Burton’s father Bill had passed away while he was in pre-production on Planet of the Apes in October 2000, and his mother, Jean, died in March 2002. Although he was never close to his parents – moving out of the family home when he was very young – their deaths affected him deeply. Professionally, Burton wanted to get back to making something smaller and more personal, especially after the studio shenanigans involved with Superman and Planet of the Apes. Together with Zanuck, he began working on ‘another script, more personal, that takes place in Paris, sort of a weird period thing.’
But Burton put that idea on hold when he was sent the script for Big Fish by producers Dan Jinks and Bruce Cohen, who had picked up the Best Picture Oscar for Sam Mendes’ American Beauty. Based on a book by Daniel Wallace entitled Big Fish: A Novel of Mythic Proportions, the script had been adapted by screenwriter John August who had read it in manuscript form in 1999, when, hot off the success of his script for Go, he was given a deal at Columbia and had the studio option Wallace’s book on his behalf. August’s script initially attracted the interest of Steven Spielberg, who had him write a couple of drafts with Jack Nicholson in mind for Edward Bloom Sr. A year later, with Spielberg no closer to committing, August put together a ‘Best Of ’draft from the many that he’d done, removing much of what Spielberg had overseen, before Jinks and Cohen sent it out to Burton, who found in the material the personal connection he had been looking for.
Big Fish revolves around the exaggerated adventures of Alabama travelling salesman Edward Bloom, a gregarious, romantic and prodigious teller of exceedingly tall tales, now in the twilight of his life and estranged from his only son, Will (Billy Crudup), a journalist living in France, soon to be a parent himself When Will returns home in the hope of reconnecting with his dying father (beautifully played by Albert Finney) and attempts some kind of reconciliation with the real person he believes is beneath the persona, the film then cuts back between the time-present drama and a fantasy version of Edward (with Ewan McGregor as the younger Bloom) through whose eyes we see events. And it’s through these mythical tales that William eventually comes to a better understanding of his father, learning lessons about acceptance, tolerance, and unconditional love.
I was ready for something like this. And reading the script just surprised me. It was also nice to do something that wasn’t a known entity – probably not since Beetlejuice have I done something completely off the radar; so to speak, and it was nice to work like that again, where you don’t have a release date before a script, where you don’t have a brand name, or something that everybody knows and compares it to. It was nice too, after a few years of doing this other kind of stuff, to connect with something again on a certain level.
My father had recently died and, although I wasn’t really close to him, it was a heavy time, and it made me start thinking and going back to the past. It was something that was very difficult for me to discuss, but then this script came along and it actually dealt with those same issues, and so it was an amazing catharsis to do this film – because you’re able to work through those feelings without having to talk to a therapist about it. For me, that kind of stuff is always quite uncomfortable and sappy and hard to put words to. That’s what I liked about the script – it kind of put images to the things that I couldn’t say. And when you start to analyse your relationship with your parents, it’s so bizarre and complicated, and yet so simple at the same time. Why, if a parent is like a hippie, are the children little straight-arrows? And why, if the parents are two boring accountants, then the children are wild? You realise it’s the strangest relationship you can have.
My dad was a professional baseball player early in his life, before I was born. He played for the Cardinals, it was a Triple-A team, I think, and I think he got injured. Then he worked for the Park and Recreation Centre in Burbank, he was city employee, but he stayed in sports. He was very well liked, he had a very outgoing personality, because he had to deal with kids’ baseball teams, girls’ and men’s softball teams, all the different sports, because Burbank had a good city sports program. And then he became a part-time travel agent, so he would travel a lot.
I don’t know if there’s any real reason why I didn’t get on with my parents. It had more to do with the fact that when I was living there, I felt old for my age. I didn’t get along with my mother so much, and my father was away a lot, and they were having whatever their problems were, and I was just always remote. That was my personality, it seemed – and even when I went to live with my grandmother, it wasn’t a big deal, I just sort of did it. And then I got my first apartment when I was 15, so I always felt olden I had to make my way. To go to Cal Arts, I had to get a job. My parents didn’t pay for my college, but I never felt really angry about that with them. I actually felt it was probably good, because I was the one who had to go do it, and I did it. In a kind of perverse way, that teaches you to be independent, and I always felt independent. And ultimately I feel that in some ways I was lucky that I was allowed that independence.
When my dad was ill … you start to prepare yourself. As I say, I didn’t have the closest relationship with them, but as he got ill I tried to kind of reconnect a little bit. I didn’t get to the point where Billy’s character does at the end of Big Fish, although it wasn’t as bad in the first place. I made some headway. But I did start thinking too about how the relationship starts out quite magical and then it sort of turns south, kind of similar to this film in some ways. And the thing I realised was – no matter how old you are, the relationship is still parent/son, it’s not human beings together. And I never really treated my parents like human beings. They’re your parents, then you grow up, and even if you’re not close you kind of realise later on that they have a whole other life going on. And you can be 45 years old but still feel inarticulate and cut off with your parents. And they kind of go full-circle, they go from children to parents and then back into children, and you go full circle in your life too. So it’s a very unique and powerful relationship.
Making anything should be cathartic. And with my dad, thinking about the relationship, it wasn’t something I could talk to a therapist about. I’ve had therapy but I’ve never discussed my parents. But in reading this script I thought, ‘This is it exactly, this puts an image to the uncommunicable.’ So I liked that very much. I wouldn’t normally do something like that except it hit me on that level. It’s like having a baby – you can’t really prepare for your real emotions. It just hits you very strongly and in a primal way. I wasn’t looking for that kind of catharsis, even though I had been thinking about my parents. So, in a way, I felt it was good to be kind of surprised …
Wallace’s book is more a collection of short stories about the adventures of Edward Bloom than a singular narrative, and John August, who had recently lost his own father when he first read it in manuscript form, first had to find a way of adapting the episodic book into a cohesive script. Part of his trick was to have several different narrators – including Edward and Will – to tell his story, so that this piece about storytelling becomes as much about the telling as the story.
It’s not quite like Rashomon, but it had a certain quality, a freedom, and that’s what I loved about it. It’s a different thing, but there’s a similarity to Ed Wood – that wasn’t a biography in the classic sense, because everybody has a slightly different take on things. That was what I loved about the book, The Nightmare of Ecstasy, one person says one thing, another person contradicts that, and that creates a sense of reality. You see it a lot in England, historians on TV saying, ‘Henry VIII did this, and that’, and I think, ‘How the fuck do you know?’
I didn’t read the book Big Fish until well after getting the script, and if I had then I don’t know if I would have said ‘Yes’ to it. It’s got lots of ideas and yet it lacked a certain shape, but I think that probably allowed John to feel like he wasn’t dealing with the Bible here. You’ve got a little bit of license to take the themes and work them into something else – and you’re putting it into another medium anyway. I think John did a really good job of taking things from the book and giving it more structure. It’s a strange structure to me, because it’s like a mosaic – one thing affects another, and first it’s overly complicated and then kind of overly simple. And I just felt like that was very much like the way things are in terms of those kind of relationships. So I felt John gave it a lot more than what was there in the book, in some ways.
Usually, with a studio, you have to be able to describe a movie in one sentence or else you’re not able to do it – that’s really the studio way. So it was really nice to have a script that I liked, and that they liked, and that nobody really wanted to change – because it was such a tricky one, going in and out of reality, you’ve got one person playing an idealised version of an older person, and the dual casting of Albert and Ewan and Jessica and Alison, shot all out of sequence. Everything was like a weird little piece of the puzzle. And a studio was willing to do it – this was amazing to me, because it didn’t have one star to sell it. It was such a pleasurable experience, to have a script that wasn’t deconstructed as we went along. I said to them before we even started shooting, ‘This is going to be a tough one to market, because anything you say about it could be misleading. And there’s not going to be an image in this that you’re going to be able to sell’ – because there have been giants and witches in other movies, done on a grander bigger scale. But then part of its problem for them was also part of its charm to me.
There are always little things that you have to do to a script, often for budget reasons – the birth scene was a late addition, because we had a whole big scene on a hill with hundreds of extras, and then we added the bathtub scene late because we wanted something between Albert and Jessica that was just the two of them for a moment. Also the little karate fight in the dark with Ewan was a last-minute addition because it was cheap. Then there were little elements we added, like the Handi-Matic, because in the script Edward was selling screwdrivers, but we wanted to come up with something that was a bit more in his sort of world. Some of this new stuff was done on the day, some was a few days ahead of time, but it kind of freaked the prop department out – ‘Let’s do this, and we’re shooting it in three days.’ But I think people kind of enjoy that, because you get to be a bit more spontaneously creative as opposed to planning for months and months …
The production was based in Montgomery, Alabama, and shot from January to May 2003. Apart from a week’s filming in Paris, the entire film was shot in the state of Alabama.
It’s a different place, and you feel like you’re in a different country, but then I feel that way anywhere – you can feel that way in Los Angeles, especially now, with Governor Schwarzenegger.
A sketch by Burton for Big Fish’s ‘Handi-Matic’ device
There were a lot of nice people, but there’s another side to it too – a sort of overly friendly thing that seems to be masking some sort of seething hostility … But people are very friendly – and I’m just not used to that, you know. I get kind of nervous, but that’s my problem really, it’s not theirs. And it infuses you with the vibe of it, I think it actually helps the movie.
The good side of it is you’re in the place where the story is taking place, so for the actors – because they’ve got to do accents – just being in the environment is helpful to them. It’s not the kind of movie you’d like to shoot on a soundstage in Los Angeles. For me, for the actors, for the crew, for the vibe of it, you just have to be there – and it’s weird to go to a place that you would never go. Then when it comes to the extras, those smaller parts, you just get the local people to play them, and that’s great and you meet interesting people, very different to LA extras, like the guy who gives Edward the job for the Handi-Matic.
But there were a lot of strange factors involved in being down there, because the stories jumped around, and there were never major locations, just a series of set-piece locations. Because of the nature of the story, and the duality of the casting, and the fact we were shooting completely out of order, and very quickly, we were shooting maybe two or three different locations in one day, so there was a lot of moving around.
I kind of looked at myself in the mirror every day and would go, ‘Why did I end up here?’ I remember I picked up the local paper one day and it said there was going to be a Klan rally, and that took me aback a little bit. It’s a strange place, but again that’s what makes it great to be there. Wouldn’t have it any other way. And you don’t get many visitors, that’s the other good thing – it’s not like people are going to saunter down to Alabama for the weekend.
It was probably the most extreme weather I’ve ever experienced. We were in the circus tent one day and it literally started to blow away. It was like The Wizard of Oz, everybody had to evacuate. Tornados, the river rising. Our whole circus set got wiped out. We shot one scene with Danny DeVito and the next day everything was about several feet underwater It was really extreme. And we had some of the biggest insects I’ve ever seen. During night shoots it sounded like a war zone. You’d hear these dive-bombing things hitting the lights and frying, and the smell of burning insects …
Other than that, it was fine.
For Burton, part of the appeal of Big Fish was its combination of a deeply emotional core with the larger-than-life, slightly exaggerated fantasy element of Edward Bloom’s tall tales. What makes the film so affecting is the balance Burton achieves between the fantasy and reality elements. A consistency of tone extends from the script to the production design to the casting and to the acting. Burton allows the real world to be ‘real’ but never gritty – there’s a movie-sheen to the real world which makes it comforting and approachable – while in the fantasy elements everything is heightened, while at the same time retaining human and lifelike proportions.
It was like shooting two movies, in a way. I certainly felt comfortable in fantasy, but I was also interested in doing something that I hadn’t done before – and that was the other stuff. But it needed both sides, because the one would just be like an episode of ER and the other would have been similar territory to before for me. So its appeal was the juxtaposition of the elements.
What I liked about the structure was that it kind of snuck up on you, and that was what I was hoping for in making the movie. You get to the end and you get very emotional, and you kind of know why and yet you don’t – it hits you from underneath as opposed to seeing exactly where it’s coming from. I couldn’t tell how it played when I was finishing the film, because I didn’t really show the movie to anybody, and I couldn’t tell if I was just in an overly emotional mood. But I was hopeful that was the way it was coming across.
As much as Burton related to the character of Will trying to repair his relationship with his terminally ill father, he also identified with Edward Bloom, because what Edward does is what Burton does – he tells stories.
That’s one of the reasons why I wanted to do it, because although I definitely understood the Will character, the whole point was to show both sides. You had to understand it and love it, and I felt very close to Edward. That was what was fun for me, because I knew I had that from the very beginning – loving that character, and also understanding the other character and the juxtaposition of that. But if I didn’t feel strongly about Ed Bloom I don’t think I could have done the film or even wanted to do it, really.
To play Edward, Burton initially talked with Jack Nicholson, whom he had worked with twice before, on Batman and Mars Attacks! The idea was that Nicholson would play the older Edward and would haw his appearance digitally altered for the scenes of him as a young man.
We discussed it – kind of a loose discussion, about how to make a younger version of him somehow, probably digitally. That was a funny discussion but it didn’t really go anywhere. It was a concept that we didn’t really know if we could pull off, necessarily. I think it was one of those ‘Get-excited-about’ conversations, kind of ‘That’s interesting. Is that really possible?’ But it would have been different. And it was fun not to have to deal with that for a change, and deal with two actors instead.
Burton then cast around for the two actors in question. The same dual casting applied to the role of Bloom’s wife, Sandra, who would eventually be played by Jessica Lange and Alison Lohman. It was Jinks and Cohen – who at the time were producing Down With Love with Ewan McGregor – who suggested the combination of McGregor and Albert Finney.
What was hard about casting Ed Bloom was that you could never think about just the one actor. You might come up with a perfect choice for one, but unless you found a nice counterpoint, it wouldn’t work. And it was a house-of-cards a little bit where we had to get them both, because what if you got one but couldn’t get the other, what are you going to do? You can’t hire Albert Finney and then have Ben Affleck thrown in there. It was the same with getting Jessica and Alison. Actually, I might have taken kind of a risk on that one and tried to go for Jessica without knowing yet quite who the other one would be. We were just so lucky with Jessica, and I love her.
Ewan’s great, he’s like Johnny. I love him because he’s really talented and he’s not afraid. I love actors who are willing to do anything and don’t have an ego in the sense of ‘How am I going to look in this?’ They just go for it and there’s a freedom to that which I appreciate. Interestingly, meeting Ewan and Albert separately, I don’t know if I was looking to connect them – and they’re completely different people – but there’s a certain spirit about them that was very connective somehow. It wasn’t so much about them really looking alike, but even when they’re performing there’s that similar spirit.
With Ewan it was like every day was a different movie – it was very, very enjoyable, because we had a very quick schedule, and I think if I’d had one of those ‘Now, shouldn’t we be over here?’ actors then we would still be shooting. In the scene with Ewan rescuing the dog, he really impressed me.
Albert Finney, well cast as Edward Bloom (senior) in Big Fish
He was having to deal with this St. Bernard that didn’t want to be in a burning building – nor did Ewan – it was smoking in there, the dog was freaked out, the steps were icy, we tried to make them as safe as possible, but the house was actually starting to burn down. And he was having to manage this thing, and it was one of the most amazing acting jobs I’ve ever seen.
Part of what I love about certain types of actors, of whom Ewan is one, is that he’s not a mimic. It’s character acting, it’s becoming somebody else. Johnny’s able to do it, but there are not many people who can do that kind of mixture of things, where you’re sort of heightened and yet you’re still real, and be funny and physical as well. And because he’s a sort of romanticised version of himself, of Ed Bloom, there is a certain kind of slightly larger ‘Aren’t I wonderful?’ kind of a thing which could potentially get on your nerves but which I thought Ewan got the balance of really, really well.
Albert’s amazing too. I’d never met him before, but looking at him in something like Tom Jones, there was a spirit about him and a certain charisma that he has that very much felt like Ewan. After we thought of that casting, someone sent me a People magazine from a few years ago where they had contemporary stars and their counterparts, a separated-at-birth kind of a thing, and there was a picture of Albert and a picture of Ewan together. And it was like, ‘Of course! It’s perfect.’ Albert’s got that real passion for life, very much like the character, and he brought a lot of himself to his role, while Ewan captured that heightened reality and open-heartedness – it’s beautiful when actors can be open-hearted. He’s done it before, he sings, he dances, but again it stays really real.
Same with Alison – she just stands there like a silent movie actress. One of the first things she did was she had to stand and hold still for two minutes, that’s all she had to do and it was emotional and beautiful. Jessica too was always able to find the simple truth to something. And because nobody had a really big part, it was like a puzzle and nobody really knew how one person was going to affect the other, but that was the beauty of it for me, I always felt that Jessica was going to help Alison’s performance and Alison was going to help Jessica, Ewan’s going to help Albert and vice versa, unknown to them in a certain way, but that was amazing for me to see.
Although McGregor was on set from the very beginning of filming, Burton chose to shoot all Albert Finney’s scenes first.
The stuff with Albert was so intense, and then we did the Ewan stuff which had a completely different energy. Ewan still came at the beginning but we didn’t shoot much, but he came by. He was a quiet observer at times. We discussed things, and Albert and Ewan spent a little time together, and we had a couple of dinners. With Ewan, I sense he thinks a lot and does his own quiet study and research, and then he doesn’t want to talk about it too much but he’ll go for it. I sense that with him, I always sensed he was ready to start shooting. I could see him watching Albert and quietly soaking it in.
In the role of William, Edward Bloom’s son, Burton cast Billy Crudup, widely considered to be one of the finest actors of his generation, who had starred in Cameron Crowe’s Almost Famous and Robert Towne’s Without Limits.
Will is a very literal person searching for literal answers, but some things in life aren’t literal, they’re not just black and white. There are things that can be real and unreal at the same time. Billy had the most difficult role of the movie and I thought he did really, really well because it’s a tricky balance to capture. I always really felt for him and I don’t know if it’s because I felt similar to that character and had that kind of relationship with my father. But there’s a certain rigidity to the character, an internal conflict, that I find very emotional, very sad, and very real. There’s just something quite touching about those characters. Again it’s that dynamic of parent/child, and it doesn’t matter how old you are, you don’t get over it. I thought that Billy did that really well. It’s kind of the emotional core of the film, it’s the simplest and the hardest one to get in a way. It’s a complicated part. We always talked about it because it treads that line. I certainly questioned, ‘Why am I acting this way? My dad’s a great guy, everybody loves him, why do I have such a problem with him?’ But it’s just the yin and yang of life.
Ewan McGregor as Ed Bloom (junior)
It was very intense doing the hospital and bedside scenes. I never went through that with my father, so it wasn’t like I was replicating something. I was in Hawaii scouting locations for Apes when I got the news that he had died. The final few times I saw my father, he looked ill, but he wasn’t bedridden. The only side of it was the emotional side that I had gone through.
The actors were really good. They are all very internal, emotional actors, very thoughtful, and while you’ve got your usual rushing around with the crew we tried to keep that to a minimum because the actors were into their space there. And it was intense. The scenes that were intense in the movie were intense to shoot, and amazing to watch. Both Albert and Billy – I felt really good that it was the right choice of people. It’s a hard thing to do, that kind of emotional repression, and Billy and I talked about it and it was something we were concerned about, that fine line. But by keeping it the way he did, and then going where he does at the end, that was good.
In supporting roles there were a number of Burton regulars including Danny DeVito as the circus ringmaster Amos Calloway who also happens to be a werewolf. The part required nudity.
Talk about scary … The great thing about Danny is you don’t have to convince him – he’s game, that’s why he’s so great, he just does it. And I was probably more worried than he was. Mosquitoes and all … but he went for it.
Burton’s new partner Helena Bonham Carter was given three parts to play: Edward Bloom’s friend Jenny, in both young and senior guises, as well as the one-eyed witch whose glass eye holds mystic powers and which foretells how one will die if one dares to look into it. Casting Bonham Carter had been Zanuck’s idea.
Starting this movie, I only saw one challenge and that was the tandem casting of Albert/Ewan and Jessica/Alison. And once that was set, I still had difficulty kind of dealing with the Jenny character, because again there was a little bit of age involved in that. Rather than getting two people to play her, Richard brought up the idea of Helena, and I’m glad he did because I think I could see it in a clearer perspective. You always feel a little awkward suggesting her, even though she’s a great actress. So that made it easy for me to deal with. I think originally he mentioned her in connection with playing Jenny, but it just seemed appropriate for her to play the witch too. What’s working with me without some heavy make-up?
Among the newcomers to Burton territory were Steve Buscemi as “poet” Norther Winslow whom Edward initially meets in the town of Spectre and later inadvertently helps commit a bank robbery, and the seven-foot eight-inch Matthew McGrory who played Karl The Giant, whom Edward first meets terrorising his home town of Ashton, and who then becomes his travelling companion. McGrory died of natural causes in August 2005. He was thirty-two.
Burton’s sketch for the one-eyed witch
Matthew is in the Guinness Book of Records: he’s got the biggest feet in the world. You feel for him. Here’s a guy who, everything he does, people are looking at him. We all feel weird but here’s a guy who obviously is getting the way we all felt in spades, he’s getting it to the hundredth degree. He’s really smart, and he just has a real gravity to him that I really liked. And Steve, he’s so great, all you gotta do is look at him and you get excited. He’s like Barney Fife’s bad brother.
Tonally Big Fish marked a sea change for Burton. Certainly it’s his most romantic and sentimental film to date, but not in any mawkish, schmaltzy sense.
It was always interesting to me to be emotional but without being overly schmaltzy. I tried to watch the bullshit-meter and just be real with it and see what happened – otherwise it’s an episode of Days Of Our Lives. That’s why I liked that there was humour in it, so it’s all thrown in together. And I had a good cast that way too. I like to pick people who can do all of it at once – be funny, be real, be dramatic, hit an emotional core. It’s hard, especially with this kind of tandem casting, it’s gimmicky by nature, so I felt quite lucky that the people we got understood all that.
I liked the romantic nature of it as well, because although it’s about a father and son, it also shows that this guy had another life and there’s a connection between a man and woman. It doesn’t overcomplicate that, but it was another layer that I liked about it. As a child you don’t think of your parents as having their own lives, especially when you’re younger, though of course they do. So I liked the romantic simplicity of that.
As for reflecting any increased happiness of my own – I don’t think I could ever really be content. I don’t think anybody who tries to work in the arts is ever really content – the minute you are is the minute it probably stops. I think there’s always a longing, there’s a desire, somewhat of a fantasy, to want to be that romantic – a longing that’s probably different from a reality of happiness, if you know what I mean. It’s more about wishing you could be that demonstrative and that grand and clear and simple about your feelings.
For Burton, another part of the appeal of Big Fish was its variety of elements and time periods.
Every day was like a new movie and so I felt like it was a little sampler-platter, you get to try everything. I actually hadn’t felt that way since Pee-Wee’s Big Adventure, where you get to try a lot of little genres all in one movie – and it’s not like you’re spending six months on things, it’s like one day’s work. ‘Okay, today we’re going to shoot the heist movie.’ ‘Today? We got wolves.’ ‘Now we’re going to go to Korea.’ So that was great.
Having shot a lot of the realistic scenes first, we then got to the fantasy side, which was kind of unleashing and unloading. And it was fun, especially after having the heaviness and the emotional simplicity and the hermetically sealed quality of the other stuff – it was nice to just open up. There was never a dull moment, and while it was strange to be in the South – fucking weird – I really enjoyed it. You know much how much sitting around there can be making movies, so it was a real pleasure to be working that quickly. And it creates an energy and a fun that is sometimes lacking when a guy’s getting into a rubber suit for an hour-and-a-half – if you’re lucky …
The Korean War stuff was a late addition. The scene was that Εwan just sort of lands there and meets two girls, but it didn’t really have any purpose to it. And so we just started joking one day about giving him a mission, but we didn’t have any money or time, and I just thought of a lame karate fight in the dark to throw in a little mission for him. Ewan wanted to fight a couple of guys. What it was based on, he said, was that he always wanted to do this in a war movie, where he kind of wipes his nose – I don’t know what movie it was a nod to …
I love people who look for historical accuracy in the film, and I got a lot of that from some journalists while publicising the movie – why, in the Korean War, were there Chinese lettering and American songs? And I say to myself, ‘They call me weird …?’ It’s not an accurate portrayal of the Korean War, nor would I say it’s an accurate portrayal of anything – that was the point.
Which is why in a movie set, in part, before the end of enforced segregation in the southern United States, the young Edward Bloom plays with black children, while baby Will is delivered by a black doctor at a time when no such physicians were permitted to deal with white patients.
That’s why I took everything from Edward Bloom’s perspective and made my own kind of character-profile of him. And, to me, he wasn’t a racist. He was a guy who wouldn’t have those boundaries. And since everything was tinged by his perception of things, it didn’t matter what the time-frame was – he wasn’t a racist, he didn’t see things that way. When we were down there shooting the circus scene, a couple of extras came over to me – a couple of scary guys – and one said, ‘You know there wouldn’t be any black people here, don’t you?’ and I said, ‘Jeez, well, in this movie there are …’
Big Fish exhibits a beautiful balance between the intense reality of the hospital scenes concerning Edward Bloom’s illness, and the Burton fantasy sequences shot nevertheless in a very real way.
That was for many reasons. Reason One was that, because of the material in the stories, we didn’t want to over rely on CG. We’ve all gotten CG-lazy in this film world. One time we were all standing out in a field looking at a tree for the sequence where Edward’s car ends up in it, and someone said, ‘Can’t we just CG the car in the tree?’ And I was like, ‘No, we’ve got to hang the car in the tree.’ Or ‘Can’t we CG the flowers in?’ ‘No, we’re going to plant all those flowers out in that field and have Ewan standing in them, not in front of a fucking blue screen.’ So it was always important that the handmade human quality come through, because of the themes of what’s real and not real. Obviously there are more realistic scenes, but even with that we never wanted them to be the clichéd Southern kind of thing, but rather take the more poetic Southern Gothic stream-of-consciousness approach.
Big Fish deals in fables and fairy tales, myths and folk stories, featuring many archetypal elements – the witch, the mermaid, the giant, the werewolf, the circus, the romanticised small town – all of which are twisted through Burton’s unique interpretation. Ironically, the Burtonesque trees that come to life to prevent Edward from leaving the town of Spectre were actually Spielberg’s addition to the script.
We did go off on classic images – it’s kind of like Jason And The Argonauts in the sense that it’s got those kinds of mythological symbols. But it was fun because, again, in each culture and each generation the symbols do get mutated and adapted. That’s why you could see the Beauty and the Beast theme done a hundred different ways and each time it can feel different, because it’s universal. But myths and folktales I’ve always been fascinated by. Again it’s the thing that changes when people become adults, they forget the fact that these stories, even witches and werewolves, are based in a certain reality of psychology and feelings. To me they’re the most natural way of having it all, of exploring real feelings in a heightened way, and it always surprised me that as people got older they would forget that stuff.
I went back to thinking about my father and, as bad a relationship as I had with him, early on it was quite magical. I mean, he had false teeth, two of which were sharp, so he would pretend that when the moon was full he would turn into a werewolf – and he could actually move his false teeth and it used to drive us all crazy, we loved it. So you realise he was quite a magical character – but you can lose that too, and it’s important to remember. I lost it, I forgot that for too long, in a certain way. As much as I was self-sufficient and got out, those early experiences do have an impact on you, probably quite a good impact, and those moments were quite surreal and magical and strong and powerful.
The one motif that interested me the most – why, I can’t figure out – is the circus motif, because I’ve always hated the circus, to this day I hate it. But here, it was fun, because this was like old fashioned circus-people, like the old Mud Shows that still exist, especially down in northern Florida. And there was something about it that reminded me of that sort of weird family of filmmaking, where you’re out there in the sticks with a bunch of people making something, so there was that connection to it. Those were pleasurable scenes to shoot because you’re in Alabama, you got all these circus people around you, and movie people are like circus people, and circus people are like … circus people.
My favourite was the suicidal cat – an actual suicidal cat, and he did several takes. I think we shot it twice and both times it was different. When I first saw that in a circus in Florida I said, ‘We gotta get this guy with his cat.’ He was Russian, I think, and he goes out there and gets the cat to jump from a great height and makes a fortune. If I wasn’t a director I would probably try to get that job, because he works for maybe twenty seconds a day. I was very impressed because it’s not an act I think it would do on its own, it’s not natural – but I have to say that was my favourite act of the day.
Several moments in Big Fish seem to echo others in past Burton films, not least the brief sequence with Edward Bloom presiding over his Ashton gardening business. The suburban lawns which his company tends feel remarkably similar to the landscape of Edward Scissorhands.
A sketch by Burton for the characters of Amos Calloway and the ‘suicidal cat’
I honestly can say that, as I’m doing it, I can see similarities, but I don’t start out thinking that way. For instance, for the landscaping scene I was thinking more of certain ads from when I was growing up, particularly one called ‘Mike Diamond Plumbing’, as well as certain images out of the 1950s from, say, Look magazine, for that precision lawn-mowing. But it has more to do with the way I like to frame things. So those connections are the things that I can see, but I don’t make the connection that early.
The film ends with a song called ‘Man Of The Hour’, written by Eddie Vedder of Pearl Jam. It was the first time Burton had utilised an original musical number – other than score and Elfman’s Nightmare numbers – since Prince provided songs for Batman.
Eddie Vedder saw the movie and he liked it and said he’d like to try something. And he was really cool about it. There was no pressure, that was the cool thing, he made it very easy. ‘If you don’t want it, don’t worry about it.’ Because if I work with musicians who I respect and they do something and I don’t like it, it could be tricky. But I thought his song was really beautiful, and I was kind of honoured. I thought it was very much in the spirit of the movie, and I think he’s got a great voice.
Shortly before the release of Big Fish, Burton became a father for the first time, with Helena Bonham Carter giving birth to Billy Burton on October 4, 2003. (Ironically, one of Big Fish’s funniest moments remains the birth of Edward Bloom, a slippery delivery scene that replaced a more elaborate birth sequence due to budgetary cuts.) Burton was present at the birth of his son.
In terms of surreal ‘shock and awe’, to use the American term, I found the one in Big Fish strangely prophetic and strangely accurate in some ways. In fact, the real birth is stranger than even that, if you put it on the Strange Meter …
Big Fish opened in the US in November 2003 to generally extremely positive reviews. While many found the film truly heartfelt, some critics believed the film to be too sentimental. There were others, however, who hailed it as a massive departure for Burton, despite the evidence of his earlier films which contain their own share of emotion and pathos, be it Martin Landau’s heartbreaking performance in Ed Wood or Johnny Depp’s in Edward Scissorhands.
Burton and Helena Bonham Carter take a moment together on the set of Big Fish
That’s why it always makes me laugh a bit to myself. ‘He’s a dark person, but this is a real departure, a much lighter film, blah blah blah …’ But I don’t really think too much about that. That’s what the movie’s about – how people perceive things, reality, what is and what’s not. I think Nightmare Before Christmas has sad, emotional moments. But you would think I just made these dark tone poems …