Following Ed Wood, Burton and producer Denise Di Novi once again collaborated with Nightmare Before Christmas director Henry Selick, producing a live action/animated version of Roald Dahl’s children’s story James and the Giant Peach. It would be their last film together and in 1995 Burton and Di Novi dissolved their partnership.
Although Burton’s name was frequently linked to various projects (including the long-in-development Catwoman script by Daniel Waters), in 1995 Burton began pre-production for Warner Bros on Mars Attacks!, an adaptation of the Topps Trading Cards first released in 1962 by Bubbles Inc. The script was written by Jonathan Gems, an English playwright and screenwriter who had done a few weeks’ rewrite work on Batman and had subsequently written a number of unproduced scripts for Burton, including a Beetlejuice sequel, Beetlejuice Goes Hawaiian, an updating of Edgar Allen Poe’s The House of Usher set in Burbank, The Hawkline Monster, a cowboy/monster movie that was to star Clint Eastwood and Jack Nicholson, and Go Baby Go, a beach movie in the style of Russ Meyer.
During the summer of 1994, Gems was in a gift shop on Melrose Avenue in Hollywood when he happened upon sets of the Mars Attacks! and Dinosaur Attacks! trading cards. Intrigued, Gems bought both sets and showed them to Burton, commenting that they’d make a great movie. A few months later, Burton called Gems and asked him to write a script based on the Mars Attacks! set.
I remembered those cards from types of cards I had as a kid. I just liked the anarchistic spirit of them. Jonathan has sort of an anarchistic spirit himself, I think – being British and living in America and having an alien perspective of it, which I sort of have myself. And I like people – and this sometimes gets me into trouble – who write scripts differently. Usually after you read a few scripts they kind of feel the same. But he just brought a different kind of energy to it.
And I connected to the whole thematic idea of ‘Things aren’t what they seem’. I was feeling really strangely about things at the time, about America – everything just seemed really off-kilter to me, and I think that was a partial dynamic of what I liked about the material. I was just feeling more anarchic, and that was the energy I liked in it – I saw that in the Martians. Plus a lot of it had to do with Ed Wood, in the sense of how hard it was to get that movie done, and feeling good about it and then it not doing well. I know it’s not just me because I hear about it all the time from other people – how hard it is to get movies made these days. It’s like this Alice in Wonderland experience, and it seems like it takes longer and longer from movie to movie. It’s kind of like being an athlete: if you start having too many false starts, it begins to unnerve you. And I just remember this one taking too long to get up and running.
Gems’ original script was budgeted by Warners at $280 million: a wholly unfeasible cost. After turning in numerous drafts in an attempt to bring the budget down, Gems was replaced by Ed Wood screenwriters Larry Karaszewski and Scott Alexander, but he later returned to the project. Gems wrote twelve drafts in all, and the film’s final budget came in at $70–75 million, of which a large percentage went on the film’s special effects. Yet Burton and Gems were consciously trying to ape the cheesy sci-fi movies of the 1950s rather than going for a hi-tech Star Wars approach.
Yeah, those 1950s invasion movies, they were the inspiration for it, although I never thought of Mars Attacks! being like ‘a science-fiction film’ because I always feel real science fiction is, in some ways, more serious. With those 1950s films, I mean there’s a lot of ones I remember being great … I remember one I loved was Target Earth and then seeing it again I couldn’t believe it was so bad. But the thing about Mars Attacks! – most of my decisions are subconscious rather than a conscious ‘I’m gonna do a 1950s science-fiction film’ or whatever. I do things based on a feeling. Then you go through the process of making a film and you get all tied up with those emotions and so it takes a while to actually let the picture go and see it for those kind of subconscious clues of why you did something. So that one’s probably another year or so off, given my usual three-year period of discovering what the fuck I was thinking about.
Detailing the four days prior to a Martian invasion of earth followed by its aftermath, Gems’ script takes in locations ranging from Washington DC, New York, Las Vegas and Kansas, to Paris, London, Easter Island, even India (where in one of the film’s funniest set pieces several Martians pose for photos in front of a burning Taj Mahal); and a battery of characters from virtually every social and political group, among them the American President and his family, scientists, members of the media, donut shop workers, former boxing champions and property developers. In terms of its structure, its locations and its vast smorgasbord of characters, Mars Attacks! owes as much to the Irwin Allen-produced disaster movies of the 1970s (such as The Poseidon Adventure, The Towering Inferno and Earthquake) as it does to Earth Versus the Flying Saucers and its ilk.
A Burton sketch for the Martians’ whistle-stop destruction of the Taj Mahal
A fraught moment in Earth Versus the Flying Saucers (1956)
I’ve always liked all those Irwin Allen films – those ‘Celebrities Getting Killed’ movies. That’s a genre in itself, where you have Charlton Heston married to Ava Gardner, and his father is Lorne Greene, who is about three years younger than his daughter Ava Gardner. You get all these weird mixes of people in those movies. So that was one aspect of it, yeah. I don’t think there was one overriding thematic thing. But it seemed like a good idea just to blow away celebrities with ray-guns.
Although Gems is credited with both the screen story and screenplay of Mars Attacks!, he dedicates his novelization of the movie to Burton, who ‘co-wrote the screenplay and didn’t ask for a credit’. Gems claims Burton’s contribution to the script cannot be underestimated. ‘He has a fantastic instinct for film structure. I come from the theatre where you tell a story through characters and dialogue, but Tim comes from animation, where you tell characters and story through pictures. A lot of the process was me writing and Tim drawing. He would say everything in terms of pictures.’
We went through the cards picking out the ones we liked, just as a starting point, to get a feel for it – we didn’t follow them literally. They’re kind of funny, taken on their own – they have great captions, like ‘Burning Cattle’. So we picked out our favourites. That’s how you start with an animated film, too.
In H. G. Wells’ novel The War of the Worlds – to which both the Mars Attacks! cards and the film adaptation owe much – mankind is saved from the Martian invaders not by military strength but by the common cold: a plot point that Gems loosely co-opted in his screenplay, which called for music to be responsible for destroying the Martians. Exactly what type of music, Gems left open. It was Burton who decided upon Slim Whitman.
That came from the dynamic of those 1950s movies. In most of them, at the end it comes down to one thing that will kill the aliens, and often I remember it being some sort of sound-wave, like in Earth Versus the Flying Saucers or Target Earth. I recall Slim Whitman’s voice from when I was a child, and his voice was very sonic. It was almost like one of those sonic frequencies that might tap right into the brain and destroy. His voice seemed very science-fictiony too, almost like that instrument, the theramin.
Burton’s initial instinct was to once again utilize stop-motion animation to create the Martians. A team of animators, headed by Manchester-based Ian Mackinnon and Peter Saunders, was hired, set up shop in Burbank and began work on stop-motion effects, only to be replaced by George Lucas’s Industrial Light & Magic, who would eventually design and animate the Martians using CG (computer-generated) imagery.
We did some testing with stop-motion. But with the amount of characters we had, and because they all looked the same, it just didn’t work. And the time factor came into it, so it made sense to go with CG. I had never worked with it before but I thought I’d just give it a try: it would be a new medium, a new thing to check out. I tried to keep it like we did on Vincent or Nightmare – to make the animated characters act, to treat them as real, because sometimes I’ve noticed that computer stuff can get a little floaty. CG doesn’t give you that weighted feeling, like when you first saw Jason and the Argonauts or some Ray Harryhausen movie with three-dimensional animation. CG can be great – it’s close – but on the other hand I am very interested in the tactile, just how different media create different emotions, and I think it’s worth thinking about each time out. But in the end I actually appreciated the CG on Mars Attacks! because otherwise it would have been near impossible to shoot anamorphic screen ratio the way we did – registration problems would have been a nightmare. So in that case I don’t think I missed the tactility of stop-motion as much as I would have on other things.
Something else I felt about CG at the time, and I actually still feel this way: being able to do anything, it can kind of diminish the effect. It’s funny – even with the new Star Wars, when you can do anything … it’s almost like humans need boundaries. It needs to be in a framework, it needs to be held in check with other elements, so that you’re still feeling something that’s much more present. For me, there’s no such thing as unlimited resources in movies – you need boundaries.
Burton imagines the Martians in sketch form
The Martian leader gleefully incinerates the US Congress
Despite his vast budget, Burton, in common with earlier movies such as Beetlejuice, stylistically chose to have the film’s effects look as low tech and cheap as possible.
Sometimes I actually felt like I was turning into Ed Wood. But it was definitely a movie where I threw in a bunch of different ideas. I remember feeling like I had felt when I was working at Disney in the animation department, where you just try a bunch of different stuff and throw it into the thing and see what happens. But it can cause certain things to become at odds with each other.
The film reunited Burton with Batman star Jack Nicholson, who had been so supportive of his young director during that movie’s difficult shoot. Originally Warren Beatty had been mentioned as President Dale and Nicholson as sleazy Las Vegas property developer Art Land. Ultimately Nicholson wound up playing both roles.
He has always been so great to me. I love working with him because he gets it. He’s somebody who has gone through so much, but still understands and appreciates the absurdity of the business and the fun of it. Jack is just willing to try stuff, and the idea of him as President, I thought was great, given the spirit of the film. I’d asked him to do the Las Vegas guy but I didn’t think he was going to do it, so I said, ‘Well, Jack, what about this part? Or this one?’. And he said, ‘How about ’em all?’. For Mars Attacks! I don’t think he tapped into his Academy Award bag of tricks; he probably delved more into his Roger Corman or Head-style career moves. We had to play ‘Hail to the Chief’ every time he walked on the set. The sound guy played it once just as a joke but then Jack got to liking it, and then it became … necessary. He’d do a couple of laps around the set and then get into it.
Hail to the Chief! Jack Nicholson as the US President
In common with the Irwin Allen disaster movies that had so inspired Gems, the cast of Mars Attacks! was a veritable star-studded confection that included Pierce Brosnan, Michael J. Fox, Annette Bening, Glenn Close, Natalie Portman, Pam Grier, Rod Steiger, singer Tom Jones, as well as faces familiar from past Burton films: Danny DeVito, who played the Penguin in Batman Returns, Sylvia Sydney, the chain-smoking after-life official in Beetlejuice, Sarah Jessica Parker, who starred in Ed Wood, and O-lon Jones, one of the nosy neighbours in Edward Scissorhands.
I sort of sectioned off the casting into two different types of people: people who I like, and then people who I thought represented certain aspects of culture and society that were more satirical. And it was fun – it was a great way to meet people and watch different actors work together in different styles. I think I got into that on Ed Wood. I like the mix of great actors, method actors, Α-actors, B-actors, and people who haven’t really acted before. I enjoy the energy of it. And it was such a surreal thing – I remember thinking that having all these people together in the same room was funny. When you’ve got a ‘great actor sampler platter’, it’s different than when you’re working with individuals constantly on a movie. You get more of a quick impression. But people were really cool – they would come in and get shot with a ray-gun and then leave.
Mars Attacks! was released in the US on 13 December 1996 to mixed reviews and indifferent box office. It was not helped by a marketing campaign that failed to grasp the film’s anarchic approach and ignored its obvious appeal to kids.
Warners in the US didn’t know what to make of it, which is sort of usual; I mean, it’s always been that way, and in some ways it’s better off when they don’t know. People kept coming up to me afterwards saying it was a bad ad campaign, but I couldn’t tell. You get so close to something you don’t really know. I know that when we took it to Europe it did much better. It was still Warners but it was their European arm, which seemed to have a better handle on it. I actually felt European audiences understood it much better or seemed to get it better. They didn’t seem to have that American egotism of, ‘You can make fun of some things, but you can’t quite make fun of other things.’
Moreover, the film’s thunder was stolen by the surprising success that summer of the similarly themed Independence Day.
It was just a coincidence. Nobody told me about it. Then somebody said, ‘They’re doing this movie, it’s kind of the same thing,’ and I thought, ‘Oh? I’ve never heard of it.’ Then it came out, and eventually I saw some of it on cable. I was surprised how close it was, but then it’s a pretty basic genre I guess. Independence Day was different in tone – it was different in everything. It almost seemed like we had done kind of a Mad magazine version of Independence Day.
Providing the score was Danny Elfman, who had had a falling out with Burton prior to Ed Wood.
I think he was mad at me from Nightmare. Nightmare was hard because between Danny, Henry and Caroline we were like a bunch of kids, fighting. That’s what I felt like anyway, and I think it was just one of those times when, like in any relationship, we just needed a break, and it was probably good for all of us. Danny works with many different people, so I think every now and then it’s worth trying something new, and I enjoyed working with Howard.
By the time the fourth Batman movie, Batman & Robin, came around, Burton was no longer involved with the franchise.
I saw Batman Forever, but I didn’t see the last one. I couldn’t. I’d never been in an experience like that before, so it was kind of surreal. It’s like you’re involved with something and then you’re not, but it’s still kind of like yours. You feel like you’ve died and you’re having an out-of-body experience. That’s the best way I can describe it. I didn’t feel like ‘I hate this’ or ‘I love this’, I just had a shock.
Yet having successfully reinvented one comic-book icon, Warners felt Burton was the obvious choice to direct a new movie version of another: Superman. Although Warners had produced three Superman films starring Christopher Reeve (the fourth was made by Cannon Films), beginning with the Richard Donner-directed 1978 movie, the potential for another blockbusting superhero franchise was not lost on executives. Film-maker and comic-book fan Kevin Smith was employed by Batman producer Jon Peters to write two drafts of a screenplay based on the Death of Superman comic-book storyline, and Oscar-winner Nicolas Cage was signed to play the Man of Steel.
They came to me. I wasn’t necessarily attracted to Superman per se because I felt like it had been done – unlike Batman, where it had been a TV series but our approach was different. But Superman had already been a movie not that long ago, and a pretty successful one. So what do you do? What was presented to me was Nic Cage and doing our own version of Superman, and I thought, well that sounds great because I love Nic Cage. So I met with him and we thought of the idea of focusing more on the fact that he’s an alien, and maybe for the first time feeling what it’s like to be Superman. Part of my problem with Superman was that he’s fine on a comic-book level, but on a movie level they never really addressed the fact that here’s this guy with this blue suit and this funny yellow belt and all that stuff. He’s actually the most two-dimensional of any comic-book character. For me, you never really get into what Superman really is, whereas with Batman I always felt he’s a fucked-up guy and you can get into his head a little bit. So we were going to try to analyze it, get a bit more in-depth about what it would feel like to be somebody who’s from another planet, who can’t tell anybody and is completely different but has to hide it. All those comics are basically the same thing, it’s duality – what’s shown, what’s hidden.
I was excited about working with Nic because the way we were thinking about it, it would have been the first time you would believe that nobody could recognize Clark Kent as Superman – that he could physically change his persona, so it wouldn’t be as simplistic as taking off a pair of glasses. Without doing make-up or anything, Nic is the kind of actor who can pull something like that off. And we were talking to Kevin Spacey for Lex Luthor – he was perfect.
So the idea was you have a great actor and you, the audience, can understand him as a character. That’s what intrigued me about it. And technically you could go to another level now – you wouldn’t have to hang the guy by fucking wires. The flying was terrible in those movies. Even seeing them at the time – I wasn’t in movies – I was going, ‘I don’t know about this …’. You could do that better, no problem.
It was called Superman Lives. I was pushing for it be Superman. I always hated those titles like Batman Forever. I thought, ‘Batman Forever, that sounds like a tattoo that somebody would get when they’re on drugs or something,’ or something some kid would write in the yearbook to somebody else. I have high problems with some of those titles.
After a year of development, during which locations were scouted, an art department employed under the direction of long-time collaborator Rick Heinrichs, and the Smith script rewritten by a series of writers, including Wesley Strick and Dan Gilroy, Warners put the project on hold.
Warners were balking pretty much all the way. We were going to be going at this date, then that date. I was working for a year on script meetings with them, and once you go down that path the script doesn’t get better, it becomes committee-ized. I don’t know this for sure, but on the last Batman they did, I remember them thinking that it was so great, and I think they were taken aback when it got dissed so much. So, all of a sudden, Warners was getting press like they had destroyed a franchise. I think they were feeling the heat of that, since the overriding factor in Hollywood is fear – decisions are based on fear most of the time. And I think they were fearful that they were going to fuck up another franchise. The way they saw it was, ‘We don’t want to do this unless it’s going to be right.’ And I didn’t want to go into it and it not be right either, because it’s Superman. It’s too much of a target.
Also, my original fear came true. I had thought, ‘Okay, Jon Peters is the producer. I’ve dealt with Jon before on Batman, and it was a nightmare, but I did it. So therefore I can probably deal with that again.’ But that wasn’t the case. I remember at one point saying to Warners, ‘You’ve got three things here. You’ve got me, you’ve got Jon Peters and you’ve got Warner Bros. And I can imagine a situation like one of those Spaghetti Western gunfights, where three people stare at each other for twenty minutes because they’ve each got different ideas.’ And that turned out to be the case. The truth of the matter is, if it had ever really had a chance of getting done, then Warners should have got rid of me or Jon, and then let me or Jon make the film. Jon had his own ideas, Warners had its own fears, and I had my own thoughts. And Jon, he’s like a whirlwind, it’s like trying to control the weather. It’s a very difficult energy to deal with. And I basically wasted a year.
It was terrible because you think you’re working on something and you’re not, and you realize at the end of it all that it’s a load of crap, because you’re having all these meetings and you’re kind of working in a vacuum. It’s one thing to work on something to make it better, and it’s another thing just to spin your wheels. It’s fine if you get something done, but to go that hard and that long and not get something done is devastating, because really I’m in it to make things. I’m not in it to have these bullshit meetings. Part of the joy is ‘doing’, and I spent a year ‘not doing’.
In 1997 Burton published The Melancholy Death of Oyster Boy & Other Stories, a collection of twenty-three illustrated stories of varying length written in verse. The stories (whose titles include ‘Stick Boy & Match Girl in Love’, ‘The Girl Who Turned into a Bed’ and ‘Melonhead’) were typically Burtonesque in content and tone, and once again managed to convey the anguish and pain of the adolescent outsider in a manner that was both delightfully comic and mildly macabre, and which, in the words of the New York Times, was ‘both childlike and sophisticated’.
They’re just little things – stories for the modern person with a short attention span. But it was fun for me. Luckily I was doing Oyster Boy while I was doing Superman, so I had a little bit of an outlet there. I’ve kind of been writing for a long time. In a weird way it’s how I think about things, so it’s a bit of a peek into how I think. And it’s a little calming Zen-type of exercise that I enjoy. It helps centre me and focus my thinking a little bit because I get all over the place. There’s a lot of Lisa Marie in there, too, in different ways. She gives me a lot.
The hapless Stain Boy, symbol of Burton’s Superman woes
Two stories featured the exploits of Stain Boy, a child superhero whose ‘gift’ is to have a nasty stain behind him wherever he goes, and who, with a cape and figure ‘S’ emblazoned on his chest, is indicative of another, better known superhero character.
Stain Boy is one of my favourite characters, and in a way he’s probably the perfect symbol of that whole Superman experience, that year – truthfully that’s pretty much how I felt. If anybody wants to know what that year was like, then just read that, that’s the best description of it.
In addition to being an accomplished painter and illustrator, Burton’s interests also extend to photography. He works in a number of different formats, from regular 35mm to 3D cameras and extra-large Polaroid cameras.
It’s just a way I like to work and think of different ideas. I like working out things visually because it taps into your subconscious and therefore, for me, it’s a more real emotion than if I intellectualize it in my mind. I like just trying something either in a drawing, or a photo with Lisa Marie; it’s a visual concept, as opposed to thinking.
The majority of Burton’s photographic work features his girlfriend of eight years, Lisa Marie.
I felt a connection when I met her that I’d never felt before and I guess that’s chemistry. It’s how we have fun, you know. We go on road trips and take pictures and be as bohemian as we can possibly be in this world. There’s some photos in which we made up some weird plants and animals, but most of them are her. It’s just nice to have somebody that you love around, as opposed to spending my whole life doing things on my own.
Burton’s muse, Lisa Marie has appeared as Vampira in Ed Wood, as the mute, gum-chewing Martian with the massive beehive who inveigles her way into the White House in Mars Attacks!, and as Ichabod Crane’s mother in Sleepy Hollow.
Fooling around: Burton photographs Lisa Marie …
… and Poppy, canine star of Mars Attacks!
Since we’re together we can kind of fool around together. That’s not something that I can do with other actors, because it’s more spontaneous. On a weekend we just fool around with costumes and make-up. I remember we fooled around one day when we were in New York, bought a little cheap wig, went to Washington and took some Polaroids and did kind of inspirational work for Mars Attacks!
Lisa Marie’s performance in Mars Attacks! is one of the film’s standout moments. Poured into a red-and-white dress that was designed by Burton, she glides wordlessly into the White House, in a manner that’s eerie, unnerving and hysterically funny, intending to assassinate the President and the First Lady.
That was a fun challenge, and I think she did a good job. It’s hard stuff to do, to move and not speak. We spent a lot of time working on things for her to wear, and we did a couple of things technically so that her walk was like a combination of her own movement, juxtaposed with technique. It’s almost like choreography, where you do movements to create an optical illusion of another type of movement. We worked with a movement guy called Dan Kamen, who had worked on Chaplin, and I learned a lot from him.
Trivia fans should also note that the chihuahua belonging to Sarah Jessica Parker’s character, onto which her head is grafted, belongs to Burton and Lisa Marie, the latter having found it on the street in Japan.
We were in Tokyo in a car talking to two other people, in this sleazy night-club area, and it’s really crowded, with all these lights, like Las Vegas, and Lisa goes, ‘Stop the car.’ I don’t know how she saw this dog like fifty yards away in a little cage on the street. So yeah, we got that dog in Tokyo. Poppy, she did good.
In 1998 Burton directed his first television commercial for a French chewing gum called Hollywood Gum. The thirty-second spot features a garden gnome who escapes from his back-garden home and, hitching a ride on a garbage truck, ends up bathing in a pool in an enchanted forest glade, with a young woman who looks like Lisa Marie (but isn’t).
An early sketch by Burton of That Dress
Martin Short as Jerry Ross and Lisa Marie as the pneumatic Martian assassin
It’s okay. I’m not sure I would rush out and do a bunch of commercials. It came along just at the time when I hadn’t worked for a while, and it was pretty simple and a fair amount of money, and I thought I’d just try it. Part of my problem is, no matter what I do, I treat everything like it’s a movie. People have told me, ‘When you do a commercial, just do it and make a little money, but don’t let it bother you.’ But I can’t not let things bother me. You know what? Dealing with clients, it’s like dealing with a studio. I just get sick of it.