Original subtitles

The misunderstood monster is the most well -known character in Tim Burton's

movies.

The feeling of not being understood recurs throughout all of his projects.

Not being able to communicate compelled Tim to create, to communicate through

filmmaking, through visual medium.

So much of his work is about the outsider.

Someone who is not as accepted into either the polite society or the clique

school. For him, the monster was always the thing that his heart went out to.

A monster reacting to society's reaction to him. Like Frankenstein,

perhaps, there is that innocence, and then there's the interaction with the

outside forces that break up that purity.

That's fascinating to Tim.

He's very attracted to the downtrodden, and there's a slice of insanity in all

of it that he taps into.

Tim subverts the exterior of characters and digs deep and has a lot of empathy

for those outsiders or people who maybe present as one thing but are actually

another.

He's able to articulate that misunderstood monster's theme so

He felt that way as a child and feels a lot like that now.

And he redefines what is weird and what's acceptable.

We see that life is complex.

That's the thing that people gravitate towards and what makes it exciting and

makes it a Tim Burton movie.

A lot of Tim Burton's characters are autobiographical.

Edward Scissorhands was unable to touch anyone because of his hands.

And it reflects the sense of isolation that Tim felt growing up in Burbank.

He fell out of place where he came from, where he was born.

He totally created his own destiny and his own self.

His mode of communicating is visual. It's entirely visual.

He doesn't need words.

That's why he relates to a dog.

It's all creation, and it's all from the imagination.

He could be from anywhere.

He's totally invented himself.

If there's ever a character that was the closest to Tim, it would be Edward.

The sort of metaphor of Edward Scissorhands, the symbolism of this man

not touch people and how badly he wanted to connect.

He was afraid to touch himself, let alone other people.

And there were amazing things about him that pulled you in and that were very

attractive, but at the same time, people were scared of him and saw him as

dangerous. I got all of that, and I think everyone does, from the visual of

character.

When he first started working with Johnny Depp, here's the star of 21 Jump

Street in a Tim Burton movie. It's not what you think it's going to be, and

that's the magic.

The thing that I like so much about Johnny is that he, in his own life, has

lot of themes and issues that are very similar to the character.

Johnny looks the way he does in real life. And, you know, he's on the cover

all these teen magazines and very popular, you know, like as a sex symbol,

of, you know, teen sex symbol.

But he's very much not that way as a person.

He's such a sensitive, vulnerable person.

That's what Tim and I have sensed, that combination of dignity, strength, and

sensitivity. And just visually, he's...

So beautiful, just ridiculous.

And so uncomfortable with that.

I was completely freaked out by it.

Paparazzi would take pictures of me. People would whisper and point their

fingers and stuff. I felt like this sort of raw nerve on display.

What I noticed the first time we met was... He wasn't really saying very many

words. He would begin a sentence, and then I would go, yeah, oh, yeah, and

we would talk about Boris Karloff or something.

We had related on a lot of levels.

After three and a half hours of a really great yak with a guy, I still thought,

no chance, man, no chance.

So about a month after the meeting, I get this phone call from Denise Denovi.

She said, Johnny, and I said, yeah. She goes,

you're Edward Scissorhands.

And I made her repeat it. Like, what, what?

She said, you're Edward Scissorhands.

When I was bringing to life a character that Tim Burton created in his youth,

because that's what he felt like, the more that I dove in, the more that I

thought about it, I realized, oh, Tim is Edward Scissorhands.

Tim's Edward Scissorhands.

And that's when just pure fear sets in.

I was cast in the film, but I was stepping into a kind of family that I

been totally brought into yet.

I was absolutely convinced that I was blowing it.

Tim had rehearsed everyone else in the cast.

Everyone.

Not me.

He didn't rehearse me.

He was excluding me from the cast and crew.

isolating me. I remember it was, yeah, man, it was scary.

I was uber paranoid.

Why is he not rehearsing me?

Well, maybe he trusts me. No, he doesn't. He doesn't trust you. What are

nuts?

He's going to cast someone else, man. I'm sitting around the hotel room, no

nothing. Oh, God, he's going to cast someone else. Bang, bang, bang on the

I look, and there's two teenage girls.

Is Tom Hanks here?

I went, I'm sorry, what?

It's Tom Hanks.

He's going to replace me any second now. I'm in his room at this point.

Maybe Tim bribed him, I don't know. You can't trust the guy. He's from Burbank,

you know.

I remember the first day we shot, it was inside the van.

Tim, he didn't audition Johnny.

It was the first time he was going to do this character.

He was nervous.

We did a couple takes, and then him and Tim went off and talked, and then

whatever happened, happened, and he was amazing in it.

In retrospect, he was very, very brilliantly allowing me to be alone,

to feel alone, maybe even more alone.

I took that feeling of teenage angst and loneliness and confusion, and

when it kicked in, it brought me closer to the character of Edward Scissorhands.

As Jack Kerouac once said, first thought, best thought.

It's your gut reaction, it's your intuition, it's your instinct, and

glued to that forever.

First thoughts that I had about the character was... A dog that I'd had, he

a close pal.

The senses that they display, that we have no idea exactly what it

is, but it's clearly something.

There is thought. You surpass language because language sometimes is not

It's unconditional love. There's no motive. It's just behaving. It's just

truth.

So the less that Edward spoke, the more he could say,

you have only the eyes, you have nothing but behavior

and reaction.

Tim's not the most social guy in the world. He's not going to dick around

small talk.

Well, he's very...

He'll come up and he'll say, you know, and I know exactly what he

means.

He didn't have a lot of words on the set, kind of walking back and forth. And

was following him, and then all of a sudden I thought, no, it's like those

diagrams of the atom. If I just stay here, he's going to come back around.

For Tim, normalcy is the scariest thing in the world.

That candy -colored suburbia is the most frightening part of the film.

The detail, I can't emphasize enough how specific he is. He made all the windows

a little bit smaller, so you couldn't tell why it felt strange.

I only found out afterwards, like, who would think of that?

It made a completely different atmosphere of this strange mythological

sensation.

That neighborhood was Tim's image or remembrance of his childhood. And then

remember these really, really strange things that people considered normal.

Hanging in their house like resin grapes.

Not real grapes. Resin grapes.

That stuff has always been...

It's just a complete, utter mystery and fascination to both of us. We still talk

about that kind of stuff.

Even in Dark Shadows. That's where I keep my macrame.

Macrame owls.

A disgraceful misuse.

Those 70s Lowry organs with the rhythm machine.

It's so weird.

It was like a secret joy that... Somebody was just clearing up in their

that they would dare to be that specifically weird.

Edward cut it. Isn't it wild?

It was exhilarating.

Everybody wants to work with Tim because working with someone with whom you

share an aesthetic, it's going to be a very gratifying creative experience.

One of his collaborators is Colleen Atwood, who's this amazing costume

She not only gets Tim and his aesthetic, but she herself has got these great

ideas that she knows how to build upon.

What she knows is important to Tim. The silhouette of a outfit, how it fits the

actor, what is this expressing? How is that going to support that character

Tim has in his mind?

Hey, Edward, where are you going?

One of my most terrifying scenes.

It was where Tim wanted Edward to cut his clothes off.

It was before any visual effects.

My costume supervisor and I taped together the shirt with toupee tape, and

only had two shirts.

So we went all night long, like, taping these shirts together till the take was

finally ripe.

It was a pretty harrowing night, but it looks great.

Now it's real. No wires or anything.

Johnny was amazing with the Stan Winston creations of those scissors.

I mean, the first time I saw those, I was just like, wow, such a genius

Those things are cool.

Colleen, she was astonishing because she just got it.

She had a great understanding of character.

It was almost like method costuming.

What Colleen has done to me for...

Pretty much every film we've ever made together, she puts me in the tightest

costume possible.

Sorry, Edward, I just... May I help you with this?

Thank you. It was leather and PVC.

I was like an old sea trunk in thousand -degree weather in hot Florida.

I think that was the name of the city, Hot.

It was the dead of the summer.

Every time I'd be like, oh man, it's so hot. I'd like look over and Tony would

have a straw.

Hi.

Kim was a very challenging role.

Kim!

Oh no.

This blonde cheerleader, Kim would tease me that he was torturing me in a way

because those were the girls that kind of picked on me in school.

Pretty much whatever.

All right?

All right. She actually has the most realistic reaction to Edwards.

And she's scared of him at first, and then she grows

to love him, whereas the whole town and everybody else loves him and then turns

on him.

Winona had this journey and experience where she understood this character and

what her world was really about.

And it lost its appeal because of meeting Edward Scissorhands.

There's something so pure about that film.

There's so much, so much heart.

The sensitivity that she played her with and the connection that she had with

Johnny.

which, as everyone knows, was on screen, off screen.

They were these two misfits that found each other, and it was that way in the

movie as well.

I remember looking at myself in the makeup the last day of shooting, knowing

that I would never look in his eyes again, and having known and understood

safety.

of playing a character who has no malice, who has no preconceptions,

who has nothing but truth and honesty.

I thought you were dead. He became part of me.

He had become a real person.

We connected with him, as people do when they see the movie, so deeply.

And you loved him for his courage, his creativity, his kindness.

All these qualities that we want in ourselves.

We did not want to say goodbye to Edward Scissorhands.

We were really invested in their love story.

It was just one of the greatest unrequited love stories ever.

When they dance in the snow, it allows you to believe that they'll always be

together in some way.

And that came from that longing for the character to continue and their

relationship to continue.

Danny's amazing work on Edward.

I can't listen to it now because I will.

I'll just start bawling.

It felt special.

I knew we were doing something really special and really

beautiful.

Tim lays bare everything in his work.

The Green Man, a self -portrait. Of course, when you look at this painting,

think, this does not look like Tim Burton.

He had created this painting after the passing of his grandmother.

The memento mori, a reflection of how he was feeling at the time.

A man in a mask with stitching on his face.

Stitching is not necessarily a frightful motif, but rather a way to represent

the ability to put yourself back together.

You see that reflected in the costume design of Edward Scissorhands. You see

that reflected in the costume design of Catwoman.

When her mental state starts to deteriorate, the stitching comes apart.

Tim translates.

these psychological ideas into his movie making.

It's literally reflected in the Sally character in The Nightmare Before

Christmas.

She takes herself apart, she puts herself back together.

And this is something that recurs in his photography projects.

So between 1992 and 1999, Tim used a large format Polaroid camera. Only about

six of these cameras were ever manufactured.

Tim used this very unique format to create his photography series.

There is no separation between how Tim feels and his forms of creative

expression.

Blue Girl.

He had dressed up his assistant. Colleen created the costume design and she had

stitching applied to her face and body.

Tim does not actively analyze why these motifs recur to him. It's kind of an

innate sense of communicating.

One of the photography series featured his dog, Poppy, for Christmas cards.

Dogs are not only in his films, but throughout all of his creative projects.

Poppy, he and Lisa Marie picked up on a street in Tokyo.

How do you get a dog back from Tokyo?

Maybe somebody's purse, I'm not sure.

And he was always with him.

He puts into words what he's feeling at that time.

His... illustrated book, The Melancholy Death of Oyster Boy and Other Stories,

is a collection of poems on these misfit characters.

Wordplay is intrinsically linked to his movies.

The Night Before Christmas is a very familiar poem, and then he transforms it

through his specific lens.

This project that Tim did 10 years ago disappeared off everybody's radar, but

Tim always wanted to do it, wanted to do it as a feature film. Not just that,

but to do it in this... archaic technique of animation everybody knows

motion is a little jittery you know the impression of it is from king kong which

is very much in keeping with how we did vince as well we were doing scissorhands

about to do batman returns when suddenly there was a new regime at disney

jeffrey katzenberg specifically this was the opportunity to say

Hey, we've got this project.

Here, let me show you.

We did get a meeting that was going to be our chance.

We did whatever was necessary to get ready.

We had this colleague, Henry Selleck, from CalArts.

He's a fantastic artist.

He was doing stop motion, and I brought Henry in with the idea that he would

direct it and bring his own expertise and his guidance to our team.

Tim was generous enough and also realistic enough to know what his

going to be. We were all kind of imbued and inoculated with the Burton vaccine

that we were able to motor along as well as we could within those circumstances.

Tim was always working on the script with Caroline and approving storyboards

characters. And like me, he was probably not sleeping much in those days.

Tim was working with Danny on all the songs.

Neither of us had any idea what it should be, but we knew what it shouldn't

Nightmare Before Christmas cannot sound like a Disney musical.

It's got to find its own voice.

Finding that voice is just heaven for me.

Tim was telling me the story like he was just sitting around the fire telling a

story to a nephew, and he'd show me pictures, he'd describe it like, and now

Jack wanders into the forest, and he sees these three doors in the tree, and

sees Christmastown for the first time. What is his reaction to the snow, to

everything?

I would just go, Tim, get out of here. You got to go. He'd come back and he'd

tell me the next part of the story.

I wrote every song in Nightmare Before Christmas in order because that's how

was telling me the story.

And he had a really clear idea of Jack.

In fleshing him out, I was able to inject my own hyper personality.

into his character and i grow so weary of the sound of screams

and i jack the pumpkin king have grown so

tired i helped breathe life into his creature i was also writing from my own

experiences feeling the need to get out of something feeling trapped in a world

that you're the center of that world but you want out

This is how I feel.

I was in a band, but I didn't want to be in a band anymore.

Nice work, bone daddy.

Yeah, I guess so.

Part of me is this character that Tim's describing to me.

There was one night where Tim and I went into a studio and we recorded complete

demos of everything I'd worked on.

I did all the voices. That's our job. But we're not mean. Except for I brought

in, obviously, a female singer to do Sally.

As anyone can see. I was singing all these songs of Jack.

Simply meant to be.

I got very, very attached

to Jack.

All these singers are being called in for the part of Jack.

I remember saying, Tim, I guess I should ask, and I was kind of hemming and

hawing. All right, here's my scenario.

When Tim and I first bonded, one of my childhood heroes was the actor Peter

Lorre, and his was Vincent Price.

It kind of defined our relationship because, you know, Vincent Price was the

torturer and Peter Lorre was always the tortured soul.

I'm imagining the singers get the part and suddenly all these terrible

accidents, like the scenario for one of his movies where all these critics are

dying. A piano falls, another gets hit by a bus.

And he goes, yeah, don't worry.

You've got the part.

That's right.

I am the pumpkin king.

We were all there in Jeffrey Katzenberg's office to get Jeffrey's

film. We had my maquettes of Jack and Zero.

santa claus an animation test from henry and we had five songs from danny elfman

what i do i am the best for my talents are renowned far and wide jeffrey was

blown away and he approved it on site and we went to work at it

average age of the crew on that movie was like 25 years old it was just like a

bunch of kids in a warehouse in san francisco the fact that it was daunting

was not something that ever occurred to anybody because

We had never done it before.

Everybody was trying to figure out how to draw like Tim.

They were like, I'm going to draw left -handed today and see if I can draw like

Tim. And it was like, don't try to draw like Tim. It's not going to happen.

Tim knows how to draw like Tim, so let's just try to work in his world here.

Well, I brought all the sculptures, all of Tim's sketches, going back to the

beginning so that we had his sense of suburbia.

of horror films, his sense of joy and love, and the slew of characters that he

had created over the years.

It felt like this is what his mind looks like inside, like just all of this

activity and this manifestation of profoundly cool beauty.

There are no right angles or straight lines in Halloween Town.

And in fact, that might have been a rule.

You will notice that we contrast Halloween Town with Christmas Town and

with the real world.

They're all about straight lines, isometric ratios and proportions.

It's all intentional, but the ability then to identify these different lands

with such stark contrasts is what art direction is all about.

Zero with an interesting character to create.

We did something called Pepper's Ghost, where you have to have a mirror where

you're shooting him someplace else, and then he looks like he's in the shot, but

he's ghostly. He was not a CG element.

The technology was old -fashioned but used in innovative ways.

It was all done on film. An animator would go on and animate them one frame

time. It might take two weeks to do a shot, and we wouldn't see it until two

weeks later.

It's petrifying to think about it, but you might look at it in a light blue

days in, and it's ruined. You would have to start again at the beginning and

just frame by frame do it again.

It is so difficult.

That was a crazy period. I was actually doing Nightmare and Batman at the same

time, Batman Returns.

Because Nightmare Before Christmas was such a long project that between

it and finishing it, Batman Returns, I think, was in the middle of it. I was

working with Tim on Batman Returns, so I was right there with him, showing him

stuff from Nightmare as it was coming through off of the fax machine,

Tim did think about, do I want to do it again?

How can I not reinvent it, but how can I have it grow?

his visualization of how do I make this a female version of these images in my

mind.

Catwoman was the answer.

Tim got a perfectly solid script.

It would pass every comic book fan's test.

Tim could barely read it without crying because it was so by the book.

I definitely came in knowing that this was Tim's show.

There's going to be no Prince songs in this one. Thank God. I love Prince, but

just the worst songs.

Danny Elfman was going to get to let loose.

I love the way he licks his lips after she... V. Neal's going to get to let

loose. The rules of screenwriting and three -act structure, they kind of go

the window. It's a different process.

This is party time. This is Burton time.

Working with Tim Burton is his own kind of fairy tale, where he's the mute

prince of a tragic kingdom. He's the monster of the cave.

And you try to come up with things that's going to get the monster to

Just don't let him eat me.

So I came up with like a couple ideas.

We wanted to start her off as a real woman on the ground floor, almost like a

homemade cat woman.

When I said the words homemade cat woman, Tim just said, shut up.

He doesn't say shut up. He doesn't speak.

Tim and I realized something's happening.

And he draws stitches like a woman in a sewing machine making her own outfit

herself.

Tim is, as a person, is always so connected to his characters.

You see him reflected in them.

He wanted to see how strange he could make her and how wounded. So she became

a Tim character, very different from the comic of Catwoman.

He really went into the stitching of Catwoman's outfit.

making it something different, like messing it up in psychology.

I would love to live with you in your castle.

Over the course of the film... Forever just like in a fairy tale. The costume

gets torn up, splotches of blonde hair come up, and by the end, she's a

I just couldn't live with myself.

Well, there is this thing going around. It's called the strong female character.

Right, and sometimes mess it up a little bit.

They think, well, if I make her kick ass, then that's a strong female

right?

But they get the promotion at the corporation.

They win the big game.

But if a female character is kind of messed up, kind of not quite right,

a much more interesting character.

A strong female character has a bit of anarchy in her. They don't want to get

the promotion at the corporation because they want to bring down the

corporation.

She's not going to be a pure feminist warrior.

She'll save a woman from mugging.

But then she'll slap the girl around. You make it so easy. Because why are you

being so weak and whimpering? Some Batman to save you.

Bruce Wayne in Batman became a much more interesting character by making

Catwoman an interesting character.

Don't you see?

We're the same.

It wasn't originally Michelle.

It was supposed to be Annette Bening. She got pregnant.

I'd never had, like, such a split -mixed feeling in my life. I was, like, very

extremely happy for her and then was, like, dropping down a dark abyss at the

same time. We were like, oh, my God, oh, my God, you know, what's going to

happen? And the movie gods bestowed upon us Michelle Pfeiffer, who just

was so phenomenal.

And it just hit the perfect tone.

And we didn't shy away from some campier elements and going for the joke

sometimes. Who is she?

What is she? I don't know whether to open fire or fall in love.

You poor guys.

Always confusing your pistols with your problems.

Even before there was a crowd -pleasing superhero movie, we knew we didn't want

to make it.

Hankman was very funny because, again, both Tim and I are pretty naive in the

comic books.

Penguin's a gangster and he's supposed to do this.

We kind of thought Burgess Meredith was a mutant.

Like, people say, he turned Penguin into a mutant.

Isn't he a mutant to begin with? He's not a real person, is he?

So we're already wrong.

And then Tim's got all these drawings of a hideous Penguin boy.

And we're just like, well, now that we're this far out on the limb, why

just go all the way and make the hideous Penguin boy grew up?

And he's like, shut up.

Again, doesn't say shut up.

Penguin forgets parents. I'm fully at peace with myself and the world.

He's like a frog that became a friend.

No, he's more like a penguin.

Penguin was my favorite man.

I mean, you know, first of all, we have certain attributes that are similar in

size and attitude.

We're both birds who cannot fly.

And so we have that little chip on our shoulder and we can swim and peck it.

Anyway.

Tim knew he wanted me.

I went to see him at his office.

It was like a wonderland. It had drawings on the tables, on the walls,

the desk.

Oswald was everywhere. It was amazing.

Having grown up, seeing all the different penguins, this was different.

very odd and crazy and Tim -esque. And when you walked in, there was this

beautiful painting.

It's little me as a baby, and it says, My name is Jimmy, but they call me the

hideous penguin boy.

I loved it immediately.

He said, please take it.

I brought it home and put it in a place of honor. It stays with me all the time.

That was the spirit of the beginning of it. And once you have the image of the

character, you start changing. Everything starts changing.

You know, and then he sprung it on me. You're going to have to be in makeup for

four hours.

I say, okay.

V. Neal did a great job. They designed the makeup, and he created every bit of

it. From my nails, from my nose, from my hair.

We talked about being abandoned.

I was their number one son, and they treated me like number two.

Being a freak.

But it's human nature to fear the unusual.

Being a little crazy.

People looking at you and not knowing what to think, not knowing what to say.

When I wrote Penguin, I kind of knew Danny DeVito was playing the role, so I

gave some, like, Louie from Taxi. Danny DeVito takes me aside and says, hey,

everybody else have a good time. Who wants to play Danny DeVito part?

not Danny DeVito. I had to go back in and write stuff that I think is outside

his comfort zone. That's the pussy I've been looking for.

He's got a huge comfort zone, it turns out.

It's chilly in here. Catwoman is so extreme.

I just fell head over heels in lust with her. I just wanted to peel that,

whatever kind of material that was, suit off of her like a grape, you know, just

take her apart and, like, you know, bring her in one of my lairs.

Speaking from Oswald's point of view, of course.

Here's a guy who's been turned against society, and he's trying to be a human

being, he's trying to fake it, and he realizes...

Human beings are the worst.

Like, it's more pure and better to be an animal.

Did you miss me?

Life's a Bitch, Now So Am I is the key Catwoman line, the key Penguin line.

I am not a human being!

I am an animal!

So it's like a victory when he realizes, I'm an animal.

The duality of the character is rife. There's so much going on, and it's so...

so many conflicts the tone is really tricky because there is a lightness and

humor to it and then there's a darkness and a gravity to it and then there's a

lot of weirdness to it you know it's like where's this coming from what is

so it's a very complicated tone to find for actors

Honey, I'm home. For Michelle, her way of speaking and moving.

Oh, I forgot I'm not married. She prepared a lot in terms of the

Him was obviously helpful to her in directing her. It was a lot to come up

the different voices, the dual characters.

I don't know about you, Miss Kitty, but I feel so much yummier.

We've seen these people unleash their ids wearing their outfits.

Selina Kyle and Bruce Wayne go to a masquerade ball, and they're the only

not wearing masks.

Is that what you think you are?

I don't know anymore.

These are people who are going through craziness. They're messed up.

Maybe Catwoman and Batman are their true selves, and these are the masks.

They're not heroes. They're not villains.

The true villain is the businessman.

I named the character Max Schreck.

after the lead actor of Nosferatu.

Tim didn't tell me to do that, but I knew Tim would like it.

A true businessman has their own weird kind of personality.

You can't even make them too weird anymore.

There's no such thing as over the top when it comes to these kind of men in

society. One can never have too much power.

If my life has a meaning, that's the meaning.

When I first met Tim...

I don't remember what we talked about, but he showed me at one point a picture

of Vincent Price, and he just handed it to me.

I don't know why he did that.

Tim gives very minimal direction, very, like, pointed, specific things that

other people wouldn't think of.

We were talking for some reason about the Great Gatsby, about the gangster

Wolfshine, and he notices that Wolfshine is wearing cufflinks made out of human

molars.

I see you're looking at my cuff buttons. Whose are they? Are they his enemy?

Why is the guy wearing human molars?

An hour later, they went to some dental lab, and Max Schreck had cufflinks made

out of human molars.

Not something anybody would notice, but I knew.

I love going there and watching the painting happening, or the mind working.

It's like jazz.

It's like sitting in with Coltrane or Charlie Parker.

I have an instrument, you have one, you have one. Okay, where do I feel? You're

the guy who's in a costume now becoming this other character.

He's playing in a certain key, you find an opening, and you jump in. In my

movie, which was in Hoffa, I was doing a shot with coffins, and I used another

open coffin.

And there he was, come to visit me on the set.

A little bit of white makeup. He was dressed for the part. We just stuck him

the coffin.

Is it a closed list there? No, no, no, no.

Perfect. He played the corpse like nobody else could have. He was

We didn't plan that. Somehow I don't think this is going to end up in the

I don't think we played jazz together.

Both his Batmans were great because they were tense. You made me remember.

He makes everything his own. It's not like he kind of plugs into a film and

serves that film.

Get those wonderful toys.

He doesn't do it that way. Whatever film he chooses, he completely changes the

DNA of it and it becomes a Tim Burton film.

When you're a director that's an original, they want you, but then

like, afraid of you at the same time. It's a tricky path to tread. He had to

deal with some studio stuff.

Their notes and their suggestions, which he wasn't enjoying.

And that's hard for a guy that's so involved in a world he's creating and

struggling to find.

Catwoman put a stuffed animal in the garbage disposal.

It was a big fight with the studio.

She's shoving them down, she's angry at the world that she's living in, and

she's turning it into something else. And you can't do that.

And we thought, well, wait a minute, that's your character.

Their job is to be risk -averse, but Tim doesn't care about a risk.

His vision is original, and it's not always evident what it will be.

He is a final cut director, and there aren't very many, so it can be

for a studio.

If I was standing next to Rothko, would I say, like, you know, that red

could be a little bit deeper?

And it might be better.

Like, would I do that? No.

Tim was this very creative person. Pee -wee and Beetlejuice were such

unique, personal movies.

And then Batman just ended up being this Goliath.

You got to go back to Cleopatra or Down with the Wind. There just hadn't been a

movie that just kind of took over all media, all food distribution, all cereal

distribution on planet Earth. And it was overwhelming.

Tim always talked about working for the brother, meaning the Warner Brothers.

It was a metaphor. I'm working for McDonald's. I'm working for the

Batman Returns had the legendary Happy Meal backlash.

The Happy Meal figures for Batman Returns got pulled off the market

movies just got gore and blood and all this horribleness.

And the little children are crying in McDonald's. It was so ridiculous.

People talk about, we broke this rule, we broke that rule, and how dare you.

When Batman Returns came out, you have to remember, there was not a thousand

superhero films.

Comic book fans thought, wait, you're wasting a Batman film on this wild

of fancy of Tim Burton?

Again, like, oh, the darkness. Darkness? Okay, we're like the least dark Batman

movie ever outside the Tumac world.

Matt Reeve.

nirvana batman and there's no problem christopher nolan blows up a sporting

event he blows up a hospital who cares a guy eating a raw fish using the

primordial goo that traumatizes you when you're creative about it when you

work with dream logic that's when you can create nightmares who doesn't want a

nightmare a nightmare before christmas that's a weirder story because nightmare

didn't do that well

We did a press junket, 100 interviews a day.

And almost every interviewer, the first thing they would say, so it's not for

kids, right?

And they'd say things like, I hear they torture Santa Claus.

No, they don't torture Santa Claus. He's fine.

Disney didn't understand what it was.

Surprised, aren't you?

I knew you would. And in their defense, there's no way they could understand

what it was.

You know, they've been doing musicals successfully for all these years. And

Nightmare Before Christmas comes along.

And it just doesn't fit into any part of a slot that's comprehensible from their

perspective. Like, what is this thing?

I kept saying the same thing. I'd say, does Halloween scare your kids?

No, they love Halloween. Then this isn't too scary for them.

It was a bit dark.

I mean, it is dark.

They are trying to hit us. There wasn't a lot of faith in that movie.

I knew this Christmas thing was a bad idea.

I felt it in my gut.

They didn't get the movie.

They didn't get the movie.

When it opened, I'll never forget a review, and I think it was in the LA

that said, don't fuck with Christmas.

And I was like, oh, my God.

They didn't get it.

And, you know, you just got to accept that. This is movies.

Everybody knows what it's like to pour your heart into something.

To see it kind of come and go quickly and get misunderstood.

What have I done? It's heartbreaking.

What have I done? In particular, it's heartbreaking on an animation because

you've got people working on this three years, four years, five years.

I don't think the studio knew what to do with it. They didn't want to do a

trailer for it.

They released it for the first time in 1993, 1994, under Touchstone.

They didn't do any toys when it first came out. But then in Japan, it

became this big sensation that people were embracing.

A decade or more later, Tim and I are in Tokyo for the opening of Charlie and

the Chocolate Factory, and there's Jack and Sally toys everywhere.

Disney at that point says, OK, we get it now.

And then Disney was like, well, we should call this a Disney film, and we

make toys.

They erased the touchstone, and then they put in the Disney.

And then now, like every year, there's stuff year -round in the parks.

They retrofit the Haunted Mansion into the Nightmare Mansion.

You drive down the street, like there's always somebody wearing Jack

Skellington. It's interesting how, over time, the audience has found him, and

then the studio has to accept whatever it is that doesn't fit in their box.

There's an audience out there, and people love it.

Tim is an artist, and Tim just wants to create.

Visions are worth fighting for.

Why spend your life making someone else's dreams?

Ed Wood was an opportunity for him to strip it down and sort of get back to

like the simple joy of film school days.

We'll have a picture that'll entertain, enlighten, and maybe even move millions

of people.

Hey kids, let's go make a movie.

It was 1992, maybe.

I get this call from Tim.

He's like, J .D., you around?

Boom, 20 minutes later, there's Tim sitting at the end of the bar, you know,

nursing a beer.

He goes,

do you know who Ed Wood is?

Yeah, of course, yeah, yeah, I do. I am familiar with Ed Wood.

I'd seen Glenner Glenda and Plan 9 from Outer Space.

So he started talking about the idea. Look, look, look, when I said that you

could have the Western territories... He didn't even have to finish telling me

the story. I just said, yeah, I'm in, you know, of course.

Whatever you want. No script, no paper, no nothing.

Is there a script?

Fuck no.

You know, tink.

Ed Wood is this guy, he's got this tremendous passion for what he does.

It's like live or die, gonna make a movie, and when he's making that movie,

making Citizen Kane. It's the greatest film that's ever been made.

And cut. Perfect. Printed. Let's move on.

The reality's a lot different. Nobody wants to see this piece of shit! Hey,

can't talk that way about my movie! Tim did not want to make that judgment on a

person's art.

We were concentrating most on his passion.

rather than whether he was looked at by society as a successful artist.

Hey, it's not that bad. You can't concentrate on the negative. Look,

some nice things to say here.

The soldier's costumes are very realistic. That positive.

There was a scene when Martin Landau took an octopus in the water and he was

doing this.

You know, I lasted a little while with it and cut, moved on to the next thing.

Oh, for Christ's sake.

Well, Tim said, you know, that scene with Martin, we need to be longer in the

water. God damn it! It's cold.

It'll warm up once you're in it. Fuck you, you come out here. So I added some

more.

And he said, no, I think even longer still.

Tony, it makes it feel even longer than it already is. I thought, oh my God, the

guy's just sitting there doing this forever.

And then we looked at the movie, and that was the whole idea.

that he's just doing it so long, the acting is off the charts. And I thought,

okay, now I get it.

And cut!

You know, editing, there's a lot of moving parts.

The length of a shot is nothing.

But in that scene, it became everything.

He could identify with somebody like that and that passion to just create.

And Tim even then sort of had a bit of a there, but for the grace of God, go I.

and that it's just like a one -chromosome difference between me and

I could have been Ed Wood, and I just could have been the guy living in a

apartment in East Hollywood, just because I'm too weird.

Honey, what if I'm wrong?

What if I just don't got it?

Most artists feel like maybe they're frauds, that they're one step away from

being considered the worst filmmaker of all time.

I wrote, directed, and starred in it, just like Orson Welles did in Citizen

Kane. Yeah, well, Orson Welles didn't wear Angora sweats, did he?

The pink Angora sweater was a form of armor.

And when you think about armor, traditionally, you don't think about an

sweater. But masking for Ed Wood, when he's dressing as a woman, he's at his

most comfortable.

Ed Wood being a transvestite was kind of the least important thing about the

character or the movie. It was way out of his time in that way.

It was more about how beautiful it was that this guy...

who made these terrible movies. They were so bad, they were great.

And his utter devotion and commitment to expressing

his art and expressing himself and how he created this family of choice

of other misfits and found someone who was completely forgotten

and lost and dying and made him the hero.

The relationship with Ed and Bella. I don't want anything. I just, I'm a

big, big fan. I've seen all your movies.

Kind of parallel the relationship with Tim and Vincent Price.

Andy, you got a new movie for me. I actually would call it at times, Ed and

Bella Love Story.

And you'll love your character. Tim always had to have Martin Landau in his

to play Lugosi.

There was a physical resemblance, but more importantly, he felt that Martin

understood. There's a lot of struggle in terms of sustaining a long career.

So Martin gets cast, and then they're doing the makeup test, but then

was bugging Tim, and he goes over to the monitor, and he turns off the color,

and he says, now it looks like Bella, because I've never seen a color

of Bella Lugosi, and the color doesn't work with him. And so that was the

that changed everything, and then he called up Sony, or Mike Simpson probably

had to make the death call.

What do you think you're doing? So he just goes crazy.

Not like that, John.

I don't like black and white because no one goes to black and white movies.

And if you look at our grosses, that was proven true.

And then they say to Tim, well, just shoot color negative and we'll print it

black and white.

That's it!

I've printed it! We were with Tim when that call came in, and he was just so

funny. He was like, I just smell a rat.

You can't trust these people. He says, one day I'll be on vacation, and I'll be

in a hotel, and I'll turn it on, and there's Ed Wood in color.

What do you think will be the next obstacle the Earth people will put in

way? Well, as long as they can think, we'll have our problems.

Tim works on instinct. He creates what he creates, and he's not thinking about

the outside world.

I like that.

Tim is very much like... Ed's very happy. Ed just wanted to make monster

He just wanted to make science fiction movies.

He'd call all his buddies. Hey, Plan 9's on TV at 2 a .m. Come on over.

Tim was...

set on johnny from day one it's like obviously they are a partnership but

just like it's gotta be johnny and then it's just like those hollywood things

where it's like oh actually there's gonna be a problem and then we could

sort of see the light go out of tim's eyes and i remember us coming in with

other casting ideas other young actors who kind of like look daniel baldwin

of he he looks like ed wood I think I had a day of Keanu Reeves. Keanu Reeves,

he could be Edward.

Imagine Keanu with a little mustache. And then Tim just looking at us with

broken eyes.

It's like, well... Tim didn't want the studios to decide.

And he said, look, guys, here's the deal.

Johnny is Edward.

Period.

This was someone that he respected artistically, and this was someone who

interest in...

going against that grain and going out on that ledge into something really

artistic.

Everybody was waiting for him to come on set, and I had seen him earlier, and I

knew he was a little bit nervous.

You've got to calm down.

He walked out onto set, and... All right, everybody, let's get set up for

112. He looked over at me, and he said, Genovi, am I going to be okay?

And I said, I think so.

I mean, I didn't know what else to say because who the hell knew?

All I could think was, what courage.

In those days, this was a long time ago.

Look at the world when that movie came out. It was very different.

Probably another one of Billy Wellman's practical shows.

I think everyone in Hollywood thought that we were crazy.

That we were going in a direction that was for sure to be, they would kill

it. But they want professionalism.

Bill Murray, too. I think, well, he kind of did it for fun, as a lark, as he is

wont to do.

I don't know if he quite knew what was going on the whole time. Like, what the

is this movie?

Mr. Bunny, why throw?

I heard you were becoming a lady.

Oh, that.

After the movie, he came up to me and he said, oh, my God. He goes, I get it

now. It wasn't until I saw your movie that I realized I have to take action.

Goodbye, penis.

Please keep it to yourself. We chose the five -year chunk because it was the

Legosi years.

But once you go past that time period, as life just, oh my God, it's just that

struggle. Take me to the nearest bar and make it snap. People who come to

Hollywood with a dream and then it doesn't work out. You have bounced your

and final rent check.

And then it's just a series of flop houses and sleeping on friends' couches

drinking too much. But Tim and Johnny both got into this synchronicity of

there's something so joyful here that Tim almost didn't want to see Ed down.

A ghastly creature. He wanted the joy of I'm a young man with ideas.

I don't like scary movies.

I don't care what people say to me. I can make it in this town.

And it was a very emotional experience shooting it in Hollywood.

We don't have a permit.

Run! On the real street, at the real location, and having these people come

of the woodwork, come out of these apartments, saying, I was here, I knew

One of the PAs comes running over to me and says, there's an old lady, she said

she was married to Ed Wood.

About to get on a bus, I'm like, what the hell? I go running over.

Kathy, you want to come watch us shoot the movie? I grab her shopping bags,

which clink because they're full of bottles.

She says, I do want to meet Johnny. Hi.

Oh, no.

Oh, no. Oh, no.

We're shooting the Musso and Franks exterior today.

Johnny is dressed like a woman.

He's disheveled because he's upset and angry at the Baptist.

And he basically looks like a $5 hooker. No, this cannot be how she meets

Johnny. She's like, where's Johnny? Where's Johnny? Door opens, and Johnny

out, and she looks up, and she says, you look just like my Eddie.

Ed was using cross -dressing because it made him feel more comfortable.

Ed's always been rejected every time he's told someone.

When Sarah Jessica reads the script, she blows a gasket, which is so different

in the way Kathy would react.

He cares so much for this woman, he's finally going to confess.

In fact, he's confessing in a spook house. It's completely crazy.

It has all the trappings of Tim Burton -ness. There's spinning wheels and

there's Dracula's coming out at you and stuff like this. But then the ride stops

and then it gets to the heart of what Tim is so good at. The emotions are

through in those characters.

When we wrote the scene, like, oh, Ed's going to explain his cross -dressing.

I like to wear women's clothes.

What is Kathy Wood going to say?

There's some scenes that are so perfect.

She just so gently says, okay, how great would that be if everybody was

like that?

You know, the thing with Johnny, how it is kind of funny, but it's also tolerant

and kind and it's given a dignity.

And then coming back to that question, am I going to be okay?

I just remember the first time we saw the movie.

And saying to Johnny, it's more than okay.

It's like, this is amazing.

I don't think it's contrived with him. I don't think it's a greater plan. I

think it's just his own intuition and his own point of view of not judging so

much.

Seeing a character like Ed Wood and just embracing the whole world of Ed Wood is

a world that's allowed to be.

And I think that Tim really believes that... All those worlds should be

to be as they are.

It had a really huge impact on our culture.

There's so many people who say Tim Burton saved my life, and they mean it.

Being different, being a nonconformist, being interested in things that other

people are not interested in, wanting to tell the truth in ways that, you know,

are not socially acceptable, looking different, dressing different.

All of those things are so hard to deal with when you're an adolescent or a

young adult.

His movies inspire, it gives courage and comfort that you can be that way. It's

not like the movies had any anger in them at all.

They are very loving movies.

I don't know really anybody else who's done it quite that powerfully.