THE STUFF THAT DREAMS ARE MADE OF

By Michael Dwyer

From The Irish Times, 12.10.1994

Several people warned me about Tim Burton. He is decidedly eccentric, they whispered, totally wrapped up in his wild imagination, and consequently, very difficult to interview. Perhaps they were confusing the man with his movies, because they got it all wrong. Burton proved to be delightful, very talkative and bubbling with enthusiasm, when we met recently in London in a cosy little Notting Hill Gate hotel.

Stubbly, tousel haired and wearing wide framed tinted glasses, he waxed eloquently on his rich, varied output. The cinema of Tim Burton is wild, adventurous and literally fantastic vivid works of a fertile imagination which are rooted in human feelings, they regularly turn unexpectedly touching and are rarely less than involving.

Tim Burton was a schoolboy in the ninth grade when his talent was first recognised: he won a prize for an anti litter poster he designed and his artwork adorned the garbage trucks of Burbank, California, where he grew up. Although Burton has said his earliest ambition was to be the actor who played Godzilla, he turned his attention to studying animation; graduating in 1979, he went to work at the Walt Disney Studios on the animated features The Fox and the Hound and The Black Cauldron.

"When I was at Disney, animation was in a terrible state," Burton says. "I just wanted to get out. The talent was there, but they didn't have the foresight to see that people have a sense of quality and would respond to it. But I think the success of the recent Disney films has been good for animation."

However, it was the Disney studios which gave Tim Burton his first shot at directing, when he made the stop motion animated short film, Vincent, a homage to one of his childhood heroes, Vincent Price, and Burton secured the services of Price himself as the film's narrator. Before he left Disney in 1984, Burton also made the half hour black and white short, Frankenweenie, an innovative spin on the Frankenstein story in which a young boy brings his dog back to life.

When Tim Burton turned to making feature films, his choices were characteristically idiosyncratic: showcasing Paul Reuben's Pee wee Herman creation in PeeWee's Big Adventure; tackling the supernatural comedy, Beetlejuice featuring Alec Baldwin, Geena Davis, Winona Ryder and Michael Keaton; bringing a breadth of vision and imagination to the comic strip adaptation, Batman, and later turning out the much less inspired sequel, Batman Returns; and blending bravura visuals with a moving picture of another yet another outsider character, a man made creature with shears instead of hands in Edward Scissorhands, starring Johnny Depp and Vincent Price as the creature and his creator.

Opening here next week, the magical The Nightmare Before Christmas was first conceived by Burton 12 years ago when he was at Disney, and is directed by his former animation colleague, Henry Selick. They employ breathtaking stop motion animation and a wealth of imagination to tell the tale of the Pumpkin King of Halloweentown who, bored with the annual routine, accidentally discovers the brighter, livelier Christmastown and sets out to control it. The result is a beautiful and enthralling Gothic adventure, but it has been given a PG (parental guidance) certificate because it may prove too scary for very young viewers.

Burton disagrees. "I've never gone along with that line of thinking, he says. "I've run up against that ever since I started making movies. First of all, what's oddest is that nothing I've done has ever been geared towards adults or kids. It just turns out the way it does - kids just happen to like it, but then adults view it and think it's too weird or dark for children. I've never understood why, because most fantasy and fairytale stuff is based on darker material than this - take Pinocchio, which is really terrifying. I think that people, as they get older, are losing sight of their own childhood and they underestimate children. You know, children are their own critics, their own barometers - if something's too scary for them, they'll leave."

Burton was content to write and produce The Nightmare Before Christmas and to leave his old friend, Selick, to direct it. "I'm very happy with the way it worked out," he says. "It was very comfortable for every one of us. When I was in animation, I had to get out because I didn't have the patience for it. To me, the artistic spirit is very spontaneous - when you get a thought that's very creative or exhilarating, and then you apply it to this long drawn out process, it's very difficult. And this type of animation (stop motion) is even more difficult because it takes so long. What keeps you going through making a movie like Nightmare is the energising feeling you get when each of those shots come through."

Since making Nightmare, Tim Burton has completed the live action feature, Ed Wood, an infectiously affectionate tribute to the director of the famously incompetent 1950s no budget productions, Glen or Glenda? and Plan 9 From Outer Space. A transvestite who married twice, Wood often turned up dressed in angora on his own film sets. Burton's film, which features a superb, flamboyant performance by Johnny Depp in the title role, views Wood as a naive innocent, a well intentioned and totally dedicated film maker blissfully unaware of his own ineptitude.

"When I read Ed Wood's letters, I was very taken with how he perceived himself," Tim Burton says. "He wrote about his films as if he was making Citizen Kane, you know, whereas other people perceived them as, like, the worst movies ever. In American culture it's so easy to make fun of people. But, however good or bad Ed Wood's films were, the fact is that he did what he did with a passion that is lacking in a lot of people in America."

It's Johnny Depp's second time to play a misunderstood Edward for Tim Burton. "I guess we only work together on movies with the name Ed in the title," the director laughs. "Johnny is just great. Edward Scissorhands was very interiorised, whereas Ed Wood is very externalised. I like actors who are adaptable and the way they can transform themselves - it's so much more interesting than all those actors who are the same in everything they do."

The other remarkable performance in Ed Wood comes from the versatile veteran, Martin Landau, as Wood's mentor, Bela Lugosi. Landau's hypnotic performance may well earn him the Oscar for best supporting actor come the spring. "Martin has done it all, from Hitchcock to Gilligan's Island, so he knows all about the highs and lows of an acting career and I believe, he understood emotionally what Bela Lugosi went through. Martin did an incredible transformation - playing a real person, yet somebody who was so weird and out of it at that time of his life."

Meanwhile, the third film in the Batman series is now in production, but without Tim Burton as director or Michael Keaton in the lead - Joel Schumacher is at the helm of Batman Forever and Val Kilmer has taken over the dual role of Batman and Bruce Wayne. Burton says he is more interested in developing his planned film focussing on the Catwoman character played by Michelle Pfeiffer in Batman Returns, and he is writing a screenplay with Pfeiffer in mind.

Burton is, in his own words, "involved a little bit" with the production of Batman Forever. "I know the director and I think he's going to do a good job," he says. "The characters are great - it's a primal kind of thing. I grew up loving those characters. Of all the comics, it's got a foundation to it that's great. I remember when we cast Michael as Batman, everyone was shocked, and I think Val Kilmer will do a good job, too. He's thoughtful, he's committed and he knows what he's up against."

Burton says he was not surprised when Michael Keaton pulled out of Batman Forever. "Everyone has their own reasons for doing or not doing things. No matter how much of a business movies are, it's still wise to treat them as an art form and to put your passions where they apply. My approach always starts with the question: Can I really do this and am I going to put 100 per cent passion into it? Every project requires that."

Tim Burton's The Nightmare Before Christmas, accompanied by the short film, Vincent, goes on Irish release next Friday. Ed Wood will open here in May or June.