The Vision Thing

Tim Burton

By Mark Salisbury

From Premiere February 2004

Tim Burton has always tried to connect with the films he makes, even if the personal associations appear, on the surface at least, to be obscure to anyone else but him. With Edward Scissorhands he was the awkward teenage unable to reach out to the world; with Ed Wood he had sympathy for a fellow filmmaker forever on the verge of failure; with Batman he sided with a superhero that preferred to be in the shadows. But his connection with his latest movie, Big Fish, the story of journalist William Bloom (Billy Crudup) trying to repair his fractious relationship with his dying father, Edward (Albert Finney), may well be the most direct to date. Burton's father died in 2000, and his mother passed away last year. Never close to his parents - he moved out of their home at 12 to live with his grandmother - Burton found that the Big Fish script, adapted by John August from Daniel Wallace's novel, unlocked in him feelings he'd been unable to articulate or share, "I couldn't even communicate [them] to my best friend. So in reading it, I thought, 'This puts an image to the incommunicable.' " Not that Burton was necessarily looking for catharsis. "I was just thinking about my parents, and you realize it's the strangest relationship you can have," he says.

For Burton, who recently became a father for the first time (his partner is actress Helene Bonham Carter, a Big Fish costar), the biggest realization was that "I never treated my parents like human beings. You grow up and they're [still] your parents. You can be 45 years old and still feel inarticulate and cut off. 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?' "Which is precisely the problem faced by Crudup's character, who has long tired of his father's compulsive storytelling and wishes that, for once, before he dies, he would tell him the truth. Although, as we witness, Edward's tall tales of his past adventures (with Ewan McGregor playing his younger self) have more than their fair share of veracity. "I always felt for him," says Burton of William. "I don't know if it's because I felt similar to that, but there's a certain rigidity to the character I find very emotional, very sad. I went back to thinking about my father, and as bad a relationship as I had, early on it was quite magical. He had false teeth, so he would pretend when the moon was full that he would turn into a werewolf. We loved it, and you realize he was quite a magical character. It's important to remember that. I forgot that for too long."

Representing a return to a smaller scale of filmmaking. "where you don't have a release date before a script." Big Fish is also, in a lot of ways, a very different kind of film from what we've come to expect from Burton (although it does feature many typically Burtonesque elements - Bloom's tall tales feature a werewolf, a sheep-eating giant, and a glass-eyed witch). Indeed, it's the realism of the Finney-Crudup core that gives Big Fish its poignancy and rich emotional impact. Burton shot all the hospital and bedside scenes first, before moving on to the more fun stuff. "It was like shooting two movies in a way," he says, "the real and the fantasy. It needed both, because [otherwise] it's an episode of ER."