Before interviewing Tim Burton in New York for Planet of the Apes, I had almost forgotten that I’d spoken to him 12 years before on the eve of Batman‘s opening. I think my memory loss was a result of the success studio publicity machines have had in pushing him as Hollywood’s king of quirk, a title that capitalises even on his bouts of hibernation.
Burton has become the kind of figure you know well, but only in a certain way. His image is by now spookily indelible: he’s the beret-clad, bestubbled auteur who appears to be at his wits’ end while still commanding enormous sets. International audiences have embraced him as a twinkling-eyed survivor of Californian suburbia, the one movie-maker with an art-school sensibility capable of turning out blockbusters. Going one better than Fellini, he became part of the title of a film he only produced: Tim Burton’s The Nightmare Before Christmas.
When I scanned my notes I realised that the Burton I spoke to in 1989 was different from the one I had just met, even though his responses were eerily similar. Where once he was halting and self-deprecating, now he romps into an interview with clear expectations of the questions he’s going to be asked and high-energy glee at responding and often deflating them.
Before Batman opened, he waxed uneasy about the movie’s prospects and said he actually liked talking to journalists because it took his mind off the movie’s opening. “In a way,” he said, “it’s the most awful time, because there’s tension and pressure, and it’s a pressure that you have nothing you can do about. You don’t know what to do with yourself.” Burton did know what to do with himself in the days before the Planet of the Apes premiere: enter “promote mode” in a lather and never leave till those opening grosses start coming in.
He has evolved as if he were Steven Spielberg’s warped, guilt-free, Gentile younger brother. Mars Attacks! was his 1941, a flop of Stygian dimensions; Sleepy Hollow was his Raiders of the Lost Ark, a smartly crafted neo-genre picture that put him back on form commercially. But where Spielberg is now respectable, Burton has retained a perverse allure.
Rather than follow Sleepy Hollow with a personal project like ET, Burton has come forth with another genre film — a remake, or, as he insists, a “reimagining” of a movie that became a genre unto itself.
The original Planet of the Apes took the 1963 novel by Pierre Boulle and applied its central reversal of apes acting like humans and humans acting like apes to the turmoil of the US in 1967. In his book Planet of the Apes as American Myth: Race, Politics, and Popular Culture, Eric Greene traces how the movie and its four sequels dramatised the convolutions of American attitudes toward the civil-rights movement and Vietnam, imperialism and student revolt. Burton’s movie is a remake, but of all five movies. And it draws on other classic pictures, too, including Spartacus and The Wizard of Oz, as well as Boulle’s original novel — particularly in the notion of an amorous attraction between an astronaut hero and a chimpanzee.
The best that can be said is that it’s still a Burton movie, with a singular combination of motley humour and visual majesty. Working from a script with a trio of authors (William Broyles Jr, who wrote Cast Away, and Mark Rosenthal and Lawrence Konner, of, among other things, Mighty Joe Young), Burton continues to jam together jarring story points and clashing moods, and to tell his story from a point of view alternating between earnestness and camp.
Like other Burton productions, the movie resembles a Christmas tree drooping with an overload of ornaments. Yet some of those ornaments unfold and reveal secret treasures, startling even the actors. Take Tim Roth, who plays the evil chimp General Thade in a perpetual snarl. After a climactic bout with Mark Wahlberg’s stolid American astronaut, Leo Davidson, Burton directed him to retreat into a crouch under a countertop in a fossilised American spaceship. Roth told me he had no idea why Burton told him to move there. Only afterwards, thinking about it, did the actor realise that a position of defeat completed the arc of his character and the political agenda of the movie.
To Roth, Thade views humans “a bit like Cecil Rhodes saw Africans”, as aliens to be crushed to his will. What happens to Thade at Leo Davidson’s hands is a piece of doggerel poetic justice. “I didn’t know why he was directing me to go there,” says Roth, “and I don’t know if that is why. But I loved the motion of it.”
The movie’s shock ending, however, makes you wonder whether filmmakers, afraid of goosing the audience with a simple “Gotcha!”, are like skaters determined to increase the number of twists and turns from triples to quadruples. It’s a stunt and by giving in to it Burton devalues the good work that he’s done with Thade.
The pluses and the minuses of Burton’s work stem from the same source: his determination not to over-think any aspect of his pictures.
For Planet of the Apes, he’s going on the offensive: “I love this material because it’s a kind of ‘fuck you’ to literal-minded people. It makes you use both sides of your brain when literal-minded people don’t want to — they want you to put things in categories for them.” His bold pronouncements are a way of marking his back yard. Inside its borders he aims to be as spontaneous as ever, as reliant on luck and accident, and as dismissive of conventional artistic unity.
When Planet of the Apes opened in the US with a record-breaking three-day take of nearly $70-million, Fox executives chalked it up to three reasons: the pull of the original property, the escalating star power of Wahlberg, and the out-there reputation of Burton. And Burton is certainly responsible for the wildly variable reviews.
Critics hailed it for being funny and imaginative or damned it for being unfunny and obvious. They called it overly clear or inscrutable. They interpreted it as being as political as the first one or not political enough.
Burton has built that confusion into the movie itself. It’s related to his own elusive directorial attitude. You can see how one school of critics can take dialogue about man’s inhumanity toward apes and simians’ unsimianity toward humans as bald statements of morality. But they’re invariably stated with such vaudevillian theatricality that they register as send-ups.
Doubtless the chaos underlying the project freed Burton to work his wayward will on it. The script went through several incarnations by assorted writers under the auspices of several different directors (Oliver Stone, James Cameron, Philip Noyce, Chris Columbus) until Broyles came up with the version that snagged Burton’s interest. Oddly enough, both Broyles and Adam Rifkin, who wrote the first revisionist “Apes” script way back in 1988, came up with an apes-as-Romans, human-as-slaves motif.
Burton hired Rosenthal and Konner for rewrites that continued even after shooting began. And if fresh pages showed up on the set and the ending was jigged and rejigged, that’s nothing new, though he did go close to the wire: he had his first exhibitors’ screening just eight days before the US theatrical premiere.
Part of the new-look Burton is to the good. I was growing weary of the rehashed tale of the disaffected, arty adolescent from bland suburban Burbank, growing up distant from his parents and finding solace in the Roger Corman-Vincent Price adaptations of Edgar Allan Poe.
I was willing to take it as the backdrop for his short, black-comic masterpiece Frankenweenie (1984), about a boy named Victor Frankenstein who brings his dead bull terrier back to life. But it wasn’t as if Burton went east and attended Juilliard. He went to the California Institute of the Arts in Valencia, a Disney-founded school that’s been a spawning-ground for the company’s animators as well as those who break away, like Burton and John Lasseter, the wizard behind Toy Story.
Anyway, when I suggest that teen suburbanites are exactly the ones who can lose themselves completely in the creation of fantasy locations like Gotham City or Sleepy Hollow or the Planet of the Apes, Burton quickly agrees. “When people are deprived of a sense, their other senses get heightened,” he says. “If you’re culturally devoid of something — of weather, of artistry, of interesting architecture, all the way down the line to culture itself — you’re either forced to give in and get that car dealership, or you manufacture those things for yourself. The pain you go through, I also recognise, is the thing that makes you.
“And more perversion and subversion goes on in suburbia than anywhere else. There are worlds within worlds. Whenever I’m in a hotel, I like to go into a ballroom where there is a group of people that for one reason or another has gathered. And it’s always weird, isn’t it? This convention or that convention. The energy of the room is always amazing.”
When describing the special energy he found in Planet of the Apes, Burton brings up one of his favourite precedents: “Before theatre, before people wrote things, they gathered around the campfire and asked, ‘What is this story about “Lizard Girl”?’ Do you know what I mean?”
“In the reversal that is dead centre here,” he says, “you’re watching apes, but they’re like humans, and you never quite know where you stand in relation to that. I’d love for a literal-minded person to look at one of the apes in this movie and give me the lowdown on him, or her. Just when you think you’re going somewhere, something else happens. I love that.”
Unlike the original book and movie, the apes no longer live in a stratified, ordered society. There’s still a stalwart and adventurous female chimpanzee, this time named Ari (Helena Bonham Carter), who immediately sees that Wahlberg’s Leo is a strangely compelling sort of human. But the evil Thade is a chimpanzee, too, and both Thade’s and Ari’s champions are Samurai silverback gorillas.
“Here’s the thing,” Burton says. “We didn’t want to do a remake. Because the original is a classic, but beyond being a classic, it is a ‘classic of its time’. The fact is, you look back at the late Sixties, you can rattle off what the issues of the day were in a second.
“Even for me at the time, I remember the issues were very clear-cut. But nowadays … I like to do this experiment. What are the three main issues of today? You get three different answers. What is happening is that we’re getting more fragmented.
“In my Planet of the Apes, I wanted to represent that fragmentation. The first movie had that simple metaphor of the apes acting just like humans and the humans acting just like animals. Here we’re coming into their culture at a different time, and it’s more like now.
“Factions are moving off in all directions. You’ve got some apes that are turning more human; then you’ve got your ape purists. And the self-esteem has not all been beaten out of the humans. It’s all a little greyer. The people who said you shouldn’t remake that first movie are right: you can’t recreate the same issues for this time. You can’t recreate Charlton Heston!”
At the time of Batman, Burton downplayed the notion of doing a sequel, then came back to the franchise for Batman Returns. Planet of the Apes, though, seems to beg for a sequel because it raises a multitude of unanswered questions. How did its humans learn to talk? Is the ape planet really Earth this time or not? If not, why are the apes and humans on it speaking English? Do they all stem from the lab animals and astronauts on Leo’s spaceship?
“I don’t think of sequels per se,” Burton says, “but this is the kind of material that circles around on itself. That’s what I think people should get from the ending. What’s tied into the mythology of the Planet of the Apes movies is this unsettling quality — and that’s not just from thinking you know where you are and not knowing, but also from finding out that what goes around comes around. You don’t ever form a complete circle, but you get this circular structure.
“Even though I had to build it with snippets and clues, I did think about this film in a way I didn’t think about other movies — about the Big Picture, the circular motion. And maybe 50%, maybe 90% of that isn’t in the movie, but it is definitely underlying the whole thing.
“I’m not an intellectual, really; I respond to things emotionally. Still, I tried to step back and analyse Planet of the Apes. I started to see an image of the structure: that uncertain, turning-around kind of thing. And that’s the peculiar beauty of it.”
It’s a beauty that has little to do with the arid topography of the original. “I’ll tell you where this stemmed from,” Burton says. “From the beginning, we decided we wanted to weave more ape mannerisms into it, both how they move and react and how they think.
“Not that we wanted to make them ape apes, but we had to locate those areas where they connect to the human. With a lot of the actors, I talked about there being some things that apes do that are recognisable as human, and some things that are just ape; sometimes we tried to move on where they were connected, but when we want to go ape, we ‘go ape’ — and there’s a shock. All of this takes on a life of its own.”
All this objective talk about a project feels like something novel for Burton, a director who told me 12 years ago that “when you’re making a movie, it’s a very interiorised world”. Maybe he’s become, in his own idiosyncratic way, a professional.
At any rate, the making of Planet of the Apes does correspond to a lot of his ongoing obsessions, including his belief that masks can release personality rather than hide it. “When you cover up,” he says, “you can let something else weird leak through. It goes back to the original Greek theatre: it’s all masks and that’s great.”
But in some ways he hasn’t changed at all. In 1989 he told me: “When you’re making a movie, there’s just this gloom that hangs around you.” Even with the success of Planet of the Apes virtually assured (the exhibitors went nuts for it), Burton still spoke of torture and despair in the movie-making process.
When I asked him why Roth said his directorial method was based on “mischief”, Burton responded: “Danny Elfman, the composer, tells me the only time he thinks I’m happy is when I’m on the scoring stage and I see the pressure’s on him and it’s a little off me. But it’s not meant as a mean thing, because I love him and I love my actors — they’re the ones doing it and they had the hardest job in the movie.
“With all that crap on, they can’t hear each other, can’t see each other half the time. I guess I feel so tortured most of the time, when I see someone else feeling tortured I get a little perverse glee out of it.”