DIRECTOR TIM BURTON REVELS IN THE WEIRD IN HIS NEW SPACE COMEDY

By Susan Stark

From The Detroit News, 12.07.1996

In Mars Attacks!, Tim Burton pays comic tribute to the cheesy alien-invasion movies of the '50s. Ask 38-year-old Burton what those movies meant to him as a boy of that era, and his face just lights up.

"They meant everything to me," he exclaims, waving around his hands to emphasize the point. "They're like a collective, primal, modern fairy tale. I've watched them voraciously ever since I was a kid, and I can never remember what they're about. They all sort of meld together. But the things you see as a child remain with you, especially if you like them."

Burton mentions the now-classic Invaders From Mars, in particular.

"It was like a dream, that movie," he says.

"And it had a lot of impact. I remember all the kids in the neighborhood talking about it and not because they could remember what it was about but because it was like a dream. Some things work on that level, and it's great."

Burton seems momentarily lost in that thought, then pulls himself back to the moment.

"Dreams," he says, wringing his hands.

"Are they real or not?

"Who wants to answer that one?"

In addition to low-budget alien pictures, Burton cites a series of lurid Topps trading cards on similar themes as a source of inspiration.

"They were unacceptable then, deemed too lurid for children or something," he recalls.

"But you take something like that away from kids, and they want it more. So they became kind of cultish.

"I never felt they damaged me. I felt they helped me. Kids have a lot of weird energy that they've gotta get out."

As a film maker, Burton made use of the saturated colors in the cards, which Warner Bros. acquired for him from Topps, and also of their "classic, simple concepts and slightly naive painting style."

Burton's hands, like his mass of wayward, curly brown hair, seem to have a life of their own. Same for his words. He speaks in fits and starts, skipping to some new idea before he's anywhere near done with the previous one, churning the air with his arms all the while.

In a business that values conformity, he's definitely odd man out. And not just because of his looks or conversational style. It's Burton's work that really sets him apart.

From his debut film, Pee-wee's Big Adventure, through the first two Batman pictures, Edward Scissorhands, Ed Wood and 1993's haunting The Nightmare Before Christmas, Burton has emerged as one of Hollywood's few bona fide visionaries. Some of his films show his dark sense of humor. Some show his dark romanticism. Some show both.

In all cases, though, Burton makes movies like no other. Distinctive movies. He'd probably call them "weird." That's his favorite word or, certainly, the one he uses most.

"It's so weird to see all those people in this thing together," he says of his large, starry Mars Attacks! company. "An Academy Award winner. Different generations. Different backgrounds.

"I look back on it, though, and I don't quite know how it happened."

Jack Nicholson, who plays both the U.S. president and a sleazy Las Vegas real estate hustler, leads a cast that also includes Glenn Close, Annette Bening, Danny DeVito, Jim Brown, Pierce Brosnan, Lukas Haas, Natalie Portman, Sylvia Sidney and Burton's girlfriend, Lisa Marie, as well as their pet Chihuahua.

Most have relatively small roles. All had to do much of their performing against a blue screen, which provides the blank background special effects people later fill up. All, Burton says, enjoyed the chance to "make something out of nothing." To the director, though, it was pure "theater of the absurd, like a heightened Fantasy Island or Love Boat episode."

Lukas Haas plays the youngest character in the group, a boyish Midwestern slacker who works at a doughnut shop, cares deeply for his grandmother and is roundly despised by his gung-ho militaristic older brother and parents.

"The whole point of that character is to show how people perceive people, that it's wrong a lot of the time," Burton says of the Haas role.

"People who don't look like heroes, who are maybe not that smart or even motivated, are pretty much dismissed.

"But, yes, I care for the boy Lukas plays. Absolutely. A lot of the ones that live (at film's end), I care about."

"The ones that have ulterior motives, that deal more on a superficial level of life, they get it. The ones that are simple make it.

"That kinda goes back to the whole sense (of the movie). It's a little more shaded, but that's basically it."

In a full weekend of interviews to promote Friday's opening of Mars Attacks!, Burton regularly seizes the chance to mention a just-discovered, potato-size Martian meteorite that seems to contradict 20-year-old astronaut reports that there's nothing but dust on the red planet.

"It's just a cheap Warner Bros. publicity stunt," he quips.

"But really, when you see all the strange, weird, wonderful things here (on earth), you know there's got to be more on the outside."

Burton's Martians are green with pop eyes and bulging brains. They speak in choppy, mechanical beeps. They're vicious. They're also impossible to psych out.

When, for instance, earthlings welcome them to our planet by releasing a white dove, they immediately fry the poor peace bird with their zappers. Although there's plenty of political satire in the movie, its prime source of comedy comes of our eagerness to negotiate, to understand and the Martians' complete lack of reciprocal interest.

"How long have humans been around, and how well do we understand ourselves?," Burton asks, assuming the answer is "not well."

"So how do we expect to understand a completely different race? Weird, beautiful things happen to everybody all the time, and we always try to understand them, to make sense of them. But we can't. And we don't.

"Why don't these Martians like birds?

"I have no idea.

"Some things are just weird in life."

You betcha.