In the decade or so since the first edition of Burton on Burton was published, Tim Burton has transformed from being a visionary director with the Midas touch to becoming an identifiable brand; the term ‘Burtonesque’ being ascribed to any filmmaker whose work is dark, edgy or quirky, or a combination thereof. It’s a transformation that’s brought its own benefits – Hollywood clout, for one – but also its own, unique set of difficulties, not least in the expectations that both studios and audiences now have of him and his output. Burton remains a filmmaker whose modus operandi is based entirely on his innermost feelings. For him to commit to a project it’s necessary for him to connect emotionally to his characters, be they original creations – the razor-fingered innocent of Edward Scissorhands – adapted from comic books – the masked vigilante of Batman – or people from real life – the delusional director in Ed Wood – connections that, as he is the first to admit, are sometimes far from obvious. Edward Scissorhands, for instance, began as a cry from the heart, a drawing from his teenage years that expressed the inner torment he felt at being unable to communicate with those around him, especially his family; while so many of his films reflect upon his childhood in suburbia.
Growing up in the Los Angeles suburb of Burbank in the 1950s and 1960s, in the shadow of the Warner Bros lot, Burton sought solace from the bright and sunny outside world in the dark of the movie theatre, connecting psychologically to those images that flicked on the big screen. His passion was monster movies, his idol Vincent Price, to whom he paid tribute in his stop-motion short Vincent and cast as the inventor father-figure in Edward Scissorhands. But while many of his work’s recurrent themes and images appear, on the surface, to be a director graciously paying homage to his youthful inspirations – notably James Whale’s 1931 Frankenstein – the reality is much more complex. ‘The image isn’t always literal,’ he once said, ‘but linked to a feeling.’
Burton’s characters are often outsiders, misunderstood and misperceived, misfits encumbered by some degree of duality, operating on the fringes of their own particular society, tolerated but pretty much left to their own devices. And in many ways he embodies that contradiction himself. Although Burton continues to hold his position at the very top of the Hollywood Α-list, a director whose very name will guarantee not only an audience but a studio green-light, in almost all other respects he and Hollywood maintain a respectful distance from one another: His films may well have reaped in excess of a billion dollars worldwide, but they’re as far from being slaves to common-denominator commercialism as he is from fully embracing the Hollywood studio system in which he has continued to operate since his beginnings as an animator at Disney in the 1980s. Despite the enormous budgets entrusted to his care, Burton’s voice has remained as original and uniquely creative as ever. He may use Hollywood’s money, he may make their summer blockbusters and their tent-pole pictures, but he makes them his way. And that’s what makes them so appealing and intriguing.
When Burton was announced as the director of a new version of Planet of the Apes, there were equal amounts of feverish excitement to those who questioned his motivation and the wisdom of remaking such a classic and much-loved film. Burton was only too aware of the potential pitfalls – ‘I knew I was walking into an ambush’ – and his ‘re-imagining’ of the material, as Twentieth Century Fox dubbed it, proved to be something of a poisoned chalice. The original Planet of the Apes had been released in 1968 into a radically distinct era and political climate – the war in Vietnam, race riots at home – working as both marked social commentary and top-notch entertainment. The world was a different place back then. In 2000, Fox weren’t interested in social comment; they wanted a franchise. Burton’s film was green-lit without a completed script and rushed into production to meet a summer release date. The compromises were there for all to see, and the finished film, despite some typically imaginative and stylistic flourishes, as well as Rick Baker’s terrific make-up, was a marked disappointment even to die-hard Burton fans. The experience, as he relates in the chapter devoted to the film, was fraught with difficulties, not least in his dealings with the studio. As for that necessary personal connection, Apes offered several familiar themes – that of reversal and of the outsider – as well as a chance to work with Charlton Heston, star of the original film. But, as Burton later reveals, his heart wasn’t quite in it: he admits to being ‘more intrigued by the idea of it than I was the actual thing.’
Burton bounced back with Big Fish, his most mainstream and, ironically, most personal film to date. Adapted by John August from a novel by Daniel Wallace, Big Fish was perfect material for Burton, playing not only with the very notion of storytelling itself but making exquisite use of his flair for fables. More importantly, Burton connected to its central theme of a son trying to reconcile with his dying father, and the script gave him a means to address his feelings about the death of his own father, who had passed away in 2000. Big Fish centres around the relationship between Edward Bloom, a former travelling salesman who has always found a deeper truth in fantasy than in reality, and his estranged son Will, who grew up to detest his father for constructing elaborate myths but who eventually comes to realize that they reveal the true man after all. The film was a triumphant blend of the fantastical and the sentimental, the emotional and the magical, with Burton, working with his best script since Ed Wood, presenting a bright, heroic, mythical America, one populated by werewolves and giants, Siamese twins and outsize catfish, an America where the romantic and the brave always win out in the end. As Peter Travers of Rolling Stone noted: ‘The tension inherent in this fable brings out a bracing maturity in Burton and gives the film its haunting gravity. As the son learns to talk to his father on the father’s terms and still see him clearly, Big Fish takes on the transformative power of art.’
There was a real sense of inevitability and providence when Burton signed on to direct a new version of Roald Dahl’s children’s classic Charlie and the Chocolate Factory. Two massively creative talents with a similarly malevolent wit and subversive streak, Burton’s and Dahl’s worlds had collided once before when he produced James and the Giant Peach. Even more thrilling was the news that the film would reunite Burton with Johnny Depp for the first time since Sleepy Hollow. Their ongoing relationship has produced their finest work on both sides, although their pairing, inevitably, brings with it a degree of expectation that Burton finds disconcerting. ‘Early on in your career you struggle to get things done but there’s the amazing freedom that comes with lack of expectation’, he says. ‘It’s harder to surprise people when they have certain expectations.’
And yet the combination has once again produced something not just surprising, but without compare. As Depp explains in his Foreword and Burton in the chapter on the film, to create their Willy Wonka they drew upon their childhood memories of children’s TV hosts and the result is genuinely startling, weird and even a little creepy – but one that would have had Roald Dahl himself, had he lived, cackling. But while Burton’s version of Charlie and the Chocolate Factory is an intensely faithful adaptation of Dahl’s world, it’s also quintessentially Burtonesque at the same time, a hippy-trippy riot of glorious colour, amazing design and delightful imagination. For fans of the book, and there are millions, it does everything you expect – but in ways you don’t.
While The Nightmare Before Christmas wasn’t a Pixar-sized hit on its initial release, in the years since it’s become a perennial holiday favourite for many, and has spawned a sideline in merchandise and toys that shows no sign of diminishing. Burton had long looked for another project to draw on his love of stop-motion animation, in particular the movies of Ray Harryhausen, and with Corpse Bride he’s created a fable that is timeless in tone and style. In a world dominated by computer-imagery, Burton keeps coming back to this painstakingly detailed medium, a resolutely hand-crafted art that, for him, contains real emotion. ‘It’s kind of an unspoken, subconscious thing which is why I like it,’ he says, ‘it’s something you can’t quite put words to, there’s a certain magic and mystery, tactile. I know you can get that on computers and get more on computers in a certain way, but there’s that handmade quality that gives it an emotional resonance, for me anyway. I don’t know if it’s because I have nostalgia for it, but I do really believe there is that in the medium.’
Inspired by a 19th century Eastern European poem, Corpse Bride tells of Victor, a shy, nervy groom who unwittingly finds himself hitched to the eponymous ‘corpse bride’ on the eve of his wedding to his fiancée Victoria, and winds up trapped in the Land of the Dead. Within this, there’s much that is recognizable from Burton’s oeuvre: the story thematically echoes Beetlejuice and Sleepy Hollow, Victor, voiced by Johnny Depp, is a typical Burton protagonist, while the inversion of the two worlds – the land of the living being ‘deader’ than that of the dead – is comfortingly familiar. It’s also not without coincidence, too, that Victor looks just like the little boy from Vincent all grown up – meaning he looks a lot like Burton. ‘That’s not lost on me, he says. I definitely felt the same thing, and said as much to myself after the fact. Any project you try to make personal.’
Mark Salisbury