Tim Burton Art Exhibit Opens in Prague

Original article from PraguePost.com by Raymond Johnson: http://www.praguepost.com/night-day/38024-exhibition-the-world-of-tim-burton-opens-in-prague

The famous director was in Prague to introduce a show of his props and drawings
In what is surely to be the most popular exhibition of the year, 500 items from film director Tim Burton’s archives of more than 10,000 film-related pieces are going on display in Prague. Some 150 of them have never been shown to the public before.

The World of Tim Burton
When: March 28–Aug. 3; Tues–Sun 10 a.m.–8 p.m.
Where: House of the Stone Bell
Tickets: 190 Kč, purchased in advance from Ticketpro (recommended)
Timburton.cz

The show includes not only props and sketches relating to his famous hit movies, but also drawings for unrealized projects ranging from another Batman sequel to Little Dead Riding Hood. Parts of comics he drew before he was famous, travel sketches and large-format Polaroid pictures round out the sections of the show.

Many of the items were never meant to be seen publicly, but were just part of the creative process. “It’s a strange thing to have things that are sort of private and personal showing in public. For me, drawings have always been a way of thinking, a form of communicating. … I was never a very good speaker, talker, so I always found it was easier for me to communicate through drawing,” Burton said at a press conference. “When I worked at Disney as an animator, I used to hide in the closet for most of the day.”

All of the items have his trademark dark sense of humor, or “carnivalesque interplay between comedy and the grotesque,” as curator Jenny He told the press.

The main theme of the exhibition is the well-meaning but misunderstood outcast who rebels against conformity by creativity, Jenny He said. “We invite visitors into Tim Burton’s world and hope they discover their own personal viewpoint of Tim’s unique and singular output,” she added.

Concept art for Planet of the Apes (2001)

Burton gave Jenny He and her team free access to his archives and let them “go through everything” to pick the items for the show. He helped to identify what pieces related to what films or unrealized projects.

A different version of the show was at the Museum of Modern Art in New York in 2009 and drew 800,000 visitors, making it that museum’s third-most popular show. “It is smaller than the other show. But … this is a unique city, so we tried to put pieces in that we felt were part of the spirit of what we feel about Prague,” Burton said. He also praised the work of the Czech designers that created the space for the show.

Concept art of Emily for Corpse Bride (2005)

He likes that the previous version of the show was popular. “Growing up in the culture I did, I didn’t go to museums a lot. The culture of art and museums was different, and not inviting. The thing that this show did was it got people that usually wouldn’t go to a museum to go to a museum and see stuff that they wouldn’t usually see in a museum,” he said.
Jenny He said that it was fitting to have the exhibition in Prague because of the city’s rich history with stop-motion animation. Burton used this technique in films like his production of Nightmare Before Christmas, which has many items in the exhibit. “At a time when we are going to infinity and beyond with CGI, Tim brought animation back to its roots,” she said.

Stop-motion puppet for Mars Attacks! (1996), which was eventually scrapped for CG creatures in the final film.

Burton cited Czech animator Karel Zeman as an influence. “[I saw] his films like [The Fabulous] Baron Munchausen, and I remember some dinosaur series. … And where I grew up in Burbank there was a documentary on Karel Zeman that showed his process. That was extremely inspirational to me. He and Ray Harryhausen were probably two inspirations in terms of wanting to remain true to doing stop-motion and [having] a handmade quality. They did that amazingly. You saw this process, and I’ll never forget that. It was very inspirational,” Burton said.

He also had praise for Czech filmmaker Jan Švankmajer. “He does amazing work. The history here in terms of animation, this is again why I am so happy to be here. There are so many amazing animators throughout the history of this country. As computers have taken over the world, this place still — as you walk around the city — this place has the feeling of art and handmade. It continues here; it’s incredible,” he said.

He also noted the mixture of darkness and humor in Czech art. “Without really thinking of it, I was very influenced by this place.”

Even further back in time, he was excited by children’s books. “Some of my earliest influences were [books by] Dr. Seuss. I loved his artwork and stories and his imagination. My influences came from lots of things, monster movies. Not so much art, but films were definitely an inspiration.”

The dark nature of Burton’s work is a form of therapy, he said. “For me it is getting feelings out that are sometimes trapped inside. … It’s always kept me alive,” he said. He began drawing as a child and just kept going with it, despite not being particularly good at it, in his own estimation. “It was a form of expression.” He also dabbled in filmmaking in his youth.

Stop-motion puppet of Victor from Frankenweenie (2012)

“I went to Cal Arts and worked at Disney because of the combination of film and drawing [in animation]. It made the most sense to pursue that,” he said, adding that it was a great way to learn about the entire filmmaking process.
He likes working with Johnny Depp because that actor takes risks. “He doesn’t mind looking ridiculous. It helps when an actor is willing to try to do things in different ways. He’s always been that way for me,” he said. But Burton isn’t concerned with wanting to work with particular actors. “For me it is all about the part. It really stems from what the piece is and who is the best person to play it. I always try to remain open minded. I do like people like Johnny who don’t mind looking ridiculous.”

Burton thinks all of his films are special in some way but says he likes Edward Scissorhands and Nightmare Before Christmas in particular. “Those are slightly more personal,” he said. But he likes all of his films, even though he seldom goes back to rewatch them. “They are all special in some way. Even if they are horrible films, there is something for me that in terms of making it or whatever is special,” he said.

Costumes for Deep Roy as the Oompa Loompa's in Charlie and the Chocolate Factory (2005)

While Prague is known for filmmaking, Burton only filmed here once. In 2000 he made two commercials for watch company Timex. “It was fun to shoot in Prague. It was a strange experience, it was great. Our production office was in brothel. I kept walking in, going in and out doing something, and I was going, ‘Who are these girls, and what do they do sitting here?’ and I found out. This was our production office,” he said.

“Because I knew of some of the artists like Karel Zeman, I was aware of the vibe of the city, and I always wanted to visit, so working here, it is always better to do something like that than to be a tourist because you can really get to know people, you can work with them, with the artists. … So that was very special. In some ways it is a better way to get a sense of the place and the city and people, working rather than touring,” he said.

Tim Burton: At Home in His Own Head

The New York Times published a thorough article about and interview with filmmaker Tim Burton. Here it is in its entirety:

September 19, 2012
Tim Burton, at Home in His Own Head
By DAVE ITZKOFF
LONDON

IT would be a tremendous disappointment if Tim Burton’s inner sanctum turned out to be a sterile environment, barren except for a telephone on its cold white floor; or a cubicle with a “World’s Greatest Dad” coffee mug. Instead, the workplace of the filmmaker behind invitingly grim delights like “Beetlejuice” and “Edward Scissorhands” is a definitive Burtonesque experience: on a hill here in north London, behind a brick wall and a mournful tree, in a Victorian residence that once belonged to the children’s book illustrator Arthur Rackham, it lies at the top of a winding staircase guarded by the imposing portraits of Boris Karloff and Christopher Lee. Its décor is best characterized as Modern Nonconformist (unless Ultraman toys and models of skeletal warriors are your thing), and when the master of the house greets you, his drinking glass will bear a poster image for “The Curse of Frankenstein.”

That the word Burtonesque has become part of the cultural lexicon hints at the surprising influence Mr. Burton, 54, has accumulated in a directorial career that spans 16 features and nearly 30 years. Across films as disparate as “Ed Wood,” “Alice in Wonderland” and “Big Fish” — released to varying critical and commercial receptions — he has developed a singular if not easily pinned-down sensibility. His style is strongly visual, darkly comic and morbidly fixated, but it is rooted just as much in his affection for monsters and misfits (which in his movies often turn out to be the same thing). He all but invented the vocabulary of the modern superhero movie (with “Batman"), brought new vitality to stop-motion animation (with “Corpse Bride,” directed with Mike Johnson, and “The Nightmare Before Christmas,” which Mr. Burton produced) and has come to be associated, for better or worse, with anything that is ghoulish or ghastly without being inaccessible. He may be the most widely embraced loner in contemporary cinema.

His success has also transported him from sleepy, suburban Southern California, where he grew up and graduated from the California Institute of the Arts, to London, where he lives with his partner, the actress Helena Bonham Carter, and their two young children, and where he has come to embrace the sensation of being perpetually out of place.

“I just feel like a foreigner,” Mr. Burton said in his cheerful, elliptical manner. “Feeling that weird foreign quality just makes you feel more, strangely, at home.”

On a recent morning Mr. Burton, dressed entirely in black, was talking about his new animated feature, “Frankenweenie,” which will be released by Walt Disney on Oct. 5., and which tells the charming story of a young boy (named Victor Frankenstein) who reanimates the corpse of his dead pet dog.

Like its director “Frankenweenie” is simultaneously modern and retrograde: the film, which is being released in 3-D black-and-white, is adapted from a live-action short that Mr. Burton made for Disney in 1984, when he was a struggling animator. That project did not get the wide release Mr. Burton hoped for, but it paved the way for him to direct his first feature, “Pee-wee’s Big Adventure,” the following year.

As he spoke (and occasionally shaped his feral, curly hair into something resembling satyr horns), Mr. Burton was in a nostalgic mood but also a defiant one. That may have been the result of the tepid reception that greeted “Dark Shadows,” his big-budget remake of the TV soap opera (which Mr. Burton said did not disappoint him), or a reluctance to analyze trends in his career. Whether he was talking about his upbringing in Burbank, his earliest frustration at Disney or the unexpected honor of a career retrospective presented at the Museum of Modern Art and other institutions, Mr. Burton still casts himself as an outsider.

“Wanting people to like you is nice, but I’m confident that there’s always going to be lots that don’t,” Mr. Burton said with gallows humor and genuine pride. “I’ll always be able to hang on to that.” These are excerpts from this conversation.


Q. Not only does “Frankenweenie” hark back to the start of your career, it seems to refer to many of the features you’ve made since the original short. Is that by design?

A. If I really thought about it, that’s something I would probably not do. [Laughs.] I don’t consciously make those points of: I did this, I’m going to put that in there as a reference to myself. Things that I grew up with stay with me. You start a certain way, and then you spend your whole life trying to find a certain simplicity that you had. It’s less about staying in childhood than keeping a certain spirit of seeing things in a different way.

Q. How much of your childhood are we seeing in Victor’s isolation?

A. I felt like an outcast. At the same time I felt quite normal. I think a lot of kids feel alone and slightly isolated and in their own world. I don’t believe the feelings I had were unique. You can sit in a classroom and feel like no one understands you, and you’re Vincent Price in “House of Usher.” I would imagine, if you talk to every single kid, most of them probably felt similarly. But I felt very tortured as a teenager. That’s where “Edward Scissorhands” came from. I was probably clinically depressed and didn’t know it.

Q. Were you encouraged to try sports?

A. My dad was a professional baseball player. He got injured early in his career, so he didn’t fulfill that dream of his. He ended up working for the sports department of the city of Burbank. I did some sports. It was a bit frustrating. I wasn’t the greatest sports person.

Q. That can be deeply disheartening at that age, to learn that you’re bad at something.

A. It’s the same with drawing. If you look at children’s drawings, they’re all great. And then at a certain point, even when they’re about 7 or 8 or 9, they go, “Oh, I can’t draw.” Well, yes, you can. I went through that same thing, even when I started to go to CalArts, and a couple of teachers said: “Don’t worry about it. If you like to draw, just draw.” And that just liberated me. My mother wasn’t an artist, but she made these weird owls out of pine cones, or cat needlepoint things. There’s an outlet for everyone, you know?

Q. Were horror films and B movies easily accessible when you were growing up?

A. They’d show monster movies on regular TV then, which they wouldn’t show now. Some of them were pretty hard core, like “The Brain That Wouldn’t Die,” or something where a guy gets his arm ripped off and is bleeding down the wall. My parents were a bit freaked out. [Laughs.] But better that I’m watching TV than them having to watch me or deal with me.

Q. There are emotions and experiences in “Frankenweenie” that audiences don’t often associate with Disney features.

A. People get worried and they go, “Oh my God, the dog gets hit by a car.” It’s funny how people are afraid of their emotions. I remember the original short was supposed to go out with “Pinocchio,” and they got all freaked out about it, like kids would be running, screaming, from the theater.

Q. Do you find poetic justice in the fact that, after all that, Disney is the studio that’s releasing “Frankenweenie"?

A. I feel like I’ve been through a revolving door over the years, and from my first time there as an animator to “Frankenweenie” to “Nightmare” and “Ed Wood,” it’s always been the same reaction: “Come back,” and then “Hmmm, I don’t know.” After I stopped working on “The Fox and the Hound” and trying to be a Disney animator — which was useless — they gave me the opportunity, for a year or two, to draw whatever I wanted. I felt quite grateful for it. At the same time I felt like Rapunzel, a princess trapped in a tower. I had everything I needed except the light of day. I felt they didn’t really want me, and luckily Warner Brothers and Paul Reubens and the producers of “Pee-wee” saw the movie and gave me a chance.

Q. If “Pee-wee’s Big Adventure” and “Beetlejuice” hadn’t been hits, would that have been the end of your filmmaking career?

A. I always felt bad for people whose first movie is a gigantic hit. [Laughs.] They were movies that were under the radar in a certain way. They’re both low-budget in terms of studio movies. Both were moderate hits, and were on some of the “10 worst movies of the year” lists. I learned quite early on: don’t get too excited, don’t get too complacent, don’t get too egotistical.

Q. When you see, 23 years after “Batman,” the extent to which superhero movies have become the backbone of Hollywood, do you feel a sense of pride or ownership?

A. No, not ownership. At the time it felt like the first attempt at a darker version of a comic book. Now it looks like a lighthearted romp. If I recall correctly, it wasn’t the greatest-received critical movie. So I do feel strange for getting such a bad rap on some level, and nobody mentions, oh, maybe it helped start something.

Q. When you worked with Johnny Depp for the first time, on “Edward Scissorhands,” what was it that connected you to him?

A. Here was a guy who was perceived as this thing — this Tiger Beat teen idol. But just meeting him, I could tell, without knowing the guy, he wasn’t that as a person. Very simply, he fit the profile of the character. We were in Florida in 90-degree heat, and he couldn’t use his hands, and he was wearing a leather outfit and covered head to toe with makeup. I was impressed by his strength and stamina. I remember Jack Nicholson showed me this book about mask acting and how it unleashes something else in a person. I’ve always been impressed by anybody that was willing to do that. Because a lot of actors don’t want to cover [theatrical voice] “the instrument.”

Q. Has your relationship with Johnny changed as your careers have evolved?

A. There’s always been a shorthand. He’s always been able to decipher my ramblings. To me he’s more like a Boris Karloff-type actor, a character actor, than a leading man. The only thing that changes — and this is something I try not to pay any attention to — is how the outside world perceives it. [Snidely] “Oh, you’re working with Johnny again?” “Oh, how come you’re not working with him this time?” You can’t win. I give up.

Q. You don’t have a formal repertory company, but there seem to be certain actors you come back to.

A. [Sighs.] I don’t want to respond to criticism I hear. People that go, “Oh, he’s using her again,” or “He’s using him again.” I’ve enjoyed pretty much everybody I’ve worked with. But it’s good to mix it up. If somebody’s right for the part — I’ve worked with them? Fine. Haven’t? Fine.

Q. Having a life with Helena Bonham Carter, do you have to be more careful about how you use her in your films?

A. The great thing about her is that, long before I met her, she had a full career. She’s also willing to do things that aren’t necessarily glamorous or attractive [Laughs], and I admire her for that. We’ve learned how to leave things at home, make it more of a sanctuary. But I probably take a slight, extra moment to think about it. On “Sweeney Todd” it was quite rough. Nobody was a singer, so I looked at lots of people. Everybody had to audition for it; she did as well. That one was a struggle, because I felt like, jeez, there’s a lot of great singers, and it’s going to look like I gave this one to my girlfriend. She really went through an extra process.

Q. In your last couple of movies you’ve burned her to a crisp, you’ve dumped her at the bottom of the ocean ——

A. I know. But she’s getting it on other movies. She’s being burned up alive a lot lately, or she’s getting set on fire quite a lot. Again, I’ve set another trend.

Q. Your “Planet of the Apes” remake introduced you to Helena, but was it otherwise a professional low for you?

A. Yeah. I’ve tried to learn my lesson. It usually happens on bigger-budget movies. You go into it, and there’s something about it I like, the studio wants to do it. But the budget’s not set and the script’s not set. So you’ve got this moving train. You’re working on it, and you’re cutting this because the budget’s too big, and you feel like an accountant. It’s certainly perceived as one of my least successful films. But at the same time I met with and worked with a lot of people that I loved.

Q. Will you ever explain its ending?

A. I had it all worked out. But it’s my own private thing. Someday we’ll go take some LSD and we’ll talk about it.

Q. Your recent films, like “Sweeney Todd,” “Alice in Wonderland” and “Charlie and the Chocolate Factory,"have all in some way been based on existing properties.

A. I’ve heard that, but a lot of things are, in a way. Even “Alice,” there’s a book, there’s lots of different versions. But there was no movie I would look to and go, “Ooh, we’re going to have to top that ‘Alice.’ “

Q. Is it harder to put your personal stamp on something you didn’t create from the ground up?

A. For me, no. It may be perceived that way, but I have to personalize everything, whether or not it comes from me. If I were to cherry-pick things, even “Ed Wood” was based on a book, it’s based on a person. “Sweeney Todd” is one of my more personal movies, because the Sweeney Todd character is a character I completely related to. Even in “Planet of the Apes” there are things I have to relate to, otherwise I just can’t do it. “Frankenweenie” is a bit more pure that way. But you could argue it’s based on a short which is based on lots of other movies.

Q. Is it a danger when you have a style that’s so distinctive it becomes boilerplate and imitated?

A. It does bother me a bit. People thought I made “Coraline.” Henry [Selick, who directed “Coraline” and “The Nightmare Before Christmas"] is a great filmmaker, but when they say something, they should have to say the person’s name. “From the producer of " — well, there’s eight producers. It’s slightly misleading. Not slightly, it’s very misleading, and that’s not fair to the consumer. Have the courage to go out under your own name. But I don’t have any control over that, and it’s not going to make me change. I can’t change my personality. Sometimes I wish I could, but I can’t.

Q. Do you think that overfamiliarity might have been a problem with “Dark Shadows,” that people saw it was you, and Johnny, and monsters, and they thought, “I’ve seen this before"?

A. Even the fact that it was deemed a failure — financially, it wasn’t really. It may not have set the world on fire, but it made its money back plus some, so I can tick that off as not being a total disaster. There’s some people that I talk to that liked it. “Alice” got critically panned. It made over a billion, I guess, whatever. “Ed Wood” got a lot of critical acclaim, it was a complete bomb. It all has a weird way of balancing itself out.

Q. When you’ve had your own retrospective at the Museum of Modern Art, do you feel bulletproof after that?

A. That was surreal. A lot of people thought I manufactured that, which I didn’t. They came to me and I was actually quite freaked out about it. To me, it was all private. It was never meant as, like, great art. It’s like hanging your laundry on the wall. “Oh, look, there’s his dirty socks and underwear.” But with the curators I felt I was in good hands, and they were just presenting it like, this is his process, this is what he does.

Q. Did it come with unforeseen pitfalls?

A. It followed suit with the movies. It got dismissed as “It’s not art.” Which I agree with.

Q. Are there other, more traditional forms of recognition you’d still like to earn?

A. Like public office?

Q. Like an Academy Award?

A. I grew up on movies like “Dr. Phibes,” that were not Academy Award-contending movies. [Laughs.] It’s not something that I’ve got to win. It’s like getting into film — I didn’t say early on, “I’m going to become a filmmaker,” “I’m going to show my work at MoMA.” When you start to think those things, you’re in trouble. Surprises are good. They become rarer and rarer as you go on. But anything like that is special. I’m not Woody Allen yet.

Q. This may seem strange to ask someone with many years of work still ahead, but what would you want your legacy to be?

A. What do I want on my gravestone?

Q. It sounds like something you’ve thought about.

A. I do. I think it’s wise to plan ahead. Start early — plan your funeral now. It’s not a morbid thought. If you want something to happen in a certain way, especially the last thing, you might as well.

The thing that I care about most — that you did something that really had an impact on them. People come up on the street, and they have a “Nightmare” tattoo, or little girls saying they love “Sweeney Todd,” and you’re like, “How were you able to see it?” Or you see people, especially around Halloween, dressed up in costume, as Corpse Bride or the Mad Hatter or Sally. It’s not critics, it’s not box office. Things that you know are connecting with real people.

Q. Is there something unrepentantly crowd-pleasing that you’ll admit to enjoying?

A. I’m always bad at this. Name something.

Q. Well, now that “Downton Abbey” is back on in Britain, will you watch it?

A. No. Helena, that’s more her kind of thing. That one I don’t quite get. To me that’s like getting a morphine injection on a Sunday night. And that can have its positives. But not my cup of tea. There’s shows like “MasterChef,” which I cry at. I don’t know why. I find it quite emotional when they cook something, and it doesn’t work out. Movies, I can’t quite think of, but especially if I’m on an airplane — I don’t know why, maybe because you constantly think you’re going to die — I find every movie, I cry if I watch it on a plane.

Q. I had that reaction to “Love Actually.”

A. [Draws a breath.] Ooh, no, no. I saw that with Helena, and I’ll never forget the ad campaign on that one. It was like, “If you don’t love this movie, there’s something wrong with you.” And we saw it, and we got into a fight and argued all the way home. It was the same with “Mamma Mia!” For a feel-good movie, I’ve never been so depressed.

Q. Your kids are old enough to see movies. Do you try to influence their tastes?

A. I don’t overly push it. I was quite proud when my daughter’s favorite movie was “War of the Gargantuas.” But now that she’s older, she’s gone off from that a bit. I don’t push my things on them. If they’re into it, they’re into it. They’ll find it, or not. You’ve got to let them find their way.

Michael Clarke Duncan, 1957-2012

Actor Michael Clarke Duncan passed away on Monday, September 5th. He was 54, and died at Cedars-Sinai Medical Center in Los Angeles, according to a statement from his publicist, Joy Fehily. He had suffered a heart attack in July and did not recover.

Duncan had always aspired to be an actor, and his dreams were made into a reality. He appeared in numerous films, including The Green Mile, Sin City, and Tim Burton's Planet of the Apes, among many others.

Growing up on Chicago's South Side, he harbored dreams of becoming an actor.

"Of course, people told me, 'Mikey, you will never be an actor. You don't have the look. You're ugly,'" he recalled in a 2003 Chicago Sun-Times interview.

But Duncan made his dreams a reality, and portrayed unforgettable characters that will live on.

Richard D. Zanuck, 1934-2012

Famed Hollywood producer Richard D. Zanuck died on the morning of Friday, July 13th, 2012 of a heart attack. He was 77 years old.

Zanuck produced numerous films, including Jaws, Driving Miss Daisy, and True Crime, among others.

Zanuck also served as producer on six of Tim Burton's films: Planet of the Apes (2001), Big Fish (2003), Charlie and the Chocolate Factory (2005), Sweeney Todd: The Demon Barber of Fleet Street (2007), Alice in Wonderland (2010), and Dark Shadows (2012).

You can read more about the working relationship of Tim Burton and Richard D. Zanuck that lasted over a decade in this article by clicking here.

Production Designer Rick Heinrichs on "Frankenweenie"

Collider recently caught up with Rick Heinrichs, production designer on Frankenweenie. The production designer has worked with Burton on numerous films in different capacities: Edward Scissorhands, Batman Returns, The Nightmare Before Christmas, Sleepy Hollow, Planet of the Apes, Dark Shadows, and their first black and white, stop-motion animated film, the short Vincent (back in 1982), as well as the original live-action Frankenweenie short in 1984, to name a few. Heinrichs discussed his role on the new black and white, stop-motion animated film which will be released in theaters on October 5th, as well as his working relationship and friendship with Tim Burton, which dates back to over thirty years ago when they were film students:

Question: How did you get involved with this project?

RICK HEINRICHS: Let’s see, 30 years ago, we did the live-action Frankenweenie, and it was a fruition of a certain period of development that Tim [Burton] and I had gone through from CalArts to Disney. That was the last thing we did at Disney, at that time. In fact, we did Frankenweenie after we developing another little TV show that we were trying to sell, called The Nightmare Before Christmas, and that ended up happening later, as well. I was actually surprised to find out that a stop-motion version of Frankenweenie was going to happen, but the more I thought about it, the more I thought, “What a great idea!” I loved the live action version, and there was something great about doing all of the design sets on stage, in addition to the location and the interiors, and it got my own wheels turning about doing live-action films, in the future, which I have continued to do. But then the idea of looking at this again, as much as I love it, there’s things that I wish we could have fixed about it. How often do you get to redo things like that? Doing it as a stop-motion animated film is appealing because that’s my passion. And, Tim and I did Vincent together, many years ago, as a kick-off for those. I think when you see the film, you can see how sophisticated it’s become. What I love about it is that it still feels handmade. You can still see the hand of the animator in there, and all of the passion that they’re putting into the character. You don’t necessarily think about it when you’re watching it, which is great. It does feel like the actors are really acting. Those animators are just amazing, the way they act through these puppets. In terms of design, it’s amazing to see it in black and white again, and really play with the tonal values in a much more controlled way, this time. When you’re doing a live-action film, you’re dealing with a lot more people and, as much as you want to control the sets and control the lighting, it’s like wearing boxing gloves to try to do something delicate. With stop-motion animation, the cinematographer is lighting the set, and the set decorators and the model makers and the animators are all people you’re talking directly to. You can fix things. It’s on a scale where it’s all fixable, and you can continue to manipulate things until it shoots. It’s a longer process of prep and production as well, so you can really bring more, continuity to bear, on the whole process.

What’s the most complex set in the film?

HEINRICHS: Well, the town is probably our most complex set. For any number of reasons of efficiencies, we really tried to restrict how that was going to get shot and be reasonable and, at the same time, give the sense of the character of the town, as a background of the people. Whenever we prepare for these things, we always design much more than we end up doing, so we have lots and lots of stores that we designed. It lives in this pseudo-Burbank world, which is where Tim grew up, coincidentally, but not exactly. It’s post-war Southwestern America. It shares a little bit of design similarity to Edward Scissorhands, in the scene of a neighborhood or a flat sense of normal with this one aberration, sticking up in the background, which is very much of a signature motif for Tim. A lot of what he tries to do is to establish a sense of what’s normal and show how that can be somewhat monstrous, in its own way. The idea of bringing your dog back to life is a nominally horrific idea, but it gets played out in this lovely way, and it ends up being a love story, really.

Did you use photo reference for it?

HEINRICHS: Yeah, we did what I would normally do on any film that’s live-action or animation. We did a lot of research. We pulled together a lot of that mid-century modern look of suburbia, that’s not really high-end stuff. It’s really more of the tract housing of the post-war era. It created its own rhythm and feel to it, and now I think it’s beautiful. It’s so flat and says so much about the people who live there. And then, the black and white just looks beautiful.

How did the New Holland idea come up?

HEINRICHS: New Holland occurred with Tim and John August, at the story stage. It was all about having Dutch day, and also about how American communities really take these Old World elements and they turn it into this flat, suburban thing. They knock down all the maple trees and they call it Maple Street. It’s this absconding of things out in the world, and making it your own thing. There was something characteristically American and charming about that, like Solvang. To be honest with you, I really think that it establishes a purpose for the windmill. Since we’re not making it part of a miniature golf course, as we did in the live-action film, we had to find another reason for it to be. But, that’s just my assumption.

Was there a reason why you made the sets were in color and the characters in black and white?

HEINRICHS: Yes, because the grass came that way. The reason why they’re in color is partly because we were replacing skies and set extending and using backgrounds, so there is a lot of digital work going on in the background. What I love is the fact that you don’t really think about that. All the stuff in the foreground is appropriately handmade and hand-animated. The look and feel of that, from the excellent visual effects people who did all the work on it, it’s part of their job to make it all work as one world, to make sure what they do is not photo realistically, which would be their normal bent. They’re actually matching a look and feel that’s already there. We were chromocene, so there were green screens behind elements. And, all of the black and white gets timed and sweetened in post-production. But, all the dailies were shown in black and white. As far as everybody was concerned, they were living in a black and white world. This is a much smaller range of graphic elements. We’re dealing with tone and shape and form and light, instead of color, and all the other stuff that comes with color. It’s out of that, that we’re trying to feeling and support the story. I think it looks beautiful. I think it does evoke a certain period of horror/science fiction films. It works in a dual way, and I know that Tim loves that stuff, as well.

Is that more liberating for you, or more challenging?

HEINRICHS: It’s both liberating and challenging. The challenge is that you have to pay much more attention to that specific stuff because you don’t have the other stuff to make it look great. Once you learn that and figure that out, then you realize that you are really dealing with elements. The tool kit is then atmospheric perspective, one foreground shape against another, lighting, texture and form. Originally, I was a sculptor, so that’s appealing to me, as well.

What was the process of taking Tim’s original drawings and translating them into these three-dimensional figures and creating a whole world from his sketches like?

HEINRICHS: I would have to go back to our early days of Disney when they were regenerating the studio. We were all working on The Fox and the Hound. It was initially exciting to be working on a Disney film, but then it just sagged in the middle, a little bit, although my kids like it. It’s a good movie. You’ve got to imagine this place with all these young animators, all of whom have been told that they’re special and are going to be amazing someday, and realize what it’s like to do the work of a big, corporate animated film. And, we would just do stuff on the outside. We’d make Super 8 movies, and do anything we could to keep our blood going. I’d always been a fan of Tim’s own work. I’m sure you’ve seen his sketches. What was appealing about them was the sense of character and beautiful line. I wanted to make it three-dimensional because I thought that his work was very three-dimensional, even though a lot of people at Disney thought it was very linear. Apparently, the hallmark of a Disney film is that they look very three-dimensional, back in those days. So, I just took it upon myself to make sculptures of his work, and there was just something different that happened. It was his intent and his look, but it was in light with form. It was just a very natural progression, to try to do those in a stop-motion animated film.

Has your job changed with like the advent of higher grade visuals and 3D?

HEINRICHS: Yes, it’s much harder to do our job because you see every pore. I think that it is an incredibly appropriate use of digital technology. It was amazing to see all of the improvements and progressions that had happened, by the time we did Nightmare in the early ‘90s with motion control, but that was with old film technology. Now, with digital cameras, which are much smaller, the ability to completely restructure the entire process using computers, you still end up with a very believably handmade product, but you’ve just helped yourself enormously with all the other things that happened. So, I’m a fan of technology. I’m not a Luddite. My problem has been with purely digital films. I feel the danger there is that the kind of short-cuts you end up having to take are the ones that are most telling in the main characters. I don’t feel that that’s the case with what we’ve been doing on Frankenweenie.

What were the discussions like, to differentiate the look of this film from everything else that Tim’s done?

HEINRICHS: There wasn’t a conscious effort to differentiate it. My feeling is that, if you do your due process and go back to the well, grab the original inspiration and just develop it from the ground up, it is just, by its own nature, going to be different. It wasn’t really intentional. With Tim, all of his films live in a Burton world, and there are different parts of that world that look a bit different. The point is never to intentionally make it not look like something else. The intent is always to go back to the source and figure out how that is informing this project.

Tim made the original Frankenweenie when he was a 25-year-old kid. Is it surreal to be revisiting it, this many years later, and to what degree are you trying to recreate what you did before?

HEINRICHS: You gain wisdom and you don’t make the same mistakes. When you’re that age, there’s a kind of energy to what you do. Because you don’t know enough not to make mistakes, there is something that is very infectious about the work. In the original Frankenweenie, there are a couple of things that are cringe worthy for me, like how we engineered the burning of the windmill. That’s always been a problem for me. But, it was a live-action film, and you’re on that rock, rolling down the hill. I do think back to that time with a lot of fondness about the young guys who were doing that stuff. It is so surreal to be able to go back and re-work something in a different way and, really, in a new way. Yes, it’s the same story, but it really is different and it has a different feel to it, as well.

What made you and Tim hit it off, all those, all those years ago, and how has your personal chemistry been, through all these films that you’ve done together?

HEINRICHS: It started because his talents and mine intermeshed, rather than competed. Probably a lot of it is that I just really dug what he was doing and wanted to see it develop. And, with any relationship over years, it evolves. We’ve gone our separate ways and done different things. I’ve worked with Tim for the last two and a half or three years, pretty consistently, and it feels great to be able to pick that up again. There’s a friendship there, and there’s been an evolution over the years, as well.

Did you meet working at Disney, or at CalArts?

HEINRICHS: Well, actually, he was at CalArts. I’d already gone through four years of art school, and I was the oldest guy in the first year there because I wanted to do animation. All these guys, who were years younger than me, including, you know, John Lasseter and Brad Bird, and other people like that, were in a grade level above me, so we didn’t actually start really working together until the studio.

Burton, Zanuck Forge a Movie Family

Geoff Boucher of the Los Angeles Times wrote an article about the relationship director Tim Burton and producer Richard D. Zanuck have forged in the past decade they have worked together. Here is the article in its entirety:

With “Dark Shadows,” the tandem of director Tim Burton and producer Richard D. Zanuck has delivered its sixth movie, this one starring Johnny Depp as a confused and heartsick vampire who spends two centuries trapped underground before emerging with two urgent instincts: Drink blood. Find family.

Both those impulses stay with the fanged Barnabas Collins for the remainder of the Warner Bros. film, which arrives in theaters Friday, as he dedicates himself to restoring the fortunes of his cursed bloodline. It’s not the first time that the legacies of fractured families and a yearning for reconnection pulsed at the heart of a Burton-Zanuck film.

In “Charlie and the Chocolate Factory,” for instance, the film’s emotional payoff arrives with the doorstep reunion of candy-maker Willy Wonka (again, Depp, deep in the pale) and his estranged father (Christopher Lee). It’s a scene and subplot you won’t find anywhere in Roald Dahl’s book or the original 1971 film adaptation, but Burton viewed it as an essential addition.

“You want a little bit of the flavor of why Wonka is the way he is,” Burton explained in an interview just before the film’s 2005 release. “Otherwise, what is he? He’s just a weird guy.”

Johnny Depp as Willy Wonka. (Peter Mountain / Warner Bros. Pictures)

Recognizing the complicated circuitry that runs between fathers and sons is also a way to frame the Burton-Zanuck partnership, which seems unlike any other major director-producer team today. At the very least, they are clearly unique among Hollywood’s “billion-dollar club” (their 2010 film “Alice in Wonderland,” is one of just 11 releases to go into 10-digit territory with its worldwide box-office tally).

Zanuck is 77 and seems immune to the passing decades — forever tanned, trim and tireless, a lifelong athlete who still enjoying ski slopes with his pal Clint Eastwood. Burton, at 53, is one of the most distinctive filmmakers of this or any other generation, with 15 feature films that usually glow in Halloween colors.

On a recent Sunday afternoon, the two met in a private dining room for a joint interview that quickly relaxed into warm conversation about the personal rhythm of their partnership in a business that rarely hums along with sentimental tunes.

Actress Helena Bonham Carter and director Tim Burton during the filming of the movie “Dark Shadows.” (Peter Mountain / Warner Bros.)

“We’re in our own weird family situation — that’s what we like,” Burton said, referring to Zanuck, key crew members and a core group of recurring cast members with whom he regularly works. “Mars Attacks!” in 1996 was the last time Burton made a movie that didn’t feature either Depp and/or Burton’s current romantic partner, Helena Bonham Carter.

Burton and Bonham Carter met during the filming of “Planet of the Apes” and have two children together, Billy and Nell. The godparents for both are Zanuck and his wife, Lili Fini Zanuck, also a producer. Last year, on the “Dark Shadows” set in London, Bonham Carter said the Zanucks are “part of our life in a special way.”

She added that the heritage of the name Zanuck made the producer an instantly compelling figure for her and Burton, both students of Hollywood history. “The stories are magnificent,” she said, “I never tire of hearing another.” The producer is the only son of Darryl F. Zanuck, the cigar-chomping Hollywood titan who founded 20th Century Films in 1935 and then two years later bought out Fox and added its name to the company.

The younger Zanuck carved out his own history, becoming Fox’s head of production at age 28 and saved the studio by putting all his chips on “The Sound of Music,” which still stands as the third-biggest film in history (behind “Gone With the Wind” and “Star Wars”) in terms of number of tickets sold.

The producer would love to add another hit to his career list with “Dark Shadows,” a movie that (unlike Barnabas) is hard to put in a box. Part comedy, part romance and part light-horror, the film is based on the namesake gothic soap opera (1966-71) that was beloved by Burton and Depp and as well by costar Michelle Pfeiffer. The old series was never a comedy (at least not intentionally), but the new movie, which has garnered early mixed reviews, sinks its teeth into the fish-out-of-water possibilities of an 18th century vampire encountering hippies, lava lamps and Alice Cooper in 1972.

Zanuck and Burton first sat across from each other in the spring of 1999 when “Planet of the Apes” brought them together. Zanuck says the conversation was stilted (Burton is especially shy, which is why he cloaks himself in black sunglasses) because “neither of us liked the script we had, but neither of us wanted to say it.”

That would change as the two keyed their partnership on candor.

“Richard always gives it to me straight, even if it’s something I don’t want to hear,” Burton said. “He has always based everything on the story and the best thing for the film… that’s not how everybody approaches it,” Burton said. “That’s something you can see if you look at his whole career as a producer. For me, there’s a lot of trust.”

The early turning point for the two men came one morning while scouting locations for “Apes.” Burton was ready to leave the hotel when word came that he needed to take an urgent call. As long minutes ticked by, Zanuck had a sense of dread and returned to the lobby, where he learned that Bill Burton, the filmmaker’s father, had died.

Burton and Zanuck collaborate on the set of “Alice in Wonderland.” (Disney)

“He was shattered, as anyone would be,” Zanuck said quietly as Burton nodded in silence.

Burton grew up in Burbank, and he’s said numerous times that he felt oddly removed from his parents and that he knew relatively little about them considering they all lived under the same roof. His father had been a minor league ballplayer and worked for the city’s parks department; his mother ran a cat-themed gift shop, and the boy felt like a stranger in his own life.

Despite that — or maybe because of it — the death of his father sent the director reeling. Zanuck was there to share his story. He and his father feuded and clashed for years. (“His father fired him when he was at Fox,” Burton said with a grin, retrieving a famous bit of Zanuck lore.) The legendary mogul died at his low-desert home just before Christmas 1979.

“I didn’t come out for three days. They had to sneak food in,” Zanuck said. “I was just a mess. The pangs of that are difficult. When it is a bumpy father-son relationship, it even makes it more of a tragedy when it hits. My father had dementia, but I had resolved things pretty well before that. The end was hard. I would go to Palm Springs and see him just sitting there all day watching cartoons. I thought, ‘My God…’ Can you imagine? Him, watching cartoons all day?”

Director Tim Burton chats with Richard D. Zanuck on the set of “Big Fish” in 2003. (Zade Rosenthal / Columbia Pictures)

The “Apes” production that followed was wrenching as Burton fought his way past the studio, the material and the effects challenges. Bonham Carter was there at his side, however, and Zanuck protected him throughout. The director had lost a father and found a family.

“It’s true — we’ve become very close,” Zanuck said. “I think part of it is the connection we have because of our fathers and what we went through when they died.”

The next Burton film was “Big Fish,” a marked departure from Burton’s storytelling and stylistic trademarks, a “wild card” in the deck, as Zanuck once described it. The story is about William Bloom (Billy Crudup), who returns home after years of estrangement and discovers his slippery father (Albert Finney) is dying of cancer. He rushes to try to learn some sort of truth — any kind of truth — about this stranger.

“It’s a movie that was very much about that time in my life,” Burton said. “I was in a certain place. Definitely, that’s where it came from.”

It was by far the lowest-grossing of the Burton-Zanuck films and (along with “Sweeney Todd: The Demon Barber of Fleet Street”) among their proudest moments. Zanuck shook his head thinking about it. “If I watched it again right now,” he said, “I know I’d cry at the end.”

– Geoff Boucher

Elfman on "Dark Shadows," "Batman," "Nightmare Before Christmas"

Composer Danny Elfman sat down for an interview with the AV Club. Elfman discussed his long working relationship with Tim Burton and his career at large, including Batman, The Nightmare Before Christmas, Pee-wee's Big Adventure, and his latest project, Dark Shadows:

The A.V. Club: Your collaboration with Tim Burton stretches back to Pee-wee’s Big Adventure. How did the two of you first come to work together?

Danny Elfman: Well, it really was out of the blue on Pee-wee. I got a call from the manager of [Oingo Boingo] saying, “This young animator is doing a film,” and then he asked me if I knew who Pee-wee Herman was. I said, “Yeah, I used to go see Paul Reubens at the Groundlings.” So I already knew of him. He said, “Well, they’re doing a movie with Pee-wee.” I just assumed when I met with him that it was going to be about a song or songs, you know, because I was in a band, and when it became about a score, I was pretty shocked. I said, “Why me?” [Laughs.] But it was just one of those random pieces of luck. Tim seemed to think, “I think you can kind of do a score,” and I’m like, “Hmmm…I don’t know.” But I saw the movie, and I went home and conjured up the first piece of music that came to my head, and I did it on my eight-track player, a little funky demo, and put it on a cassette and sent it out to him and didn’t expect to hear back. And a week or two later, I got a call saying, “You got the job.” And I almost turned it down.

AVC: Why?

DE: Well, my reasoning to my manager was, “You know, that was fun doing the meeting, and it was fun doing the demo, but I’m just gonna fuck up their movie. I don’t know how to do a score. And they’re really nice guys.” But he says, “Yeah, you know what? You call ’em and tell ’em you’re not gonna do it, ’cause I’ve been working on this deal for two weeks!” [Laughs.] And he gave me a phone number, and I looked at it and looked at it and thought about it overnight… and I just never made the call.

AVC: You’d seen Paul Reubens when he was with the Groundlings, but did you actually know Tim Burton prior to that initial meeting?

DE: No, amazingly, though it’s possible we crossed paths. And it’s possible that Paul and I could’ve potentially crossed paths without knowing it—and John Lasseter, too—because we were all at Cal Arts at the same time.

AVC: So how did your name come into the mix, then? Were they just Oingo Boingo fans?

DE: Tim was an Oingo Boingo fan, and Paul knew me through the Mystic Knights Of The Oingo Boingo, which came before Oingo Boingo and did a score for my brother’s cult film, Forbidden Zone. So Paul was a fan of Forbidden Zone and Tim was a fan of Oingo Boingo, so my name came up for both of them, but from two different incarnations.
AVC: Having done the score for Forbidden Zone, how did you approach doing the one for Pee-wee’s Big Adventure?

DE: Well, it was hard, because nothing had prepared me for that. Forbidden Zone was just a thing with the 12 pieces that I played with every day, just writing out some music for them, so writing an orchestral score… I didn’t really know how to begin. And I just tried to look to the music that I loved, and I said, “I’ll just do what I think would be fun to do.” And I really did expect it all to get thrown out, because it didn’t feel like the kind of stuff that goes into contemporary comedies. I didn’t expect any of it to survive.

AVC: And how much of it did?

DE: All of it. It was just one of those weird things, though, because even as I was writing it, I was thinking, “Yeah, Tim’s fun to work with, but the studio’s gonna hear it, and they’re gonna toss it and get a real composer.” [Laughs.]

AVC: When you’re composing the score to a film that’s based on an existing property, like Dark Shadows, do you go ever back and listen to the music from the original in search of inspiration?

DE: Well, interestingly, this is the first time we have done that. Because on Planet Of The Apes and Charlie [And The Chocolate Factory] and Batman, we made a conscious decision to make no references—ever—to the originals, that they should be their own thing and that we shouldn’t even listen to it. But here, this was different. Tim really did like the tone of the music to the TV show, and he got me listening to it. So half the score is kind of big, melodramatic orchestra, and… We didn’t really know how to approach it at first, but it finally kind of evolved into this clear design where, when we’re in the big part of the love story in the past and how Barnabas became a vampire and his battle with Angelique, we’re using the orchestra in a more or less traditional way. But whenever he’s with the family in the house, we’re going to use an ensemble that’s very much like the ensemble might have been in 1970. A very, very small orchestra, mostly just three solo instruments: a bass clarinet, bass flute, and vibes. And the vibes and the flute very much are taken and inspired from the original TV music. Furthermore, there were these riffs that they did that I really liked, so I did pull some music from the TV show into the score, and Bob Cobert, the writer for that, is credited in the cue sheets for those moments where it kind of becomes a co-composition. So it really was unique. The only time in 75 films or whatever that I’ve ever paid attention to the music of the past was Mission: Impossible, because I knew I was going to use Lalo Schifrin’s song, and Dark Shadows. And it wasn’t a specific piece. It was just a tone, a sound, that we both really liked. So that did make it kind of more fun and special in that way.

AVC: Under more typical circumstances, what’s the composition process like for you? At least when you’re working with Tim, presumably you generally know well before filming begins that you’re going to be handling the score. Do you read the script and see where your mind takes you?

DE: Well, yeah, I read the script, but then I forget about it. Because wherever my mind takes me when I’m reading it is going to be the wrong direction with Tim. [Laughs.] I learned that years ago when I got started three weeks early on Beetlejuice and started writing all this music from the script, and then I saw the rough cut and realized that there wasn’t one note of what I’d written that had anything to do with the movie. So now when I go and I look at the footage with Tim for the first time, I try to actually do the opposite and blank out everything from my head. I want my brain to be pure static. But Tim brings me onto the set always about halfway into production, walks me around, and likes me to sit on the set, because he knows that I got the Batman theme actually from that first visit, and he’ll show me about 20 or 30 minutes of footage. So when I go home, now I’ve got a really good idea of what the movie actually is, and I will in fact start getting some early ideas from that and log them down. And then when I finally start the film usually a month or two or even three later, when the first rough cut of the film is together, it is what I’m expecting now. And then I just pick up where I left off.

AVC: How collaborative is your process with the filmmakers that you work with? Do you go track by track and say, “How’s this work for you?” Or do you wait until you’ve got a whole rough score together and submit it?

DE: Oh, no, no. It’s very collaborative, cue by cue. In fact, tomorrow morning we’re meeting and I have three more cues for Frankenweenie to play [for Burton]. Very often… I’ll drive him crazy. [Laughs.] It’s a little bit maddening, because early on, I go through lots of ideas, and I’m putting, like, “Here’s six things to listen to, here’s four ideas,” and he’ll go, “Oh my God, I can’t focus on that much.” And I go, “C’mon, c’mon, you can do it.” And going through all of those ideas, that’s how we’ll home in on what the score is. Because in the beginning, I really just tried all kinds of stuff. There’s never, ever a single clear idea that this is what it’s going to be.

AVC: Does that connection with him make it easier to work him versus other filmmakers?

DE: Well, it’s not necessarily easier or harder. Every filmmaker is their own unique kind of psychological entity, and some are just very, very picky or fussy and… They’re just more difficult than others. Others are a little bit more removed and just kind of, like, get the feel of it and move on. Tim is kind of neither extreme. He definitely doesn’t think things out. It’s visceral. He has to listen and respond. He won’t talk about music, and when we spot a movie, for example, Tim’s famous for the shortest spotting sessions. [A spotting session is when a director and composer decide where in a film music will occur, usually before the score is written. —ed.] I’ve been on movies where the spotting took two days. If his movie’s an hour-45, I’ll be surprised if our spotting will take more than two hours and 15 minutes. [Laughs.] He doesn’t want to talk about it. He’ll just say, “We’ll start music here, we’ll end music here. We’ll start here, it should end here.” And occasionally he’ll tell me how he feels about a scene. “The scene makes me feel this way or that way.”

So in that sense, it’s kind of perfect, because really, any more information is not really useful anyhow. So with Tim, it’s all about, “Don’t talk about it, don’t analyze it for sure, just do it,” and then he’ll see what he gets a visceral response to. And as he gets a visceral response, it’s my job to home in on that and try to fine-tune it and make it work for him. So it’s never easy. But it’s always exciting, and it’s always a challenge. There’s no coasting with Tim. Ever. Some people think that it’s like, “Oh, you know him so well you can write the score without even meeting with him.” That’s so not true. I actually spent more time on Big Fish than any film I’ve ever worked on with him. Finding what it is can be a real interesting and sometimes winding path before we actually arrive there. It’s a journey. And it’s an interesting journey, but that doesn’t mean that it’s a piece of cake.

AVC: Is there any particular score that you look back on and think, “I still can’t believe I got out of that alive”?

DE: Well, the most difficult score of all my however many scores—I said 75 earlier, but I really don’t know exactly how many it is—was Batman. For sure. But that wasn’t because the score itself was so hard to write, even though I’d never written a drama, I’d never written anything serious or melodramatic or dramatic. I’d only written comedy. But mainly because the studio and the producer didn’t want me on the film. [Laughs.] So I was struggling, and Tim was struggling to keep me on. So there was, like, a strong movement and desire to not have me there, to have somebody more experienced, somebody who knew what they were doing, and so I really, really had to fight for that one. I felt like it was just uphill all the way, clinging on by my fingernails, until finally I crossed this threshold with [producer] Jon Peters. I played him this cue… I was with Tim, and he said, “Play him such and such,” and I played him a piece that ended up becoming the main titles. And that was just one of dozens. I didn’t know how to present stuff well at that point. And suddenly Jon leapt up out of his chair and he started conducting with his hands. [Laughs.] And Tim gave me a look, and it was, like, “That’s it. We’re in.”

AVC: Many of the cues you’ve written have resonated with listeners on an emotional level. Have you ever been in mid-composition and just gotten caught up in your own work, where you were, like, “Wow, if this is moving me, I must really be onto something here”?
DE: No. I mean, I’ll never get so impressed with a piece of music I’ve written that I’ll go, “Wow, that’s the shit!” [Laughs.] I’m just not wired that way. I’ll sometimes get emotional when I’m scoring a scene because the scene will get to me. But it’s not because I’ve written such a killer piece of music and I’m going, “I am so the motherfucker here.” One area that I think Tim and I are very similar is that the highest compliment I’ve ever heard him pay his own work is, “I think it came out interesting.” And that’s pretty much how I feel about my music: “I hope it’s okay. I think it came out interesting.” And maybe in a year or two I’ll actually think I did a good job.

AVC: In addition to your film work, you’ve also done several TV themes over the years, but the one that’s probably been heard by the most ears is The Simpsons.

DE: Well, it was a lucky break, you know? I’ve written, what, about 15 themes? And that one was the one that I thought nobody would ever hear. I wrote it in a day. It was one day’s work. I had it in my head in the car on the way home, and by the time I got home from meeting Matt Groening, I’d already written it, and I basically just walked in, made a demo, sent it out to him, and got a message back saying, “Great, fine.” [Laughs.] It was about as simple as it gets.

AVC: On a different TV-related topic, there’s a clip of The Mystic Knights Of The Oingo Boingo on The Gong Show that’s made the rounds on YouTube. What, if anything, do you remember about that experience?

DE: Well, we were literally passing the hat on the streets in those days, so I remember we got the gig, and we thought it’d be funny, but… We were trying to get gonged. And we didn’t. What you don’t realize was that my brother had the rocket ship with a fire extinguisher, and he was purposely ready to blast the judges. But we never got to do it! So not only did we not expect to win, we expected to get gonged and we were looking forward to it! [Laughs.] So it was kind of a disappointment when it was over.

AVC: You mentioned Forbidden Zone earlier, the Mystic Knights’ film. How was it to work on that, given your limited motion picture experience at that point?

DE: Well, at that point, I wasn’t trying to make the music sound like a motion-picture score. It was really kind of like doing what we did onstage, but doing it for pictures. So it actually was really easy and fun. It was just a minor adjustment, the fact that we weren’t doing it for a stage show but for pictures, but it was the same kind of music, the same type of thing, the songs were in the genre that we were doing. It was really just being the Mystic Knights.

AVC: What about the aspect of being in front of the camera?

DE: Well, it was like shooting a rock video. I’m only comfortable in front of the camera if I’m lip-synching. The few times I’ve had to speak lines in front of a camera were just the most miserable experiences of my life. If you’d asked me as a teenager what I wanted to do, I would’ve said film. And if you’d asked me what, I would’ve said, “Anything but acting and composing.” [Laughs.] I thought I was going to be involved in the visual side. It never occurred to me to do music, but I knew from the beginning that I never could be an actor.

AVC: So did anyone have to twist your arm to get you to provide the singing voice of Jack Skellington in The Nightmare Before Christmas? Not that you were onscreen, but it was still acting.

DE: No, you know, when I was doing Jack… I was doing all the demos. I was writing a song probably every three days. It was so quick. Tim would come over, he’d tell me part of the story, and so I did all the songs. I even had to do Sally’s song. So I did all the pieces, and then we went in the studio and did, like, more finished demos of everything. So I literally did virtually every voice… Except for Sally, where I did bring in a singer to help me out. [Laughs.] It was just a little too silly singing Sally in falsetto. So by the time we were way down the line, there was a certain point where there was a feeling that was like, “Oh my God, no one else can sing these songs, because they really are me. They’re my stories, almost.” I felt such a kinship to the character. His story was reflecting how I felt with my band and everything else with that period of time. I wanted to leave my band, but I couldn’t, and I wanted something else, but I didn’t know what. So Jack Skellington’s whole journey to Christmastown was really my journey out of Oingo Boingo. That was my Halloweenland, my wanting something else. I so related to him on so many levels.

AVC: It’s strange to think that there’s an entire generation—more than one, probably, at this point—that has no idea that this guy who does the music for Tim Burton’s movies even used to be in a band.

DE: [Laughs.] Yeah, probably.

AVC: Do you ever miss the days of being in Oingo Boingo?

DE: No. You know, when I stopped doing The Mystic Knights—because you’ve got to remember that I did The Mystic Knights for eight years before Oingo Boingo. So when I started the band, I never missed doing The Mystic Knights, and when I started doing composing, I did both for 10 years, and that was hard. But I wanted to move on. And I think I was, weirdly, always more comfortable as a writer than a performer. Although I admit that I did love getting up there, especially when we were in the clubs. I found it more stressful when we started moving into the bigger arenas. And I don’t know if I was ever as much of a natural. I don’t think I was cut out to be that. I don’t know how bands stay together for all those years and keep doing the same songs. It would drive me insane. And I couldn’t tour more than three months, because even six weeks would drive me insane. I’d reached a point where I was like, “If I have to do this song one more time, I’m gonna blow my brains out.”

I think there is kind of a wiring you have to have, both to be in a band or to be in theater, where you’re gonna do the same show every single night. And in a band, even though you’re going to do new material, you’ve still got to perform the old stuff that they want to hear, and I would just quickly reach this point where I was like, “I can’t bear it. I just can’t bear it any longer.” I can’t do a concert without doing any older material, but I can’t stand going up there and doing songs that I know.
I think people who do that love it. There’s a reason why U2 and The Rolling Stones and these bands can get up there and keep doing it. They must love doing those songs regardless of how many times they’ve done them, in the same way that someone goes up and does a stage play or Broadway every night. I don’t know how they do it. I could never do it. So I just think it’s kind of an internal wiring, and I think I just wasn’t meant to have my career in that. The fact that I lasted so many years was more than enough than I needed for a lifetime. Sometimes I miss just using my voice more, the singing, but I don’t miss the pressure of going onstage and having to learn a shitload of songs.

AVC: Is there a definitive Oingo Boingo album to your mind? Is there any one that captures the band’s sound perfectly?

DE: No, I don’t think we ever caught the sound perfectly. I don’t know. If you asked the fans, most of them would probably go with Dead Man’s Party, but for me, I was never happy with the sound on any of the albums, and every album I did, I always wanted to figure out, “Why doesn’t that sound the way I wanted it to sound, or the way I thought it would sound?” I never was able to get that part of it together. I was never able to get that sound that was in my head.

AVC: How do you look back on your solo album from that era, So-Lo?

DE: I don’t. I had extra tunes, and I just kind of wanted to try that. And I did it, and I said, “All right, that was that.”

By the way, I don’t mean to cast disparaging remarks when I say I don’t miss being in Oingo Boingo, because that could be taken the wrong way by Oingo Boingo fans. I did enjoy doing those shows, but I just don’t think it was my destiny to be a stage performer forever. I was happier writing and recording songs than I was in recording them, except in those few moments when it was just really fantastic. You know, there were these great moments at the Universal Amphitheater and at the Irvine Meadows Amphitheater that will always be really precious to me.

AVC: Did you feel that the band lost anything when it shifted from being The Mystic Knights to just being Oingo Boingo?

DE: Well, no, because we became a different thing. The Mystic Knights was totally non-electric. It was all acoustic and brass. I played trombone, acoustic guitar, and percussion. In Oingo Boingo, I picked up an electric guitar. We just stole the name, really. [Laughs.] It was really nothing else that we took from The Mystic Knights. The whole idea was to do something that had no sets, no costumes, no makeup, none of the stuff we were burdened by for all those years, that we could just plug in amps and do a show.

AVC: So less an evolution than a brand-new entity.

DE: Oh yeah. It was just like, “That’s it, Mystic Knights are gone, let’s start something new.” I literally woke up one morning, I heard a ska tune from The Specials, then I got into Madness, The Specials, The Selecter, and that was it. It was all over. I just wanted to be in a ska band. So that’s what I did. End of one story, beginning of another story. Now, the next 16 years were pretty convoluted as far as where that ska band went and trying to figure out what we were. [Laughs.] And I definitely had some great, great moments that I treasure. But I think my destiny was to be someone who scribbles in dark rooms, not somebody who goes out there performing their material every night.

Video: Wahlberg on "Apes," Clubbing with Burton

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In a video interview with MTV, Mark Wahlberg discusses working on the 2001 Tim Burton version of Planet of the Apes. He acknowledges that the film wasn't a critical success, but explains that the Burton himself wasn't in a very comfortable position. Regardless, Wahlberg says it was the most fun he has had on a film set.

Wahlberg also talked about going to a club with his director. "I have no better time on any movie than I had working with Tim," Wahlberg recently told MTV. "I had the most amazing time with Tim. I run to be on the set with him. We were doing reshoots, and he came out with me to Paris. We're in the club. Tim was in the club, man. Tim was in the club. Then he'd be drawing people, and all of his caricatures looked the same. He'd be drawing people in the club."

Video: Danny Elfman on "Dark Shadows" Score

In the last few weeks, while the film has been shooting in the UK, Danny Elfman has been experimenting with some of the musical elements for his score for the adaptation of Dark Shadows.

MTV News asked the composer about his work so far on the project.

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"It’s still very early, they’re not even done shooting. I just sent them some stuff so they can play with it while they’re editing," Elfman said about his progress on Shadows at the premiere of Real Steel, the score for which he also composed. "I think it’s just going to be fun. You can tell from Johnny Depp’s hairstyle right off the bat, it’s like, ‘Oh wow, that’s different.’ It’s [set in] the ‘70s, it’s going to be fun."

"I think this will be a little wilder than 'Edward Scissorhands,' but I don’t know. I really don’t know what to expect until it’s done."

Elfman also said that he and Burton had discussed the use of a smaller-scale orchestra, perhaps to emulate the music for the original TV series and classic motion pictures involving vampires and other gothic monsters. Elfman did something similar for his iconic music for The Nightmare Before Christmas. But Elfman stated that nothing has been set in stone yet.

"I think we might keep it small. That was Tim’s first thought to make it very small, but having said that maybe we’ll make it big. Things can change between now and then."

FearNet also asked Elfman if the film's score would include the theme from the original television series.

"We had this discussion with Batman," said Elfman, "[about] whether we wanted to incorporate the TV theme. And Tim said, ‘No, don't do that.' And on Planet of the Apes, once again, and Charlie and the Chocolate Factory; that was a big one – "Do we incorporate it in?" "No." So I'm just guessing that he's gonna say no again, that he's gonna want to develop his own language and dialogue for this."

"Having said that," Elfman laughed, "who knows? You may just hear a theramin!"

Rick Heinrichs on "Dark Shadows"

Production designer Rick Heinrichs and Tim Burton go way, way back. Although you're certainly familiar with their collaborations on The Nightmare Before Christmas, Sleepy Hollow, and Planet of the Apes (to name a few), the two began working together as film students in the 1980s, and projects such as Hansel and Gretel and Vincent. Now, they're teaming up again for Dark Shadows.

Heinrichs spoke with Blog of Dark Shadows recently:

BLOG OF DARK SHADOWS: What are your overall feelings about becoming a part of the project; what made you say yes?

RICK HEINRICHS: I’m a fan of Tim’s movies as well a colleague and I’m delighted to be working with him again. I also love the genre of this film.

BLOG OF DARK SHADOWS: Were you a fan of the original series or the ’91 revival?

RICK HEINRICHS: I was aware of Dark Shadows growing up for the fact that a lot of kids were running home from school to watch the series in the afternoon. It seemed an odd subject to me for a soap opera. Now of course I realize the brilliance of showcasing it as a soap: the interplay of extreme emotions pouring from the different characters brought about by this courtly vampire in their midst. I also noticed that a majority of the fans seemed to be female and I wondered what was up with that. Obviously this was before I realized that the opposite sex could be romantically attracted to the doomed bad boy. Or was it bat-boy? At that time, I was looking at horror comics like Creepy and Eerie and the work of Jim Steranko and others. That’s where I first experienced the pleasure of stories that recognized the fine line between humor and horror.

BLOG OF DARK SHADOWS: Does the experience of Sleepy Hollow serve as a kind of stepping stone for this film? Of all of Tim Burton’s films, it is the one that most closely hits on the whole Dark Shadows feeling, I think.

RICK HEINRICHS: Sleepy Hollow was the story of a rational man’s journey into the irrational. We intentionally wanted Ichabod Crane’s investigation in upstate New York to have a progressively dreamlike quality ultimately leading to a nightmare. While the two movies do share certain genre aspects as well as the male lead, it’s certainly going to be a different feeling film.

BLOG OF DARK SHADOWS: Do you envision it being a challenge capturing visual elements of that show, yet updating it for the modern audience, or is it a completely different kettle of fish?

RICK HEINRICHS: It’s not a completely different kettle of fish. The reason [we're] doing Dark Shadows to a degree is to explore and relish what was great about that series and the character of Barnabas Collins, and we intend to make it a world the series’ many fans will enjoy.

Glenn Shadix, 1952-2010

Tragic news: actor and Tim Burton collaborator Glenn Shadix passed away. He was 58 years old, and died in his home in Alabama. Here is the information from his official website:

"It is with great sadness and pain that the family of William G. “Glenn Shadix” Scott announces his passing this morning.

A memorial service will be held at Lakeside Baptist Church, 2865 Old Rocky Ridge Road, Birmingham, on Saturday, September 11th at 2 p.m.

The family has requested that in lieu of flowers, memorial contributions be made in Glenn’s name to the Theatre Department of the Alabama School of Fine Arts, 1800 8th Avenue, Birmingham, AL 35203."


Glenn Shadix is best known for his role as the pompous interior decorator in Tim Burton's 1988 film, Beetlejuice. He also appeared in Burton's Planet of the Apes in 2001, supplied his voice for the Mayor in The Nightmare Before Christmas, and lent his voice to the early flash animation series The World of Stainboy, created by Tim Burton in 2000.

"Alice" #1 at Box Office: $116 Mil. Opening Weekend

Brandon Gray of Box Office Mojo has all the details on the successful opening weekend of Alice in Wonderland:

Audiences clamored to see Alice in Wonderland (2010) as if they were late for an important date, delivering a $116.1 million opening weekend. That's more in just three days than the total gross of any other 2010 release. Alice's corpulent start drove the highest-grossing March weekend ever: overall business boomed 69 percent over the same timeframe last year, when Watchmen debuted.

Showing on approximately 7,400 screens at 3,728 sites, Alice in Wonderland's opening stands as not only the all time biggest for the month of March, but as the highest-grossing ever for a movie released outside of May, July or November and sixth overall. It's a career best for director Tim Burton, surpassing Planet of the Apes (2001)'s $68.5 million, and second best for top-billed actor Johnny Depp, behind the second Pirates of the Caribbean. Alice marks the seventh collaboration between Mr. Burton and Mr. Depp, and its debut handily eclipsed their previous high together, Charlie and the Chocolate Factory ($56.2 million).

Around 70 percent or over $80 million of Alice in Wonderland's opening was viewed through the 3D looking glass, topping Avatar's $55 million as the biggest 3D launch ever. Alice played at a record 2,251 3D sites, compared to Avatar's 2,038. Alice also set a new opening milestone for IMAX, grossing an estimated $11.9 million at 188 sites (included in the totals). The previous benchmark was Avatar's $9.5 million at 178 sites. Combined, the 3D and IMAX ticket premiums over normal prices appear to have added about $22 million to Alice's gross.

To hit $116.1 million out-of-the-gate, Alice in Wonderland benefitted from a combination of factors, including the involvement of Johnny Depp and Tim Burton, who are among Hollywood's few bankable name talents, batting in their quirky wheelhouse, and the good will built up by Avatar for 3D events. Distributor Walt Disney Pictures' marketing campaign was not only omnipresent but spot on in its presentation: it first grabbed people's attention with a flashy entre into Wonderland through Mad Hatter, Red Queen and other wacky characters, then it lured audiences further by grounding the fantasy with Alice and presenting her adventure story.

All told, Alice in Wonderland appealed well beyond the family crowd suggested by its Disney branding and Lewis Caroll's famous literary source. According to Disney's exit polling, 39 percent of the audience was parents and their children, while 36 percent was couples. The basic gender and age demographics came in at 55 percent female and 54 percent under 25 years old.

At the foreign box office, shiny and new Alice in Wonderland unseated reigning stalwart Avatar, debuting to an estimated $94 million from 40 territories or around 60 percent of the overseas market. Add in the domestic take, and Alice's worldwide weekend was an estimated $210.1 million, ranking as the 14th biggest worldwide launch ever. The United Kingdom was Alice's top foreign market with an estimated $16.8 million (the highest non-sequel start ever there), followed by Italy ($13.9 million, also a non-sequel record), Russia ($12.3 million) and Australia ($9.2 million). Meanwhile, Avatar was off 42 percent, generating $22.8 million and bringing its total to $1.88 billion.