Tim Burton's 5 Favorite Films

RottenTomatoes asked Tim Burton what five of his favorite films are. Here was his answer:



Dracula A.D. 1972 (1972)

"It was a great year for films. [laughs] Seeing that movie is one of the reasons I wanted to move to London, because it's quite swinging -- it's like this weird mixture of a Hammer horror film and swinging London. There's a scene where they cut from, I don't know, 1569 or whatever, and it cuts to rock music and a jet airplane, so there's a weird juxtaposition of things. I've gotten to know Christopher Lee over the years and I know that he would not say that this was one of his favorite films. I think it was Hammer on the decline and they thought, 'Hey, let's get hip,' which was a mistake. But I enjoy mistakes sometimes."



The Wicker Man (1974)

"It's like a weird musical. That is actually one of Christopher's favorite movies that he did, unlike the last one. It was not a very successful movie when it came out but it's really quite a hypnotic and amazing film I think. It's like a weird dream. Some of these films I can't kind of watch over, because they play in your mind like a dream. It reminds me of growing up in Burbank. Things are quite normal on the surface but underneath they're not quite what they seem. I found this film to be such a strange mixture; the elements are very odd."




The Golden Voyage of Sinbad (1973)

"Ray Harryhausen is another inspiration to me. He did it all himself, too, you know, in the days when it was difficult to do that. In his characters -- even the things that had no character -- you could feel an artist at work there. You could feel his hand in it, and that's rare, in any kind of film. His acting was better than the acting of the humans. It really tapped in to what I like about movies, I mean, the fantasy but also that handmade element, when you can see the movement of the characters -- it's like Frankenstein or Pinocchio, taking an inanimate object and having it come to life. That's why I still like to do stop-motion projects."



War of the Gargantuas (1970)

"One of my favorites. It's my two-year-old daughter's favorite movie. She's the green gargantua and my other son is the brown one, and she loves being the bad green gargantua. She's obsessed with it, as I was. I grew up watching Japanese science fiction movies and I particularly, unlike most hard core film people, like dubbed movies -- there's something about that language and the translation that somehow fits into the movie; it's like a weird poetry. There's a beauty to these films, the Japanese character designs -- there's a human kind of quality to these things, which I love. Monsters were always the most soulful characters. I don't know if it's because the actors were so bad, but the monsters were always the emotional focal point."



The Omega Man (1971)

"Seeing Charlton Heston reciting lines from Woodstock and wearing jumpsuits that look like he's out of Gilligan's Island -- there are lots of good things. The thing I liked about this is that the vampire characters were played by real people. They had a really cool look to them -- black robes, dark glasses. Not Charlton Heston with his shirt off. [laughs] I was kind of obsessed by him, because he's like the greatest bad actor of all time. Between this and Planet of the Apes and Soylent Green and The Ten Commandments -- I know that was a religious film but I always thought it was like the first zombie movie. He starts out like this real person and by the end he's like this weird zombie."

Charlton Heston, 1923-2008

Movie legend Charlton Heston passed away on Saturday, April 5th, 2008. He was 84. Lydia, his wife of 64 years, was by his side.

The Oscar-winning actor, president of the National Rifle Association, and Civil Rights activist was one of the last remnants of the so-called Golden Age of Hollywood. He starred in such monumental classics as Ben-Hur, The Ten Commandments, Touch of Evil, and the original Planet of the Apes, among many other films.

One of his last onscreen appearances was in Tim Burton's 2001 version of the science-fiction adventure Planet of the Apes. In the film, Heston appears in an unbilled, surprise cameo as a dying old chimpanzee, speaking to his violent son, the villainous Thade, played by Tim Roth.

On the DVD audio commentary track of the film, Burton recalls how exciting it was, working with this screen legend and hearing his booming voice in person.

Here's an excerpt of a review of Burton's film by Armond White of the New York Press from 2001. The review has a consideration portion focusing on Heston's brief appearance. You can read the full article, which also comments on the visual style, Tim Roth and Helena Bonham Carter's performances, and likens the movie to social satire, in this link:



Charlton Heston reveals the discreet charm of the Hollywood conservative in Tim Burton’s reimagined Planet of the Apes. In the 1968 original Heston starred as an American astronaut who discovers a future evolutionary reversal–a society ruled by apes, with humans as the captive species. Now, in an unbilled cameo, Heston plays one of the apes passing a legacy of violence and vengeance to his son Thade (a snarling, snorting Tim Roth). Once again evolution has played tricks on mankind by reasserting the atavistic animal within. And Heston displays this with rousing, hilarious aplomb. You might recall Laurence Olivier’s deathbed scene in Brideshead Revisited but Heston’s from-the-mountaintop voice ("Damn them all to hell!") is irresistible. It echoes through one’s movie memories–parodying aristocratic hubris and Heston himself.

Bequeathing an ancient relic–a gun–to a pre-Neanderthal is an irony surely not lost on NRA zealot Heston who, earlier this year, appeared as a dangerous, rifle-toting nut case in the Warren Beatty comedy Town & Country. When one of Burton’s primates sees a gun and asks, "Who would invent such a thing?" the obvious answer to the question resonates as Heston’s private joke–a punchline that hunts down liberal alarmists in their tracks. Fully cognizant of the misuse of firearms, Heston’s gag doesn’t deny the risks that guns entail. (The sense of the scene recalls that Simpsons joke when Homer, told he can only purchase a gun after an eight-day security check, whines, "But I’m angry now!") Heston’s scene reflects the gun control debate with imaginative complexity–as such sophisticated moralists Sam Peckinpah and John Boorman once were able to do. He goes pop–without isolating the issue or taking it past ambivalence to partisan oversimplification. In fact, Heston’s character curses "the power of invention, the power of technology... Against this our [physical] strength means nothing." It’s a startlingly humane plea coming from a dying simian patriarch who was a nearly pacifist ruler hiding the secret of weaponry. Knowing the catastrophe of humans’ unchecked aggression, Heston warns, "No creature is as dangerous...as violent." This twist is richer than any right- or left-wing rhetoric.