JONATHAN ROMNEY speaks to cult Hollywood director Tim Burton about his freaks, frailties and fame – and his latest film Mars Attacks!
TIM BURTON’S Mars Attacks! seems like a sure-fire recipe for box-office success – hordes of evil aliens, a cult director with a berserk visual imagination, and a prodigally illustrious cast (Nicholson, Close, DeVito, Bening, Poppy the Chihuahua). But since its December release in the United States, the film has made less than the reissued Star Wars managed in a fortnight.
By normal Hollywood criteria, this makes it a flop. Moreover, for all its lunatic black-comic energies, Mars Attacks! is rather like a hi-tech version of It’s a Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World – all guns blazing but not actually very funny. Yet it’s absolutely compelling as an anomaly, a dissident creative abuse of the blockbuster format. Its America is a neon desert of bone-headed vulgarity just asking to be laid waste by little green men, cackling imps from the Id. Inspired by a set of early 1960s trading cards, Mars Attacks! is a salutary raspberry, an adolescent apocalypse.
Some of the film’s tawdry Vegas glamour seems to have rubbed off on Burton. Waiting to interview him, I expect to see the black-clad matchstick man that he caricatured for his quasi-autobiographical Edward Scissorhands. But when he walks in, he’s wearing an electric blue suit with visor-like shades hidden by the familiar coiffure of teased black candy-floss. He meets and greets with the confidence of an avant garde MTV game show host, then perches on the edge of the sofa in a posture suggesting the ease is only skin deep.
The mystery with Burton has always been how an apparently reticent individual came to be a major Hollywood player. The industry traditionally makes a protective fuss about its “child-like” creatives (Lucas, Spielberg, little Robin Williams), but Burton, the immortaliser of vulnerable outsiders like Pee-Wee Herman, Ed Wood and an unprecedently distraught Batman, is more oddball than most. How does he get to make these strange, moody films which fly in the face of Hollywood wisdom?
Burton has always been known for an artisanal approach – he started, after all, as a humble production-line animator for Disney, during the company’s early-Eighties nadir. In Mars Attacks! he hops on the digital wagon, but where you’d expect him to take to computer imagery like a kid with a dangerous new toy, he sounds more like the scientist offering Dire Warnings in a Fifties monster movie.
Pulp horror was Burton’s staple diet as a child in the Los Angeles district of Burbank, which contains the studio complexes and the trimmed-lawn suburban dystopia he parodied in Edward Scissorhands. His solitary childhood, B- movie addiction, and self-image as an ungainly outsider have been much documented, but how many American film- makers of his generation don’t share those attributes?
Yet even by Hollywoodbrat standards, his imagination was unusually vivid. He dreamed of being the man inside the Godzilla suit, stomping Tokyo to ashes; in Mars Attacks! he effectively seems to have realised that aspiration.
“Since it’s not real,” he says, “there’s something cathartic about it. I like these anarchistic characters, not because I consider myself a real hardcore anarchist, but in terms of seeing things in a different way. Kind of blowing away certain conventions that are getting more entrenched in our culture and are moving it in a more bureaucratic way.”
Burton seems to have found a perfect counterpart in his partner Lisa Marie – just Lisa Marie, not to confused with the erstwhile Mrs Jacko. After his short-lived marriage, he met the former model and sometime Malcolm McLaren collaborator in 1992. It’s said she has changed him beyond recognition, recharging a moody, taciturn character.
Lovestruck directors traditionally put their partners on screen, but Burton has twice cast Lisa Marie in grotesque supporting roles – in Ed Wood as glamour- ghoul Vampira, and now as a Martian invader in cheesecake disguise.
But how much is Burton really the fragile, abstracted soul he appears to be? He was much wounded by a 1994 Vanity Fair article that suggested he represents himself as a weird waif in order to hide a ruthless, even exploitative real self. But surely no one who’s directed several blockbusters could be a frail hothouse orchid? He was when he started, he insists. “I’d see people get angry and I freaked out … Then I started to understand. On Batman Returns I got so upset I flipped out and I don’t think a couple of people at the studio forgot that – I was so angry, it was scary.”
On brief acquaintance, it’s hard to gauge Burton’s scary side. But one thing’s certain: it takes an extreme sensibility to do what he does in Mars Attacks! – to graphically and gruesomely behead your own pet chihuahua. Burton shrugs. “I always felt I was a dog. I was born in the Year of the Dog, so there’s some connective tissue there.”
Mars Attacks! opens in cinemas across South Africa this Friday