TIM BURTON'S BIG ADVENTURE

By Jay Carr

From The Boston Globe, 10.17.1993

Tim Burton sits balled up on a sofa, elongated hand running through his jet-black, Edward Scissorhands hair, not wanting to know too much about the interior sources of his movies. "I try to just treat it like it's what I want to do - not think," he says, "because I learn more about myself that way. I learn more what my own psychology is when things happen from the subconscious rather than intellectualizing from the first moment." Burton has had lots of time to plumb his new stop-motion animated feature, The Nightmare Before Christmas, due Friday. The story about Halloween characters taking over Christmas, led by a spindly loner called Jack Skellington, began more than a decade ago when Burton was working as a Disney animator.

Influenced by "How the Grinch Stole Christmas," he had written a poem, a parody of Clement Moore's "A Visit from St. Nicholas," which he meant to have his favorite actor, Vincent Price, narrate as a TV special. But the project went nowhere - as did most of Burton's work at Disney, where he spent five years being a fish out of water after graduating from Cal Arts as an animator. "You couldn't give it away," Burton says of The Nightmare Before Christmas. What belatedly lifted it off the drawing board was, of course, Burton's subsequent success with Pee-wee's Big Adventure, Beetlejuice, Batman and its sequel and Edward Scissorhands. Ironically, the project has turned out to be the reason Burton is returning to the Disney fold, which he fled in 1984 because it didn't offer his nocturnal loners enough scope.

"I was working on The Fox and the Hound, and it was pretty quickly obvious that I was not cut out for it. It was, like, oh man, I couldn't do it. They were very nice to me. They said, 'We're doing this movie, The Black Cauldron, ' so I just sat in a room for a year and came up with ideas and stuff, just drew any idea I wanted to, and it was great. It was like weird characters, weird props, weird furniture, just sitting in a room doing whatever I wanted. But at some point I realized they had no intention of using any of it. It was like that show, 'The Prisoner.' It was all very pleasant, all very nice, everyone's smiling and being very supportive. But it's like you realize early on that it's like a vacuum, a black hole.

"But it was a great time for me to explore my own ideas, really. I got to do those short films," Burton says, referring to Vincent, his six-minute short about a boy who wants to hang around the house watching Vincent Price movies, and Frankenweenie, about a boy who reanimates his dead dog. From the start, Burton's films have been psychic self-portraits walking the line between the eerie and the funny. Burton, 36, grew up in Burbank, a baseball's throw from the Disney studio - had he been inclined to throw baseballs, as his father, a former ballplayer and park-league coach, urged him to do. When his mother, who owned a boutique specializing in items decorated with cat motifs, suggested he go out and play, he'd go to a nearby cemetery.

Batman the brooding loner, dropping spiderlike behind muggers on a rooftop, is as much an idealized alter ego as the kid who'd rather play with spiders and bats in the attic than listen to his mother and go out in the sun. If Batman is a Pee-wee who resents being forced to grow up, Beetlejuice and the Joker are anarchic clowns in their heavy makeup. And Edward Scissorhands is the sweet outsider living in the shadows, wanting to belong to a surrealistically neat suburbia that seems far more ominous than Edward's gloomy castle. Playhouses, attics, Batcaves, lairs - they all figure heavily in the Burton lexicon of vividly specified worlds fed by a tension between horror and humor.

Jack Skellington's world - a series of sets separated by black velvet curtains in a San Francisco warehouse, where animators and technicians labored two years to produce 70 seconds of film a week - suggests a merger between a couple of deranged doctors, Caligari and Seuss. Sweetly scary, it's an environment that can bear comparisons to the Playskool surrealism of Pee-wee, the special-effects anarchy undermining the postmodern architecture in Beetlejuice, the inky urban metropolis imploded in Batman. Once Burton's drawings were executed and the script approved, he began the routine of journeying from Los Angeles to San Francisco every few weeks. Henry Selick was signed to direct; he was a pal from the days when he was also a frustrated animator at Disney ("He couldn't draw cute foxes, either"), and subsequently a success at stop-motion animation for MTV.

"I don't want to turn into this isolated, interiorized person focused on the work," Burton says, "and although I see similarities in retrospect between the films and the characters in them, I've never really consciously thought about it. I feel the reason I like Jack is I like his passion about something - his search for a feeling in himself and going out and trying something. When people get passionate, they get blinded a little bit. . . . There's something that's very beautiful about passion, no matter how absurd it is to anybody else. I enjoyed that about the Pee-wee character, that his whole passion was about his bike. It's, like, everybody's going, 'Well, this is stupid 'cause it's, like, who cares about a bike?' Well, he cares about his bike, and that's great. It doesn't matter what you care about as long as you care about something."

Burton's passion, it soon becomes clear in words that might be coming from his gentle, misunderstood Edward Scissorhands, lies in resisting pigeonholing. "It's like you're lumped into a category early on," he says. "It's like you're good at sports, you're not good. You're smart, you're stupid. People are all individuals, and society doesn't allow for that." Stung by criticism that his Batman sequel was too scary for kids, and sensitive about the possibility that his Halloween-tinged Christmas might be labeled similarly, Burton says: "You wonder who's doing the categorizing. It's like when I was in school, there was a group of people who were deemed the retarded class. The fact is, these people were not retarded, they were smart. It's just that society doesn't allow for the individual. It's a classic theme in literature, that kind of repression.

"So, yeah, it must be a theme in my pictures, it must be something, because I don't consciously seek them out. It's something that I was upset by from the very beginning and angry about and resisted from the very beginning. It's like I'll turn on 'America's Funniest Home Videos,' and get completely frightened about what that's about. It's live peeping-tom. That I get frightened by. You rarely hear about that stuff. It's like, as the culture crumbles around us, people get more self-righteous and offended by things. It's weird. It's a weird dynamic. At the same time, they get offended by things that are basically stupid entertainment. Things that are much more inherently disturbing kind of go unnoticed. It's sad."

"I just try to remain the way I was, which is really hard because - it's funny. Five years ago, if I didn't return people's phone calls, it was, like, 'You're the crazy artist.' But now, people get offended. It's like, if you don't return phone calls or whatever, it's like, 'What? You snot!' If I'm not returning a phone call, it's because I'm not a good businessman and I don't have good social skills. That's why I'm not calling you back. There's a lot of that stuff you have to deal with more.

"That's why I think I'm moving away from there, actually. I am going to get out. I grew up there and stuff, but I'm going to come to New York for a bit. You know, it's weird in LA. It's such an industry town. I can spend all day on the phone talking about nothing. It's a waste of time. When you're making a movie, all you want is people that are helping you make the movie. These executives start believing they know what they're talking about. They behave as if what they're doing is science. It's a joke, and I'm tired of it. You know, you either trust someone to make a movie, or you don't.

"I'll never forget these meetings where they're sitting talking to me about this movie I'm making now, Ed Wood, about the guy who made Plan 9 from Outer Space. They're sitting talking to me about my black-and-white movie that hardly costs anything, I'm making it for scale, and they're saying that people don't go to see black-and-white movies, or they don't go to this, or they don't go to that. Or this is too weird, or this is too that. I remember when they tried to change the title of Beetlejuice to House Ghosts. Who can predict? I can't predict. I don't pretend to. You only go by what you think. I like to deal with people that accept the fact that it's not a science."

Bill Murray and Johnny Depp, Burton's soulful Edward Scissorhands, are starring in the biofilm about Wood, the angora-fancying ex-Marine who made the '50s schlock classics Glen or Glenda, Jailbait, Revenge of the Dead and Bride of the Monster, in addition to the legendary Plan 9. (It is remembered, among other reasons, for being Bela Lugosi's last film; he died during the shoot, and his role was taken over by Wood's dentist.) Says Burton of the man celebrated in the film he took to Disney when another studio rejected it: "He was sort of my psychologist, I felt. I always felt like he got me through the abstractions of my early life with those movies. They helped me understand the drama of my life in a sort of abstract, fairy-tale way. I don't know, everybody's got - you know, for some people John Wayne does it. But that was mine."