CUTTING IT IN HOLLYWOOD NO BIG DEAL FOR DIRECTOR OF EDWARD SCISSORHANDS

By John Griffin

From The Gazette (Montreal), 09.05.1992, Final Edition

Edward Scissorhands is alive and well and living nervously in the body of film-maker Tim Burton.

The sensitive, sweet-natured man-child with the big hair and dangerous arms in Burton's fable of the same name is in town, registered under the name of the artist who created him.

Take away the pancake makeup, lethal limbs and near-catatonia that actor Johnny Depp brought to his heartbreaking role in the movie, however, and Tim Burton is Edward.

The famed director of Beetlejuice, both Batmans, Edward, and the immortal Peewee's Big Adventure is under the microscope this weekend.

While there's little doubt Burton is honored, at the tender age of 32, to be the subject of tomorrow night's Montreal World Film Festival tribute, he's visibly spooked by it, too.

Like Edward, Burton is obsessed with and protected by the creative process. It is the beginning, middle and end of his existence, and his shelter from the storm of real life.

That his unique cinematic vision has appealed to so many people and made billions of dollars for Hollywood is what he calls a "lucky" coincidence.

Burton would be doodling on cocktail napkins if he weren't crafting $80-million dark comic-book visions of modern heroes.

Creativity isn't only a gift. It's a need. Fame is a coincidence. A by-product. And a retrospective at this time in his life is just weird enough to make him wonder if it's not some kind of omen.

During a conversation in his hotel suite, Burton attempts to articulate the creative twitch that has taken him from drawing for the animation wing at Disney to the corridors of Tinseltown mega- power in one decade.

Stabbing the air with his bird-like arms and delicate hands helps. So does busying the fragile bundle of bones that passes for his frame all over an overstuffed chair.

For someone who says he only learned how to talk a couple of years ago, so does his hot-wired, elliptical way of speaking. It takes a while, but Burton comes across as a guy whose shell-like innocence is protection against a business he can describe all too well.

"I lucked into doing it really," says the California native of a progression that began with a short film called Frankenweenie in the early '80s; led to the fun-house world of Peewee's Big Adventure in 1985; and went into another dimension with the box- office demolition derby of 1989's Batman.

"I never said, 'I'm going to go to film school. I'm going to be a director,' or any of that."

Burton says he's "always had goals and moved forward personally," but he doesn't see himself as a big Hollywood player.

"The truth of dealing with something like this is you really have to do what you want to do. If you really care about your work, then you can't allow yourself to think too much about pressure."

Burton understands pressure better than most. It's the feeling you get when the studio expects you to top a $400-million hit. It's the tightening around the temples that comes when this summer's Batman Returns is considered a flop if it grosses only $200 million to $300 million worldwide.

"Some people consider movies an art form. But most of the people in Hollywood consider them a business. It's very dangerous having meetings with studio people, and they'll say, 'This or that is what people want to see.' There's this feeling that they know what's going on.

"But the truth is, they don't. It's absurd. L.A. is a very isolated, insulated, one-note, industry town. The only realistic way to look at what we do is to hope for the best, and go with your impulses.

"I've always tried to do that. The most difficult thing for me now is the difference in how I'm perceived."

Burton gives an example. "Two or three years ago," he says--and he means pre-Batman--"if I didn't return a phone call, I'm just being the crazy artist.

"Now if I don't return the call I'm an egotistical asshole. I've found that, even though I'm still socially inept, doing the same things I was three years ago, and acting the same way, the perception around me has changed."

"The mix between business and art is always an unholy alliance," he laughs. " Making a movie is hard enough as it is. It's such an intense process. It upsets me to have to wade through the other stuff, too."

Burton is prepared to do it, however.

Partly, it's an inevitable aspect of "the social business that is making a movie. It's not like a painting that goes directly from your hand to the canvas. There are 100 people around.

"Up until a couple of years ago, I never spoke," he laughs again. "So it was a difficult process for me."

Despite progress in his communication skills, and the fact he's probably the most marketable director in the world, Burton refuses to see himself in terms of his success.

"I don't know what works or doesn't work. Obviously I feel good if I reach somebody out there.

"But I also know that if I ever ran into some trouble, I probably wouldn't make more movies. I've seen too many people make Police Academy, and I'm not into doing a technical job of work."

Burton is convinced that, as an artist, "the danger is to buy into your reputation, and what people say about you."

That attitude may explain why Burton has just flown up from Florida, where he was meeting with the suits at Disney for an animated project he calls Nightmare Before Christmas.

Ironically, it's a fleshed-out version of something he designed 10 years ago while he was toiling with that company, and is only now finally getting around to doing.

"It's certainly not the scale of something like a Batman, or even Disney's other animated films. But I've never been so excited, in a way. There are very few projects in your life that are elevated another notch in terms of your passion about them."

Burton sees it as a break with his past. And tomorrow's tribute is a symbol of that break.

"Right now, I feel like I've gone through something with Batman, like I've been floating a giant conglomerate.

"I want to do something different. I don't know whether it will be dramatic or imperceptible. But it will be different."