“Leave me alone, damn it!”

One of Burton’s early masterpieces was called “Edward Scissorhands.” It was a story about a man created artificially by a brilliant scientist; instead of hands, he had enormous scissors with which he could skillfully trim lawns and create hairstyles for women. It was “Edward” that first showcased the talent of actor Johnny Depp (at that time he was a TV star; later he became a close friend of Burton and appeared in numerous films by him). It was also partially an autobiographical story.

Tim grew up in Burbank – Hollywood was not far from him, yet Burbank remained a typical provincial town, much like the setting of “Edward.” In his childhood, Tim had a few friends, but he grew up rather lonely and immersed in fantasies, “as if he spread an aura around him saying, ‘Leave me alone, damn it!'” And, like Edward, on Christmas and Halloween, he decorated his neighbors’ houses – not with tree sculptures, but with various drawings. Tim loved drawing (but he didn’t like reading at all), and he especially adored old horror movies. He wasn’t scared of what happened in them, but he was fascinated. In an interview with his biographer, Mark Salisbury, Burton recalled that he particularly liked “The Brain That Wouldn’t Die,” where a man’s hand gets severed and touches a bloodied cult on the wall before dying, while his head lies on a plate, laughing at him.

In school, he started making puppet animations with his friends – they were terribly clumsy and unprofessional, but made with genuine inspiration. And at the age of 18, he went to study at the California Institute of the Arts, founded by Walt Disney. Later, he was hired by the Walt Disney Studio to work as an animator, but nothing worked out: the cartoon was about cheerful foxes, and Burton’s characters looked as if they had been run over by a car. After much torment, kind people gave him tens of thousands of dollars to make a short animated film called “Vincent” about a boy who adored horror movie star Vincent Price (and who looked very much like Tim himself). Then there was a reimagining of the Grimm Brothers’ “Hansel and Gretel” in a Japanese style, and then “Frankenweenie” – another short film, a variation on the theme of “Frankenstein,” but with a dog at the center of the story. The studio didn’t quite know what to do with Burton’s work. However, the comedy actor Paul Reubens saw “Frankenweenie,” was charmed, and gave Burton the opportunity to direct his first feature film, “Pee-wee’s Big Adventure” …

HEADS OFF SHOULDERS!

“I don’t understand how I became a director – I was just very lucky” – Burton later admitted. But just a few years after the premiere of “Big Adventure” he was on the set of “Batman” – a big-budget comic book film, which he turned into his unique author’s project. He insisted that the lead role should be played by Michael Keaton, and he did not care about the 50,000 letters of protest that sent to the studio Warner Bros. angry fans of the Bat-Man (Keaton was considered a comedic actor, it was difficult to imagine him in the role of a superhero). Only the appointment of Jack Nicholson to play the Joker calmed the fans’ outrage: everyone agreed that at least this candidate was perfect. And Nicholson himself was very helpful to Burton on the set, – was deprived of stardom and arrogance, did not look down on the young man.

The fabulous “Batman” with its menacing dark streets and a giant cave under a gothic mansion, with amazing music by Danny Elfman and plenty of black humour, became one of the major hits of the 80s. The sequel, “Batman Returns”, was five times darker and more inventive, it was already the purest art of cinema, almost an art house with a colossal budget. The villains, Penguin (Danny DeVito) and Catwoman (Michelle Pfeiffer), act without any clear plan or understanding of why they were born into the world in the first place. They are driven by the kind of intense anger and pain that you don’t often see in Hollywood cinema at all. “McDonald’s”, which began to sell breakfast with figurines of Batman, curtailed the whole campaign – they were horrified that the film turned out, in the words of one critic, “a nasty nihilistic nightmare”. The studio did not let Burton to direct the third film about Batman – on it took the director Joel Schumacher … But today, “Batman Returns” look like a museum walk – and all the works in this museum generated by the imagination of one brilliant man, Tim Burton.

Almost every film he made after that was a big hit. For example, the charming macabre comedy “Mars Attacks!”, based on the cards of the early 60s (the cards were creepy, the Martians behaved like real sadists with the Earth population, but Burton lightened the mood of the story). “Sleepy Hollow”, on the other hand, was based on a lightly humorous story by Washington Irving – and in Burton’s version it became a horror story with a natural Headless Horseman who cuts off the heads of everyone in a row… His bloodiest story was “Sweeney Todd: The Demon Barber of Fleet Street”, a vigilante tragedy in which Johnny Depp slit the throats of ordinary Londoners and his girlfriend (Helena Bonham-Carter) baked from their meat pies. Even the almost juvenile Alice in Wonderland featured severed heads – the Red Queen, played by Helena Bonham Carter, had no complaints from her subjects.

FELL IN LOVE WITH A GIRL WHILE WATCHING A UFO WITH HER.

Incidentally, Helena Bonham Carter, who stars in Burton’s “Sweeney Todd”, was already his girlfriend. They met in the early 2000s when they worked together on “Planet of the Apes”. Before that, Burton was married to German artist Lena Giesecke and then had an affair with actress Lisa Mary (they say they fell in love while watching UFOs circling in the Californian sky). But it was Helena who gave birth to his children, a son and a daughter. Johnny Depp, speaking of his children (and Burton’s son became his godson), recalled: “Who would have thought that our offspring would spend time together in playgrounds: swinging on swings, sharing toy cars, toy monsters, even risking catching chicken pox? This part of life was something I could never have imagined. Seeing Tim as a happy father is enough to make me cry uncontrollably. As is almost always the case, Tim’s feelings are easy to read in his eyes. They’ve shone before, there’s no denying that, those worried, sad, tired eyes have always shone. But now old Tim’s eyes have turned into real lasers!

And yet, in 2014, Tim and Helena divorced (they used that word, even though they were never formally married). He recently met his new girlfriend in October 2022 – she was the famous actress Monica Bellucci. They confirmed their romance only six months ago. In February 2023. Monica told Elle magazine in an interview: “This is one of those meetings that rarely happen in life … I know this man, I love him, and now another adventure begins – I will meet him as a director.

It’s just that Burton is now making a sequel to another of the films that made him famous: Beetlejuice (1988). In addition to Bellucci, the film will star Winona Ryder and Michael Keaton as a “bio-exorcist” who helps the ghosts of the recently deceased to scare the living, who have taken over empty apartments and mansions after the death of the previous owners. Typical Bertone fantasy, and of course the director’s fans are rooting for him to succeed this time.

BY THE WAY.

After Batman, he could have done Superman.

Tim Burton, like many big Hollywood directors, is full of unfinished projects. For example, he seriously considered making Catwoman with Michelle Pfeiffer. After the events of Batman Returns, the heroine was to lose her memory and go on holiday to Oasis City, a kind of Las Vegas for superheroes. But the project eventually fizzled out. More Burton could have done “The Addams Family” (not done, because he was busy with the second “Batman”), “Jurassic Park” (the rights to the novel by Michael Krytona were bought back by another studio and the project was given to Steven Spielberg), “The Fall of the House of Esher” by Edgar Poe (preferred to do “Mars Attacks! “), “The Cathedral of Notre Dame de Paris” by Hugo, “Maleficent” with Angelina Jolie, “Monstrapocalypse” about giant sea-monster kaiju (the project was cancelled because Guillermo del Toro had a rival film on the same theme, “Pacific Rim”). Most upsetting was the cancellation of “Superman Alive! – a comic book adaptation starring Nicolas Cage as the Man of Steel. In the late 90s, Burton threatened to spend a year on it, and even found locations, but studio Warner Bros. demanded a rewrite of the script, and Burton fell out with the producers. Cage as Superman seen in the recent film “Flash”.