MAN FROM MARS

By Richard Mowe

From Scotland on Sunday, 03.02.1997

It was only a matter of time before Tim Burton decided to follow his natural instincts by paying affectionate tribute to the flying saucer B-movies which ruled his misspent youth.

He makes no apologies for unleashing Mars Attacks! on the universe or the fact that he and the rest of the team including President Jack Nicholson, First Lady Glenn Close, General Rod Steiger, Professor Pierce Brosnan and Burton's girlfriend Lisa Marie as Martian Girl, had the ball of their lives making it. The only slight blot on the copybook has been its reception at home ("Americans have no sense of humour about themselves") although he hopes his fast-talking, double-crossing aliens may yet win over the rest of the earth. Popular appreciation elsewhere would help given that it cost a whacking $ 85m .

Burton, 38, fits to a tee the description of being so laid back that he's horizontal. His unkempt and long dark hair sprouts forth in all directions, the tinted shades have thick black rims and legs, and the clothing is uniformly black right down to the Doc Martens and stripy socks. He displays a wacky sense of humour as sentences tumble out in a torrent.

By contrast his partner for the last five years, Lisa Marie, an ex-model, who also had a small role in Burton's previous opus Ed Wood, looks immaculately groomed and fights to put in a word edgeways.

Clearly, from the doe-eyed glances, she adores him.

They have been together since Burton's marriage to German painter, Lena Gieseke, foundered.

He was on the rebound, and also needed to have his confidence restored after the Batman sequel performed less well than expected.

Burton, in turn, relishes playing to her to the extent that you could see him as a natural-born performer. But the man who turned Batman and its second sequel into highly hyped money-making machines, assures he harbours no such inclinations.

"The reason I responded to Batman was that he likes to remain hidden. I like characters like that. I am definitely not a performer which has helped me to be unjudgemental about actors and the kind of things they can do. I like to see people transformed. There was a bit of controversy over my Batmans because they were becoming too dark.

If I had kept going you would not have been able to see anything: I would have ended up with a black screen. Anyway, I wanted to move on. Now after Ed Wood and Mars Attacks! it's time to go into a different universe. I'm thinking a trying to work it out a but nothing has come through yet."

He has managed to remain true to his offbeat nature through Pee Wee's Big Adventure, Beetlejuice, the Batmans, Edward Scissorhands, and The Nightmare Before Christmas to Ed Wood, about Hollywood's worst film-maker.

Burton loved the character, created by an angora-besweatered Johnny Depp, who posthumously became notorious for his "perfection of ineptitude." He says: "I did get caught up in Wood's enthusiasm for those kind of bad movies and it was very infectious. I felt possessed by his spirit, and it may have spilled over into this to some degree."

As a youth escaping an unhappy family background the solitary Burton overdosed on cinema after he left home to live with his grandmother. "My father worked as a park attendant in Burbank and I suppose my mom was a repressed housewife. I went to the movies all the time. That's what shaped me, and made me understand things about the world outside. I don't go to the movies as much as I used to, and I'm not affected in the same way as I was then. As I get older I seek inner peace by drawing," he says, sounding suspiciously New Ageist.

At 16 he was clearing tables in a local diner, while doodling on the side. He claims it was his outlet for his feelings; otherwise he tended not to be very communicative. His artistic efforts won a Disney fellowship to study animation at the California Institute of Arts and on graduation he started as an apprentice animator for Disney.

Disney allowed him the resources to make two short films which acted as calling cards for his first feature in 1985 (Pee Wee) followed by Beetlejuice. Both proved extremely profitable, which made Hollywood sit up and take note.

Because Burton "lucked into film-making" without any master plan he finds it difficult to hold forth about future directions. "The plus factor about the background in animation was that in a weird way it taught you through drawing how to act out a story. It teaches you indirectly what is possible and proved to be as good as going to film school. Yeah a you want to grow, try different things on different levels, but I'm not sure what," he says in a way that gives meaning to actor Michael Keaton's description of him as "the most inarticulate articulate guy I know".

Whatever the impediment, Burton's knack of snaring actors remains unimpeded. Nicholson, the Joker in Batman Returns, was someone he grew up with on screen as one of schlock director Roger Corman's proteges. "So Mars Attacks! kind of brought him back into that world. When we first met at his house we talked for more than three hours. Then when I left I realised that I did not understand a word of what we had been talking about. It was like the greatest form of abstract communication."

Similarly he hired Tom Jones to join the fray because he always struck him as having an "action hero personality. And in my neighbourhood nobody listened to music unless it was Tom Jones."

He suggests that the line between politics and showbusiness has become blurred. "That's why Jack made a great president. Part of the inspiration for the film was to do with the fact that a lot of the issues have become very abstract. One is the similarity between Republican and Democrat. It makes you feel like a Martian yourself when you see how strange things are on planet earth." Perhaps, on reflection, Burton's little green creatures seem perfectly normal, after all.