Having finally left Disney, and with Frankenweenie receiving good word of mouth within industry circles, it was only a matter of time before Burton secured a feature to direct. What nobody, least of all Burton himself, could have predicted, however, was that the project would be so in tune with his artistic and creative sensibilities. Pee-Wee Herman, aka comedian Paul Reubens, a weirdly asexual, grey-suited personality with a red bow-tie, rouged cheeks and a beloved bicycle, had achieved cult status with his children’s TV show Pee-Wee’s Playhouse. Warner Bros were looking to turn Pee-Wee from TV star to film sensation, and in Burton, who was only 26 at the time, they found the perfect man to do it.
I was just waiting around, and there was this woman at Warner Bros, Bonnie Lee, she was sort of a friend, and she brought me to the attention of the people over there, and I got the Pee-Wee movie fairly easily. That was the easiest job I have ever got, I mean, any job, even a restaurant job, and any movie before or since. Bonnie showed Frankenweenie to the Warner Bros people. They showed it to Paul Reubens and the producers of the movie, and it was like, ‘Do you want to do this movie?’ and I said, ‘Yeah.’ It was great. It was perfect, because I liked the material, and I felt very comfortable that I would be able to support it because Paul’s character was so strong. He was Pee-Wee.
I also just liked the fact that he was into his own thing: his bike. In most movies the plot device has to be something that is of importance, and what was of importance to him was his bike.
It’s hard for me to imagine a first movie, unless I had created it myself, that I could have related to as well as I did to Pee-Wee. It was so easy to realize it because I could feel it very easily. It was all scripted, except for tiny bits here and there. Some of the visual jokes weren’t scripted, like when he’s in the bathroom and he looks out through the fish tank window. But since the character was so strong it allowed us to focus on certain visual things.
I loved the movie and felt so connected to it because there was a lot of imagery that I liked. I could add, but I wasn’t imposing my own thing on it completely. I got to take the stuff that was there and embellish it. There were a few things that I added, but I was just lucky to be so clearly in synch with Paul. It would have been a real nightmare if I hadn’t been in synch with him; I would have been fired because he was the star and it was his movie.
Pee-Wee’s Big Adventure: Paul Reubens and bicycle
I remember seeing Paul’s show and loving it because it really tapped into the permanent adolescence thing, and I completely connected with that. It was good for me too, because at that point in my life I really wasn’t the best communicator, and it would have been a nightmare if we hadn’t been so in synch. What he liked, for the most part, I liked; what I liked, for the most part, he liked. So we just did it.
‘It really tapped into that permanent adolescent thing’
I’ve always felt close to all the characters in my films. I’ve always felt I had to be, because when you’re doing something you’re putting your life into it, and there has to be aspects to all the characters that are either a part of you, or something you can relate to, or something that is symbolic of something inside you. I have to connect. The Pee-Wee character was just into what he was doing, and when you grow up in a culture where people remain very hidden, it was nice that he didn’t really care about how he was perceived. He operated in his own world, and there’s something I find very admirable about that. He’s a character who is on his own, who is able to operate in society, and yet he’s also sort of an outcast. Again, it’s that whole theme of being perceived as this weird thing. In some ways, there’s a freedom to that, because you’re free to live in your own world. But it’s a prison in a way. It’s how I felt when I was an animator at Disney.
Written by Phil Hartman, Michael Varhol and its star Paul Reubens, Pee-Wee’s Big Adventure centres around Herman’s quest to retrieve his stolen bike, a search that takes him on a road trip across America, from a dinosaur park in Palm Springs, down to the Alamo and back to Burbank, encountering all manner of American film archetypes, including a biker gang, an escaped prisoner and a waitress out to better herself It was a journey which allowed Burton to indulge in his penchant for stop-motion animation. Firstly, in a dream sequence in which a Tyrannosaurus rex – animated by regular collaborator Rick Heinrichs – chows down on Pee-Wee’s bike, and secondly, in the film’s most memorable sequence, when Pee-Wee encounters Large Marge, a ghostly female truck driver whose face distorts in front of his eyes.
There’s an energy with stop-motion that you can’t even describe. It’s to do with giving things life, and I guess that’s why I wanted to get into animation originally. To give life to something that doesn’t have it is cool, and even more so in three dimensions, because, at least for me, it feels even more real. With the Large Marge thing or the dinosaur – any time we could throw in some stop-motion, the better. We would have had a lot more if they’d have let us.
Transformation: Large Marge
The movie-making process is weird, because the Large Marge sequence was in the script originally, and there was lots of talk about how to do it; we even talked about not having anything, just Paul screaming, and let that be the joke. It’s funny, whenever I see the movie with an audience that sequence almost always gets the biggest laugh. You can tell that was the thing that kept people going for the whole movie, it carried people along, and it’s so scary because I almost cut out the best thing before an audience saw it. It was a special effect and those are the first things to go.
The dinosaur dream
I completely storyboarded Vincent. I storyboarded at least half of Frankenweenie and a friend of mine did the rest, while on Pee-Wee I got a guy to board it. From movie to movie they’ve gotten boarded less and less and what I’ve done since then is little sketches. On Pee-Wee, because it was my first film, they wanted to know that I’d got the shot list, that I could make the day. So it was helpful, and I liked that. It was my background, so I felt comfortable. Again, since I wasn’t very good at speaking, this visual representation was helpful.
A lot of people in the movie were from improv groups like The Groundlings, and I started to get really into it, because when people are good at improv, it’s really fun and it’s kind of liberating. And so I started to feel that I was going to storyboard less because it’s more fun to build up to a spot and let it happen on the stage. You have to have enough of an idea to know what you’re doing, but as much as you plan, there’s something about the reality of being on the set with the actors, costumes, lights and the rest of that environment that changes things. Not so much on the Pee-Wee movie because that was kind of there, but in later movies, it’s like ‘This line may sound good, but it’s being said by a guy in a bat-suit, so I don’t know if it’s a good line.’ You may think it’s a good line, but it’s not until you get on that stage, at that moment, with these weird characters that it’s right. So I loosened that up a lot. On Beetlejuice it was even more so because Catherine O’Hara and Michael Keaton are so good at improv.
It started with Paul and one of the writers, Phil Hartman, who is on Saturday Night Live now. Those guys were really good and funny, and working on that movie was a lot like being in animation and having a story meeting; even though the script was really good, we’d sit around and come up with ideas. It was very exciting to me to be around them because they were funny. In improv, they base everything on knowing what their character is and letting it go from there. In Pee-Wee it was a case of having the elements there already: he’s got these bunny slippers and there’s a little toy carrot, so you have the slippers go and sniff the carrot. One thing that was completely improvised was that whole thing in the Alamo with the guide. That was the first time that there was a good chunk of improvisation and the girl who did that, Jan Hooks, was really good and ended up on Saturday Night Live. All these people from The Groundlings, people from improv, I have a real respect for them because it’s the way I like working: it starts with a very good foundation and then kind of goes free.
Pee-Wee’s Big Adventure climaxes with a bicycle ride on the Warner Bros backlot. It’s almost Felliniesque in content and tone as Pee-Wee Herman, reunited with his beloved red and white bicycle, is pursued through a series of soundstages disrupting the filming taking place on each one. The movies in question reflect Burton’s preoccupations and interests: a beach movie, a Christmas number, a Japanese monsterfest with Godzilla – though, he says, the majority of the films were in fact present in the original script.
I think I added a couple. But all those genres were stuff that I liked very much; that monster fighting Godzilla was the Giddra, otherwise known as Monster Zero. Working on the Warner Bros backlot was kind of magical. Shooting on a soundstage is magical. That magic has worn off a little since then, unfortunately, because of the business side surrounding Hollywood, the torture aspects of it. I kind of get freaked out when I go to studios now because there’s a negative as well as a positive side, whereas before there just used to be a positive one.
While Burton had previously used composers Michael Convertino and David Newman to score Frankenweenie and Aladdin, to provide the music for Pee-Wee’s Big Adventure he chose Danny Elfman, lead singer with the cult group Oingo Boingo Band, who had never scored a film before.
Before I was in the movies I’d go see them in clubs. I had always liked their music. Of all the groups that I went to see, which was mainly the punk kind of stuff, which I love, I always felt that because they had more people in the band and used weirder instruments, the music seemed to be more story-oriented in some way, more filmic. So when the Pee-Wee movie came about, it was great, because being low-budget they were more willing to take a chance. They took a chance on me, they took a chance on Danny. Their attitude was to surround me with a bunch of old pros, but music was the one area which that didn’t carry over into. Hearing the music played by an orchestra was probably one of the most exciting experiences I’ve ever had. It was incredible and so funny to see Danny because he’d never done anything like that. It’s always magical when you’ve never done something. I guess it’s like having sex: it can be great, but it’s never quite the same as that first time. Music is always important, but that was really the first time where it was like a character, definitely a character.
Danny was great because he had never done this and so it was good for me because I got to go through the process. He got a tape of the film and I would go over to his house, and he’d play little things on his keyboard so I could see it right there. We were definitely on the same wavelength. It was good because what he couldn’t verbalize, or what I couldn’t verbalize, didn’t matter because it was there and he got it. It was pretty much like, ‘It’s great, it’s perfect’, and it’s so much easier when that’s the case. I’ve always tried to be very sensitive; if you find the right people, you’re almost on a different level.
Because it was a low-budget movie it wasn’t high on Warner Bros’ priorities, but at the same time The Goonies was being shot across the way and they had these huge sets, and, I don’t know, they may have been on schedule, maybe it was just me who wasn’t, but the executives passed by that stage every day and would come down and start yelling at me, ‘What are you doing? You’re taking all this time?’ They were on our case, but it didn’t teach me anything, except to have a worse temper and go faster. It’s at that stage that you learn that movie-making is not an exact science. The thing that has always bothered me is that nobody was irresponsible. It was like, ‘I wish this was going faster’, but we were dealing with animals and elements and FX. We weren’t doing anything crazy, we weren’t overshooting. I even cut stuff out as we were going along because we didn’t have time. But we were just a small thing. It’s show-business hierachy, in a way. They won’t torture A list people, but they’ll torture the Β list, because they can.
To be a director you can’t have any fear. At best, you probably have to have a very healthy balance of not being an egomaniac, but with enough security in yourself to just go for it. Also, I think the unknown helps. Actually, you get more freaked out as you go along and the experiences pile up on you; you find yourself getting weirder. I found that on my first feature, I was the most secure and unfreaked out than at any other time since. I had the greatest time.
I was the worst in school for learning anything. If somebody tells me something, I have some reaction against hearing it, I just will not listen. It’s why I’m so bad with names. I don’t know where that’s from. It probably comes from some weird internal protection. In school I retained nothing. All I remember from school are the names of certain clouds. I don’t remember dates, I don’t remember anything. So I didn’t come away from Pee-Wee thinking I had learned this or I had learned that, because that experience was probably the purest experience I have ever had, and part of that was me being fairly naive about the whole situation. I’ve found that there are a lot of unpleasant things involved in movies and it’s best not to dwell on them. It’s funny about selective memory because on every movie I’ve done I’ve gotten very sick, because I’ve put a lot of myself into it. I’ve gotten sick and I’ve had to keep going and finish the movie, and yet I wanted to die. But those things kind of fade away after a while. It’s a good thing. That’s why I never like jumping from one movie to another, because it’s too much of a harsh experience. Luckily it leaves you, so that you can do it again, but it does get harder and harder.
That’s why I think I always liked Fellini movies because he seemed to capture the spirit and the magic of making a movie. It is something that is beautiful and you want to obtain it because it gives you the energy to keep going. But there are a lot of negative sides to it, nothing really negative, but it’s a harsh experience. The things you learn about movie-making are fine, as you go along you learn about lenses. It’s taken me a while, but I gather information each time. You just try to keep learning on a basic technical level. But on the other side, the Hollywood side, there’s nothing really to learn that’s of any value. A lot of it is not based on logic, and that can be disturbing. If you’re trying to find a foundation for something, it’s a disturbing thing, so I try not to think too much about it, because I feel more irrational from movie to movie.
Released in the summer of 1985 Pee-Wee’s Big Adventure was a surprise box-office success, though critical opinion was mixed.
The reviews on Pee-Wee’s Big Adventure were really bad. I remember one review, and I’ll never forget this, which said, ‘Everything is great, the costumes are brilliant, the photography is great, the script is fabulous, the actors are all great, the only thing that’s terrible is the direction.’ One said, ‘On a scale of one to ten, ten being best, Pee-Wee’s Big Adventure gets a minus one.’ It’s the first minus one I remember seeing. It was on a lot of the ten worst films of the year lists. It’s funny, I look at the movie and I don’t think it’s bad. I love it. There may be some weak passages, but it’s really not that bad. It was kind of devasting; I had never really been through that before. There were a couple of good reviews, but for the most part they were pretty bad. Not just on the fence bad, but bad bad.
But I think it affected me in a positive way. I’ve always gotten enough good and bad reviews. I’ve known people who’ve gone through that first film thing when they get ‘They’re the next Orson Welles’, and that can kill you. I’m glad I didn’t get that. I much prefer the kind of raking over the coals I got because it’s a mistake to believe any of it. A lot of the criticism I got was that the film was just images, and I’m thinking, ‘It’s a movie for Christ’s sake, it’s not a radio programme, it’s a visual thing, so what’s wrong?’
Having a background in animation sort of broadens the scope of what you can do visually. Cinema is a visual medium so everything that you do – even if it’s not blurting out to the audience on a completely conscious level: ‘This is what I am’ – everything is meaningful in terms of the look of things. So I always felt having that background in animation was a good tool for me to explore visual ideas and apply them to live action.
The thing I liked about Fellini was that he created images that even if you didn’t know what they meant literally, you felt something. It’s not creating images to create images. And even though I didn’t fully understand a lot of what he was saying, I could feel a heart behind it. That’s what his work meant to me, that things don’t have to be literal, you don’t have to understand everything. Even though it may be an extreme image, something that’s out of the realm of people’s perception of reality, you feel something. It’s that whole sort of unspoken thing that I find beautiful. That’s the magic of movies.
Pee-Wee made money, which was the main thing in Hollywood at that stage of the game. I care about money, which is why I get so intense when these people are on my case saying I don’t make commercial movies, because I’ve always felt very responsible to the people who put up the money. It’s not like you’re doing a painting. There is a large amount of money involved, even if you’re doing a low-budget movie, so I don’t want to waste it. In a non-exact science, kind of weird world, you try to do the best you can. I’ve never taken the attitude of the artiste, who says I don’t care about anything, I’m just making my movie. I try to be true to myself and do only what I can do, because if I veer from that everybody’s in trouble. So I try to maintain that integrity. And when there is a large amount of money involved, I attempt, without pretending to know what audiences are all about, to try and do something that people would like to see, without going too crazy.
You try your best, but it’s such a surreal thing. I thought the movie industry was bad, but when you look at other worlds, like fashion or advertising or the art world, it’s even more cut-throat and even more full of pretension and bullshit. I think the good thing about the movie industry which protects you from that is that there are so many things that can go wrong, so many elements: the reviews, the box office, and then there’s the movie itself. There are so many things that can punch away at you and force you to have a little bit of humility, that it kind of keeps you grounded.
I had a good experience on Pee-Wee, I enjoyed it. It was surreal: a lot of the reviews were bad and then the movie did fairly well, which was great. It’s hard to imagine a better, more grounding experience in a way because it left me realizing that you’ve got to just try and hope for the best, maintain some integrity and try to punch through it.
I don’t even think they asked me to do the next Pee-Wee movie, but it’s not something I wanted to do. It was my first movie and I could already see the rut that Hollywood puts people in. You do two Pee-Wee movies, and then that’s you, which was different for me than it was for Paul. For him that’s fine, because that’s his character.
Later that same year Burton directed The Jar, an episode of Alfred Hitchcock Presents, a revamped version of the sixties TV series which had been updated by US network NBC and which featured colourized versions of Hitchcock’s prologues and epilogues. Scripted by horror novelist Michael McDowell, from Ray Bradbury’s original teleplay, The Jar starred Griffin Dunne as the owner of the titular container whose mis shapen contents have a persuasive effect on those who behold them and featured a score from Danny Elfman and special effects by Rick Heinrichs.
That was another tough one. I’ve learned from things like The Jar and Aladdin that when I get into situations like that it’s very dangerous. If I can’t do exactly what I want to do – that’s not to say that what I want to do is going to work out every time – things just don’t work out quite as well. I need that deep connection.
The next year Burton was called in by Brad Bird, who he had worked with on The Fox and the Hound, to contribute a number of designs to Family Dog, an animated episode of Steven Spielberg’s television series Amazing Stories which Bird was directing, and which was originally part of a showreel the pair had produced during their time at Disney, The episode was subsequently turned into a series by Spielberg’s company Amblin for which Burton served as executive producer.
My involvement was pretty much from a design point of view; I did storyboards and designed some more characters, because I just love the idea of trying to do something from a dog’s point of view. I don’t know why, but I always relate to dogs. Edward Scissorhands is like a dog to me.
Family Dog