Sun-drenched Santa Monica Beach is perhaps the last place you’d expect to find Tim Burton, the gothic genius behind
Batman Returns and
Beetlejuice. And the last place he expected to find himself on this bright October afternoon. “Yeah, well, it’s the furthest you can get from the city,” he jokes, gesturing around the swanky beachside hotel, a half-hour drive from downtown Los Angeles. “At least I can start swimming if it all gets too much.”
Burton is not altogether pleased to be back in his native California, which he finally left four years ago to settle in London. It’s something about the predictable sunshine, the suburban sprawl, the . . . well, conformity of it all that gives him the shudders. “It frightens me,” he confesses, peering up through his tangled black fringe.
Burton is in town for the relaunch of his off-beat classic, The Nightmare Before Christmas, which Disney has remastered in 3-D for a new generation of filmgoers. The movie will be shown at The Times BFILondon Film festival tomorrow. The tale of Jack Skellington, the lonely Pumpkin King of Hallowe’en, who falls through a door in a tree trunk and finds himself in the sugar-coated world of Christmas, is classic Burton, from its skeletal reindeers to its Frankenstein’s monster heroine. A dark world away from the sunlit ’burbs of Burbank, where Burton grew up. Yet, like all his most gothic screen creations, that is where it sprang from.
Little Tim was a quiet boy who loved drawing and watching monster movies. “I was always kind of like a foreigner here,” he says of seasonless southern California. Hallowe’en was not his favourite festival; that was Christmas, when he could tune his TV to animated classics such as Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer and The Grinch that Stole Christmas, and dream that he too was in a land where it snowed.
Suburbia was anathema to a boy who dreamt of becoming Vincent Price. High school was a trial to be survived until he escaped. But when he did, and became an animation artist, by way of art school, it was at Disney, at the time the studio equivalent of the conformity he was trying to escape.
Bored with sketching cute animals for cheesy classics such as The Fox and the Hound (“I was really bad at it — if you see foxes that look as if they’ve been hit by a car, those are probably mine.”), Burton persuaded his bosses to let him work on his own ideas. And from his childhood love of Christmas, the Nightmare film was born. Now Burton is more than accepted: he is a cult director, a celebrated visionary, but adored by film aficionados and mass audiences alike. He has the movie-star girlfriend, Helena Bonham Carter, mother of his son, Billy. And a long-running muse, Johnny Depp. He is, I suggest, Hollywood royalty.
He shakes his head, laughing. “See, the thing about that is that it’s a misperception,” he says. Projects of his still get turned down, or fall through along the way, which is “devastating”. Perhaps it’s because, for all his success, Burton has never really got over being the weird kid watching monster movies while the cool crowd hung out in the sun.
Think of Edward Scissorhands, the near-mute hero of the movie he calls his most autobiographical. Edward, the shy creation of a modern-day Dr Frankenstein, is driven back to his lonely hell on the fringes of society by a mob of angry suburbanites.
Crikey, what did they do to him, those Burbank kids? “I grew up feeling like, well, they made you feel like you’re the odd thing in that situation when it’s the environment itself that’s the strange thing,” he explains. The environment was the inspiration for the candy-coloured, creepily conformist Midland, the setting of Scissorhands.
“There are a lot of projects that explore the dark side of suburbia and there is a reason for it because there is a dark side,” Burton continues. “It’s got that mask of normalcy which is truly disturbing.” Not something of which Burton himself could be accused. If anything, it is his mask that is abnormal, the side he likes to project, with his black outfits and his wild mop of black hair. That, and the gothic preoccupations of his films, the skeleton imagery and obsessions with Frankenstein myths and the afterlife, have all conspired to give him the reputation of being “dark”. Has he grown tired of that oft-repeated epithet? “Yeah, because it’s obviously not true,” he sighs. “Really. I could come out in a light-blue leisure suit and it still wouldn’t change people’s take on you. We all have our moments of depression or darkness but it’s not like I’m hanging out in a cave.” I believe him and not just because today he’s wearing a grey striped shirt instead of black. Tim Burton isn’t dark; he’s funny and sweet and likeable — just like his films, which aren’t really that dark either. The soul of Nightmare is sweetness itself; it’s only the wrapping that has skulls on. Jack Skellington is full of childish glee when he arrives in Christmastown, and tries to steal Christmas for himself not out of mean-spiritedness but delight at this shiny, snowy thing after all those ghosts and grimness.
Burton has even let his own son watch it, “well, parts of it”, despite the parental guidance warning for the scary bits. “But he’s OK with the imagery of it because he has it all over his room,” he says, referring to the Jack pillows and figures that decorate his son’s lair.
So will little Billy grow up being called a weirdo by his schoolmates, living as he does in the Burton residence, the two adjoining houses that Burton and Bonham-Carter share in Belsize Park, North London, linked by a corridor? “Well, you never know whether they are going to have a response against one parent or another,” he says. “There are these hippy parents that end up with these kids who are accountants and Republicans . . . I dunno.” So far, however, Billy is showing a pleasing affinity for stop-motion, the painstaking and dying art of puppet animation used in Nightmare. “If you were to pick his favourite programmes, they are all stop-motion — Bob the Builder and Pingu,” Burton says, happily.
Billy is in London right now with his mother; Burton will soon be back himself, after a quick stop in Japan to promote the new Nightmare. He can’t wait. “I’ve always felt better there. I’m not sure why. It took me to go to some place else to feel more comfortable, more at home,” he says. “I felt that the first time I went to London. It was like the first past-life experience I’d ever had, that somehow I belonged there.”
London will also serve as the setting of his next project, a movie version of the Stephen Sondheim musical Sweeney Todd, his sixth collaboration with Depp. That is, if the project does not fall through. “I’m holding my breath,” Burton says. I’m not. Any studio would have to be nutty to reject a project from such a team. But that’s not how Burton thinks.
“I think if you are tortured in high school, you never forget that,” he says. “It either destroys you or makes you fight for certain things. Or it can make you see things in ways that are a bit more unexpected.”
The Nightmare Before Christmas: Special Edition is out now on DVD; The Nightmare Before Christmas is showing at The Times BFI Film Festival on Sunday at Vue West End, London WC2 (www.lff.org.uk) at 3pm
