Posts Tagged ‘Pee Wee’s Big Adventure’

Metro In Focus: Tim Burton’s characters, “I feel like they are mutated children.”

screen-shot-2016-09-26-at-4-44-08-pmBy Richard Crouse – Metro In Focus

Visionary Tim Burton values his time alone.

One writer called the director of Pee Wee’s Big Adventure, Beetle Juice, Batman, Edward Scissorhands and this weekend’s Miss Peregrine’s Home For Peculiar Children, “the most widely embraced loner in contemporary cinema.”

“I always try to at least spend time, as much as I can everyday, staring out into space; staring out a window,” the director says. “I find that sometimes you get the most ideas and the most feelings when you’re not involved in things you have to do everyday; especially these days when technology is such that you can be reached any time. I try and avoid that.”

Unsurprisingly as a filmmaker the characters he champions tend to echo his sensibility. From warped Mad Hatter in his Alice in Wonderland to the grieving child in Frankenweenie who reanimated a dog’s corpse, Burton’s heroes are often misfits and outsiders.

From his debut, Pee-Wee’s Big Adventure, Burton has showcased people on the fringes of society. “You don’t wanna get mixed up with a guy like me,” says man-child Pee-Wee (Paul Reubens), “I’m a loner. A rebel.” Loosely based Vittorio De Sica’s classic film The Bicycle Thief, Burton’s story sees Pee-Wee on a mission to retrieve his stolen fire engine-red customized 1940s Schwinn. David Letterman was a fan, describing the anti-social character as having, “the external structure of a bratty little precocious kid, but you know it’s being controlled by the incubus, the manifestation of evil itself.”

In his next film Burton breathed life into Betelgeuse‘s rancid lungs. In the haunted-house comedy Beetlejuice Michael Keaton plays a “bio-exorcist” with crazy hair, giant teeth and an attitude, hired by two ghosts to scare away the insufferable new owners of their old house.

“I think Beetlejuice shows the complete positive side of being misperceived and being categorized as something different,” Burton says. “He can do whatever he wants! He’s horrible and everybody knows it, so he’s a complete fantasy of all of that.”

Burton’s two greatest misfits, his most intrepid folks on the outside looking in, are the off-kilter Eds—Wood and Scissorhands.

Edward Scissorhands is the strange-but-sweet story of a man with scissors for hands. The first collaboration of Tim Burton and Johnny Depp, the movie is a funny, romantic and moving fantasy was inspired by a sketch Burton created as a teenager. “One look at that drawing was all I needed to understand what Edward was about,” says Depp. “I felt very tortured as a teenager,” says Burton. “That’s where Edward Scissorhands came from. I was probably clinically depressed and didn’t know it.”

Ed Wood, played by Depp in the film of the same name, is the story of one of Hollywood’s great outcasts. Wood wrote, produced and directed low-budget anti-classics like Plan 9 from Outer Space and Glen or Glenda. Burton says he was a fan of Wood’s films and after reading some of the director’s letters was touched by how Wood, “wrote about his films as if he was making Citizen Kane, you know, whereas other people perceived them as, like, the worst movies ever.”

Burton links his best-known creations, labelling them as “semi-antisocial, [having] difficulty communicating or relating, slightly out of touch,” and adds, “I feel very close to those characters. I really do. I feel like they are mutated children.”

BIG EYES: 3 ½ STARS. “true-life tale that is stranger than fiction.”

bgiTim Burton likes strange stories. From the razor sharp fingers of “Edward Scissorhands” to “Pee Wee’s Big Adventure,” he has made his trade on stranger-than-life stories.

Now, with “Big Eyes,” starring Amy Adams and Christoph Waltz as Margaret and Walter Keane, he has found a true-life tale that is stranger than fiction.

There was a time when Walter Keane was the top selling painter in the world. Original paintings of his big-eyed waifs commanded thousands of dollars but if that was too high end for you, a print could be purchased for the price of a breakfast at Dennys. And sell they did, like hotcakes. Keane became rich and famous and even though gallery owners, like the one played by Jason Schwartzman in the movie, thought the “taste police” should be called wherever the paintings were displayed and a critic (Terrence Stamp) called them grotesque and “an infinity of kitsch,” the morose portraits were very popular.

“I think what Keane has done is just terrific,” said Andy Warhol. “It has to be good. If it were bad, so many people wouldn’t like it.”

Trouble was, Walter couldn’t paint. He was an artist wannabe with a talent for promotion of other people’s work. In this case it was the work of his wife Margaret. For her the paintings were a personal expression, for him they were a personal cheque to fame and fortune. From selling the paintings at street fairs to the walls of jazz clubs to their own gallery and finally department stores all over the world, Walter became the public face of the phenomenon while Margaret sat at home, tucked away in a small garret cranking out big eyes and keeping her mouth shut.

Eventually Margaret sought out the credit she and share of the money she had rightly earned in a dramatic courtroom battle that was settled with easels and brushes instead of lawyers and writs.

Like Burton’s look at the life of Hollywood hack Ed Wood, “Big Eyes” once again proves that beauty is in the eye of the beholder and sometimes fact is stranger than fiction. The love and generosity Burton slathered on Woods’ eventful life and subpar work is once again on display.

The big-eyed paintings are an acquired taste, a kitschy look at another time when outsider art took center stage but Burton uses them not just as an artifact form another time but to present a story of an artist’s quest for recognition and recompense. It’s a trip back in time to the early to mid Sixties when women’s art was not taken seriously—“Your husband is quite a talent. Do you paint too?” she’s asked—and while we never really learn why the paintings become so popular, we know that through some savvy promotion they did.

What’s more important is the how and why of Margaret’s story. Why did she let her husband steal the spotlight and the money?

That’s the heart of it all and through Waltz’s flamboyant performance as the charmingly vile Walter and Adams’s soulful take on the shy and pliable Margaret we’re given a glimpse into a one-sided and unhealthy relationship with a very public face.

If the eyes are the window to the soul, “Big Eyes” is a skillful, if a little thin look at an artist’s soul and the soulless shark who tried to steal it from her.

Tim Burton Is Director-Turned-Artist for New Exhibit by Richard Crouse zoomermag.com PEOPLE Thursday, November 25, 2010 By Richard Crouse

arts-tim-burton-584Tim Burton’s cell phone ring tone is exactly what you would expect from the man who has directed some of the most atmospheric films of the last two decades. In Toronto this week to promote an exhibition of his art and films at the TIFF Bell Lightbox Burton was mid sentence when his cell phone went off. The eerie wail of a Theremin filled the room.

“Sorry,” he says fumbling to mute the phone. “It scares me every time it rings.”

Turns out the visionary director of Pee Wee’s Big Adventure, Beetle Juice, Batman, Edward Scissorhands and most recently, the billion dollar grossing Alice in Wonderland, values his time away from technology, specifically his phone.

“I always try to at least spend time, as much as I can everyday, staring out into space; staring out a window,” he says. “I find that sometimes you get the most ideas and the most feelings when you’re not involved in things you have to do everyday; especially these days when technology is such that you can be reached any time. I try and avoid that.”

He may call spacing out an “important part of the day” but don’t call him a loner. On set he looks forward to working with others.

“Part of the joy of making a movie is working with collaborators,” he says. “When I first started in animation class you’d draw all the characters, you’d cut it, you’d do everything, which is great because it gives you a great background. But as you go on part of the joy is working with collaborators. People who surprise you. People who you try and tell them what you are doing and they get it and they add something to it, whether it’s actors or designers or whomever. I’ve really gotten to enjoy that process. It keeps things fresh. You get surprised by people and that is part of the joy of making a film.”

Right now Burton is working on full-length 3-D stop motion remake of his own 1984 short film Frankenweenie, a well loved cult classic about a young boy who uses electricity to revive his recently deceased dog.

“I love stop motion,” he says, “so it is kind of fun to keep with that. The tactile nature of it is something I always like to experience.”

Ironically he’s making the film in conjunction with Walt Disney, the same company who fired him in the mid-80s after he made the original short film, claiming it was too scary for young audiences. The House of Mouse and Burton have since kissed and made up—he made Alice in Wonderland for them—and he says now he’s appreciative of the two years of experience Disney gave him as a young man.

“If I had been there at any other time I wouldn’t have gotten the opportunity to do what I did,” he says, “because they were so directionless as a company. They were trying to move into the modern world but they weren’t quite ready for it yet so I got to try things that were off the track. It was a strange time but I’m always grateful for it because if it had been any other two years on one side or another [of the time he was there] I wouldn’t have gotten that opportunity.”

Now, courtesy of the Bell TIFF Lightbox working in conjunction with the MOMA, we’re getting the chance to see some of the early Disney work as well as 700 of the director’s paintings, drawings, maquettes, puppets, videos and storyboards.

“This is a strange thing,” he says. “I never really went to museums. A wax museum maybe, so the idea of [seeing my work] here was an out of body experience. It’s kind of like, ‘Look at my dirty socks hanging on the wall. Look at my underwear.’ But reconnecting with yourself is very interesting because I would never have looked at any of this stuff ever again and so they kind of forced the issue. It’s strange, which is fine. I don’t mind a strange feeling.”

The Burton exhibit runs at the Bell TIFF Lightbox from Nov. 26, 2010 to April 21, 2011.