EIGHT QUESTIONS FOR TIM BURTON
By Kim Masters
From
The Washington Post, 10.24.1993, Final Edition
Everyone notices the resemblance: Gaunt, pale, with a tangle of shoe-polish black
hair, Tim Burton looks like the characters in his movies. And the director
of
Beetlejuice,
Batman and
Edward Scissorhands resembles
them in other ways too: spooky and sweet, a wistful misfit who finds himself
isolated by his peculiar vision.
Burton's only 34, but he's already one of the rare directors who has been successful
enough to make films his way. His latest feature,
Tim Burton's The Nightmare
Before Christmas, which opened Friday, tells the ghoulishly fanciful story
of the Pumpkin King who feels unfulfilled by life in Halloweentown and searches
for something more. Burton conceived and produced the film; it was made under
the direction of stop-action animation specialist Henry Selick, who worked with
a battery of animators in a warehouse in San Francisco
for more than two years.
The technique requires up to 24 separate shots per second of film. For the film's
hero--a puppet with elongated, pencil-thin limbs--animators created 700 different
heads, each with a different facial expression. The film brought Burton back
to Disney, where he began his career as an animator in the early
'80s.
Q. How weird is
Nightmare?
A. I don't think it's weird at all. At all. It's very sweet. It's not harmful
at
all.
Q. If you had a young child, you'd let him see it?
A. Absolutely. People get so freaked out. I mean, I don't have any kids, but
my experience with kids is they're like adults. If something is too scary for
them,
they won't watch it. It's not
Clockwork Orange. They're not strapped to
the chair with their eyes pinned open. . . People get self-righteous and fixated
on certain things that don't really matter while the rest of society crumbles
around them. It seems weird to me. ... A movie with puppets or Batman--it's so
far out of reality. Give me a break.
Q. You said you'd rather put an ice pick through your head than direct another
Batman.
What happened?
A. I enjoy and I love the material. But you know what? The last one really confused
me all the way down the line. I'm on this [press] junket, and one person comes
in and says with complete, hundred-percent conviction: 'Oh, I love this. It's
much lighter than the first one.' And the next person would come in and say,
'Oh, this is so much darker than the first one.' It was like a
joke. ...
Then ... people were getting all crazy, like this is too scary for their kids.
. . Well, wait a minute. The first movie, there's a guy shooting guns at people
at point-blank range without any sense of remorse at all, which I find more disturbing
than almost anything. There's nothing like that in [the second]
movie.
Q. So it was too hard, between their wanting to protect their commercial interests
and the
Batman name and your wanting to pursue your
vision?
A. Yeah, exactly. I did experiment. I did make that second one more my own kind
of weird thing.
Q. Why do you always want to do weird things?
A. I don't want to do weird things. It kind of freaks me out 'cause ... I don't
think of it as weird, so I don't know what they're talking about.
Q. Well, you must have an idea that ghouls and goblins and graveyards are
weird.
A. In this culture. Most other countries ... mainly Latin countries, that stuff
is much more integrated into life.
Q. We have a fear of death, or a fear of spookiness?
A. I think it's like a weird puritanical thing. Look at funeral rituals in other
countries and they're so joyous, they're so kind of beautiful. Even if they're
somber, they're grand. They're emotional. If you've ever been to a funeral here
... you feel like you're dead yourself. It's creepy.
Q. Why did you want to use the stop-action technique?
A. There's power to this animation. It's not something that can be verbalized.
It's like when you watch
King Kong: You see the hair moving on the character.
It's beautiful. ... If that had been done in another way, I don't think that
movie would have been as powerful. It's beautiful.
