“It’s so profound and so powerful”: the Tim Burton movie that amazed Guillermo del Toro
Guillermo Del Toro and Tim Burton have a lot in common. Both are outspoken auteurs with their own instantly recognisable style of directing, and both have a fascination with the occult and the darker realms of human imagination. Burton’s debut feature, Pee-Wee’s Big Adventure, premiered in the same year as Del Toro’s Doña Lupe, his first short film. All Del Toro needs to do is start putting his long-term partner into all of his movies, and the transformation will be complete.
Though del Toro and Burton have never collaborated, the potential chaos they could create together is tantalising. Del Toro has openly praised Burton in the past, singling out one film as his personal favourite. Surprisingly, it isn’t the macabre Beetlejuice or Corpse Bride—instead, it’s one of Burton’s more understated, less gothic works.
“Ed Wood,” Del Toro told Film Talk in 2018. “It’s so profound and so powerful; it’s absolutely amazing. The reason why I admire it so much is simply because I couldn’t do it.” The Mexican director explained that Burton’s 1994 biopic of the cherished maker of B-movies simply couldn’t have been produced by someone from his part of the world.
“To us Latin Americans,” he said. “There’s a will to accept the fantastic as part of everyday life. That’s very natural to us, considering our culture. If you watch my movies, the supernatural or the extraordinary exists side by side with very ordinary situations. So that’s a natural vocation because I’m Mexican, I’m from Latin America. And when you are Mexican, you are the other, you know.”
The movie goes out of its way to position Wood as a creative spirit, someone who could think outside the box in the often stagnant world of Hollywood in the 1950s. Del Toro is saying that because Latin American culture celebrates this way of thinking instead of shunning it, Wood wouldn’t have been regarded as the pariah he was.
Del Toro then told a story that illustrated how he had been ‘othered’ throughout his life. It was about a time he got stopped by the police early in his career while driving a beaten-up old car. “You are from Mexico; I don’t see what are you doing here in Beverly Hills,” scoffed the cop in the story. “I said, ‘I’m on my way to meet a producer.’ ‘A producer? In this car?’ They kept me there for almost an hour. When you have different roots, you see the world in a different way.”
It makes sense why del Toro would resonate with the story of Ed Wood’s life. Regularly mocked and ostracised for his outlandish and often wonky movies – Glen or Glenda, Plan 9 From Outer Space, Bride of the Monster – Wood persisted nevertheless and made the films he wanted to make. It’s not hard to see why the mind behind Pan’s Labyrinth, The Devil’s Backbone, and The Shape of Water would see so much of himself in that example.
Burton’s picture, which starred Johnny Depp as the eccentric director, helped spark a renewed interest in his work and transformed him from an obscure joke into a cult hero. The film itself was showered with praise, and it won Martin Landau the ‘Best Supporting Actor’ Oscar for his portrayal of Bela Lugosi, actor and frequent Wood collaborator.
