Tim Burton’s least favourite kind of Hollywood movie: “Stodgy and really boring”
Most people know what goes into making a Tim Burton movie. Usually, you need one or both of Johnny Depp and Helena Bonham-Carter. You need some kind of gothic world for them to inhabit, along with spiky hair and some creepy kids singing at some point. It’s what we know and expect. That’s not to say his films aren’t good, because they often are, but there’s definitely going to be a certain aesthetic.
So it was a bit of a surprise back in 1994 when Burton decided to do a biopic of a famed, notoriously bad American horror director Edward Davis Wood Jr, with Ed Wood. Sure, Johnny Depp was present and correct, but this wasn’t a gothic fantasy; instead, it was a comedy drama rooted in reality, co-starring several other well-known names, including Bill Murray and Sarah Jessica Parker.
It was also a surprise because Burton is not a fan of biopics, not at all. As he told Mark Salisbury for the book Burton on Burton: “I hate most biopics. I find that most biopics are stodgy and really boring, because people, in my opinion, take too much of a reverential approach, and it’s fake”.
“Every time I’ve seen a biopic, it just doesn’t feel real,” he added. “There’s something about it, the sheer fact that it’s a movie and that an actor is portraying someone, means there’s a level of facade and fakery to it.”
So Burton tried to be a little different when it came to Ed Wood, and allowed his own personal admiration of the director to spill into the tone of the film, adding his ideas of what he felt Wood was like rather than attempting a documentary, as well as drawing from his own meetings with legendary horror star Vincent Price in retelling Wood’s friendship with one of the original Draculas, Bela Lugosi.
He added, “In some ways I’m a purist. I wasn’t there with these people, I don’t know them, but I have a feeling about them. So that’s what I’m doing. I’m doing my feeling.”
Ed Wood almost didn’t get made at all; many felt the story wasn’t interesting enough to the general public, that they didn’t know Wood well enough, and Burton’s insistence on filming it in black and white caused the project to be dropped by Columbia studios.
These fears proved founded. Despite critical praise, the film lost about $5million and struggled at the box office, although it won two Oscars, and Burton still considers it to be one of his best movies.
Over the last decade, Burton has been fairly quiet; he directed just two films in ten years, Dumbo, after which he said he was unlikely to ever work with Disney again, and the long-awaited Beetlejuice Beetlejuice starring Michael Keaton, the follow-up to the 1980s original comedy horror that was a smash hit around the globe.
He has, though, signed on to direct a remake of the 1950s sci-fi Attack of the 50 Foot Woman, penned by Gone Girl writer Gillian Flynn. He also acts as a producer on Netflix’s Addams Family spin-off Wednesday, and directed eight episodes of the show, which has won four Emmys and features a cast full of cinematic stalwarts like Steve Buscemi, Christopher Lloyd and Catherine Zeta-Jones.
