’m doing a drawing I can become focused, and, in a funny way, it’s a calming experience. And that’s something I’ve never forgotten. I like to draw very much, and as a kid that’s all you do in class all day. It’s great. If you go to a kindergarten class all the children draw the same, no one’s better than another. But something happens when you get older. Society beats things out of you. I remember going through art school, and you’ve got to take life drawing, and it was a real struggle. Instead of encouraging you to express yourself and draw like you did when you were a child, they start going by the rules of society. They say, ‘No. No. You can’t draw like this. You have to draw like this.’ And I remember one day I was so frustrated – because I love drawing, but actually I’m not that good at it. But one day something clicked in my brain. I was sitting sketching and I thought, ‘Fuck it, I don’t care if I can draw or not. I like doing it.’ And I swear to God, from one second to the next I had a freedom which I hadn’t had before. From that point on, I didn’t care if I couldn’t make the human form look like the human form. I didn’t care if people liked it. There was this almost like drug-induced sense of freedom. And I fight that every day, someone saying, ‘You can’t do that. This doesn’t make any sense.’ Every day it’s a struggle. It’s just a question of trying to maintain a certain amount of freedom.
In 1976, when Burton was eighteen, he won a scholarship to attend the California Institute of the Arts (Cal Arts), a college in Valencia, California founded by Walt Disney, with a programme that had been set up the previous year by the Disney Studio as a training school for prospective animators.
In high school I had a teacher who was encouraging, and I got a scholarship to Cal Arts. At Cal Arts we would make Super 8 movies: we made a Mexican monster movie and a surf movie, just for fun. But animation – I thought that might be a way to make a living. Disney basically had had the same animators since Snow White and they had taken a very leisurely approach to training new people. I joined the second year of the Disney-funded programme; they were trying to teach all these eager young new recruits to be animators. It was like being in the Army; I’ve never been in the Army, but the Disney programme is probably about as close as I’ll ever get. You’re taught by Disney people, you’re taught the Disney philosophy. It was kind of a funny atmosphere, but it was the first time I had been with a group of people with similar interests. They were similar outcast types, people who were ridiculed for their liking of Star Trek or whatever.
You had access to Disney propaganda material. So, if you wanted to see the way Snow White was drawn, you could see the lines under the dress. You were taught by Disney artists, animators, layout people; you were taught the Disney way. At the time there wasn’t the diversity in animation that exists now, so Disney, even as low as it was, was a very romantic ideal, and I would say 90 per cent of the class had aspirations to work there.
At the end of the year, everybody would do a little piece of animation and the Disney review board would come out to view them. It was like a draft. They would review all the films, and they would take people to work at the studio from any class, freshman, on up to the final year, with special consideration for those at the end. But they didn’t care. If somebody showed particular promise, then they would get picked. So there was always a lot of competition and speculation about who was going to get picked. It was very intense, and there were always a few surprises each year. I was there three years. I don’t know if I would have gone there a fourth, because during the last year I spent almost every day in the financial aid office, because they gave me a scholarship and then they took it away; it was an expensive school, and I could only afford it with that scholarship. As the years went on, the competition, the films, would get more elaborate, there was sound, music, even though they were basically pencil tests. The last one I did was called Stalk of the Celery Monster. It was stupid, but I got picked. It was a lean year, and I was lucky, actually, because they really wanted people.