TIM BURTON: THE MAN BEHIND 'BATMAN'

By David Elliott

From The San Diego Union-Tribune, 06.25.1989

Batten down the hatches, the Batman storm is flapping its fat black wings ...

The hero (SOCK!),

The hype (POW!!),

The hoopla (BAM!!!),

And now, at last, far from least, the movie. Plus--and this, too, is news--the creative man behind it.

While Michael Keaton (as Batman/Bruce Wayne) and Jack Nicholson (as the caped hero's nemesis and alter ego, The Joker) dominate the fan talk and promo frenzy, director Tim Burton is the one who really knows the movie Batman. From inside out, from $30 million planned hit to $40 million-plus probable maxi-hit, this was Burton's bat baby. could be the crowning box-office KO of the late '80s. High in the ozone of buzz, there is "successor to Spielberg" talk.

Which makes quite a load for a small man to carry.

Yet Burton looks relaxed, almost at home in a hotel in Universal City, where he has come with Keaton, Kim Basinger and other figures of the Warner Bros. film to promote it. He grew up in Burbank, then for a frustrated time ("It got boring") drew cartoons for Disney. This elfin Valley Boy has now ascended the movie Matterhorn.

The slender artist, 30, with Carnaby Street Kid hair and long, mousy teeth, looks somewhat like another Tim, the once immortal ukulele-playing Tiny Tim (though Burton is much tinier). Before the cascade of group interviews that would flood his afternoon, he agreed to meet me, in part from gratitude for early and enthusiastic support I gave Pee-wee's Big Adventure.

"This is such a nervous time," Burton says, though not showing it except in antic dabs of laughter. "I've never had anything this big before, with all this pre-opening speculation. So much has been written about this picture that is simply untrue. I almost feel I'm on a parallel planet."

Get-it-right heat began coming from the studio long before completion. And Batman fans, loyal to the Gothic '30s comic book original or the zappy, campy '60s TV show starring Adam West, kicked up dust clouds of pre-emptive abuse when Keaton, so hip, so '80s, was cast as their hero. For Burton, talents more familiar to George Patton or Omar Bradley have had to be in hand.

"But my only real enemy was time," he says, adding, "This project been floated around town for years, but we had just one year to make it from virtual scratch. And it was finished, contrary to rumors, as I intended. No big scenes were left out. Making it over in London obviously made a difference, gave us distance from control--for me that was a lifesaver--yet when a studio is investing this much money, they're entitled to show a certain nervous interest. Wouldn't you be concerned?

"You know, what I feel so good about now is that, given all the possible pitfalls, this movie still has its personality, its style. I didn't want it shaved down, layer by layer, getting safer and safer until it's nothing. movie."

Eye-sculpting a film for total sensual delivery is Burton's gift, rooted in the Universal and RKO horror classics he loved as a TV-watching kid, given design flair by his cartooning days. He showed it in the shorts Frankenweenie (which Disney made but would not release--too odd, too dark) and Vincent ("Still my most personal film"). His first feature, Pee-wee's Big Adventure, was a style spree, funny, giddy, an instant kick that perceptive audiences and reviewers took to heart.

Working with ace designer Anton Furst, Burton made Batman a triumph of dark, throbbingly industrial style, with a multiplaned Gotham City of shadows that is like Fritz Lang Revisited (or Terry Gilliam: Batman Does Brazil). Of course, the approach has drawn some sourballs like that which ended Richard Corliss' Time review of Batman: "Its heart got lost on Tim Burton's story board."

"I don't really like story boards," Burton gently retorts. "You can create ideas on them, but then you get on the sets, with the actors and lights, and you throw out most of those ideas. Movies are born while you're shooting. Why tie people down before?

"Darkness seemed very inherent in this piece from the start, when (writer) Sam Hamm and I were going over the script. Batman lives by night, and we wanted to explore the man behind him, Bruce Wayne, who really has a dark past to confront. It's a tale of primal emotions.

"Yet on the set nothing felt heavy! Everybody got into the spirit of what we wanted, and it stayed fun, though exhausting. No personality feuds, no creative differences, no inside bad stuff. It was no harder to make than a Pee-wee or Beetlejuice."

What drew Burton was "that I loved the extremes, the operatic quality of the characters. Batman and The Joker--what a pair! I loved that basic good vs. evil, night fable, Phantom of the Opera stuff. I loved it as a child and still do, though I don't hang upside down in my closet reading the Batman comics."

Some of the Batmaniacs do, and they wanted to hang Burton and Keaton upside down (film sight-unseen, of course). Bring up the controversy, now turning stale from its inherent dumbness, and Burton seems to be both tired and amused, defending his strategies: film, I knew it was a no-win situation on one level. There's this vocal group who just hate the TV series as a cancer on the image of their beloved Batman. On the other hand, there's a larger group who only know the TV show and want the sock-pow-bam humor of that. How can you satisfy them both? You can't. You just satisfy your vision of the story, which is, after all, the only way to make good movies."

Casting. Keaton seems a little slight as Batman, until you see him on screen. And he is a full, felt Bruce Wayne. Jack Nicholson does an exalted star turn as The Joker, his slash mouth grinning like hell's gate. Burton expands:

"I wanted Michael from the start. I knew he could do it after working with him on Beetlejuice. And there is something in his eyes, a dimension of feeling, even with the mask on. He and Jack felt so comfortable together; they like each other and it was a beautiful match, solid from the start.

"The danger in a comic-book story movie is that everything becomes too clear-cut and blatant. You know, Wayne thinks, Now I am avenging the death of my parents,' and the film simply illustrates that. Michael as Bruce Wayne carried us beyond that simplification, gave us the turmoil, the deeper stuff--not that we're exactly talking Ibsen here. surprising and funny, but not jokey in the pure sense of camp. The humor should not come at the expense of character. Jack hangs out there, yet without cutting the rope."

There is a ham-from-heaven scene when old, snarling, hissing Jack Palance, as The Joker's mob boss, unleashes the full Palance treatment on Nicholson. Later he is killed off, and Nicholson gets the delayed topper by doing a dead-on Palance impersonation for about 10 seconds. I ask Burton if that was improvised and he glows over it:

"Yeah, that's pure Jack Nicholson doing pure Jack Palance. We hired Palance because we could not otherwise answer the question, Who can be Jack Nicholson's boss?' I mean, Palance even today makes Nicholson look like a kid. Jack (Palance) is his own thing. There is no other. He is menacing and awesome.

"When we shot the scene of Palance shaking Nicholson like a rag doll, I was dying watching it. It was so funny! I could tell something was going on in Nicholson, the wheels were turning inside. And later it came out in this wonderful verbal impersonation. You see, that's where he is so great--he has such huge private reserves of humor and energy, so he makes even the craziest things seem real and inspired."

Nobody was cast as Batman's boyish pal Robin, because there is no Robin. Burton explains, "We just couldn't figure how to slip Robin into the story structure. Since we were dealing with the duel of Batman and The Joker, Robin seemed irrelevant. Also, how do you fit in those bright green boots and yellow cape?"

Speaking of the film's style, which will make it for most viewers (and break it for a few), the climax action appears to be a huge salute to the church tower scenes in Vertigo, Hunchback of Notre Dame, perhaps even Orson Welles' The Stranger. Burton savors the idea, but also slips off the film-buff mantle as it hits his shoulders.

"I guess that sort of thing is there," he reflects, "but it's strictly subconscious. Really. I'm not a movie buff in the sense that I know so much about them. I love things like Hunchback and Beauty and the Beast, but I never said to Anton (Furst), Hey, let's do a number from this one.'

"I can't work that way, even though I know people think I do some pastiche. subliminal process. Maybe the 10-year-old deep inside me is showing himself, but I'm not egging him on, consciously. Movies work on levels so deep down in your brain that it doesn't help to calculate the sources and influences. Just let it happen, creatively."

Thus he will continue, if he can survive the media monster engulfing his big new film. Burton has very mixed feelings about some of the hype, like the spotlight thrown on the film's ugly/beautiful Batmobile (made from a core structure of '68 Chevy Impalas). He smiles a shade bleakly, commenting ...

"I often ask myself, Is there a movie attached to this?' You know, Warners isn't even behind all this Batmobile stuff, even though it's their job to sell a movie like this like, yeah, a damned car. It's a runaway thing now, out of their control. I guess it's great PR, but finally you want people to focus on the movie. You're scared that merchandising will consume the movie, make it seem like old news even before it opens. Fortunately, the previews have been reassuring."

Offering previews of his own career, he says that another Pee-wee Herman film doesn't seem likely--the sequel Big Top Pee-wee (directed by Randal Kleiser) was botched. Burton was offered the sequel, "And I might have done it except that I was so busy with Beetlejuice, and I didn't want to be shoved into a category--Mr. Pee-wee Director--which is the great curse of this business. But I love the Pee-wee character and I got along wonderfully with the man inside him, Paul Reubens. He's brilliant."

After a period of rest, Burton hopes "to do something more scaled-down but surreal and personal, closer to my short Vincent. I've been able to make these large films my own way, but I haven't yet done what I most want to do in movies. I like to think the best Tim Burton movie is yet to be."