'MARS ATTACKS' DIRECTOR FINDS WORLD WEIRD

By Susan Stark (Detroit News)

From The Seattle Times, 12.26.1996, Thursday Final Edition

In Mars Attacks!, Tim Burton pays comic tribute to the cheesy alien invasion movies of the '50s. Ask Burton what those movies meant to him as a preteen of the 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 since I was a kid and I can never remember what they're about. They all sort of meld together."

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.

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

In all cases, though, Burton makes movies like no other. He'd probably call them "weird." That's his favorite word, 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 background.

"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 real estate hustler, leads a cast that also includes Glenn Close, Annette Bening, Danny DeVito, Jim Brown, Pierce Brosnan, Natalie Portman 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. And all, Burton says, enjoyed the chance to "make something out of nothing." To the director, though, it was pure "theater of the absurd."

In a full weekend of interviews to promote Mars Attacks!, Burton regularly seizes the chance to mention a just-discovered, potato-size Martian meteorite that seems to contradict 1976 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."