In the summer of 2001, Tim Burton was holed up in a New York hotel room, curled into a fetal position, pretty much devastated in every way possible after putting the finishing touches — at the last second — on his remake, update or whatever you want to call it of “Planet of the Apes.” The Burbank-born Burton tends to get very vulnerable when he finishes a movie to begin with, but “Apes” sent him over the edge, mostly due to a Japanese promotional junket he was forced to attend while still in the process of finalizing the movie.
Of course, Burton’s frazzled condition might also have had something to do with the year he spent battling Fox executives over the budget, length of the shoot, casting, set design and final cut of “Apes.” Plus, Burton wasn’t too big on all the promotional tie-ins.
So when Burton opens the door to his Santa Monica hotel suite and appears genuinely relaxed and — dare we say it? — happy, we know he has put the primates behind him. In fact, Burton has followed the worst movie of his career with, arguably, his best, the wondrous father-and-son movie “Big Fish.” And the timing was no accident.
“Yeah, you learn things, things you already know, so I guess it’d be more appropriate to say you relearn them,” says Burton, who has mixed lavish, big-budget spectacles such as “Batman” and “Mars Attacks” with oddball personal charmers “Edward Scissorhands” and “Ed Wood” over the course of his career.
“It sounds ridiculous, it sounds like the only way it should be, but it was just nice to start a movie with a script that everyone liked,” Burton says of “Big Fish.” “That way, it’s not this deconstruction process where you have a release date before a script, which causes so much wasted energy. Then you get to put all the energy into the film and not all this stuff that doesn’t end up on screen. That was a real nice change.”
The catch
In many ways, “Big Fish” seems the perfect fit for the 45-year-old Burton. The movie is about a man, Edward Bloom (played in the present by Albert Finney and in flashbacks by Ewan McGregor), who revels in personal mythology at the expense of his relationship with his only son, the serious, literal-minded Will (Billy Crudup). As we see Edward’s life story played out — the colorful yarns he tells include a huge catfish, a werewolf circus master, a hungry giant and conjoined twin torch singers — we, and Will, gradually come to understand and value the importance of a life lived in wonder.
Burton’s connections to the material invite some scrutiny, although he hates this kind of self-analysis. (“I don’t want to start thinking of myself like I’m some kind of Happy Meal,” Burton says.) Obviously, given his resume, Burton can relate to Bloom, a spinner of fantasies, and, indeed, many of Bloom’s stories in “Big Fish” possess the kind of Gothic horror undertones and self-conscious sense of the absurd that are hallmarks of Burton’s own work.
As for the film’s emotionally powerful father-son story, Burton’s father, Bill, was a former minor-league baseball player who later worked at the Burbank Parks and Recreation Department. They were never particularly close; Burton spent his teen years living with his grandmother. They spoke, but never quite reconciled before Bill died in 2000. Shortly afterward, Burton received the script for “Big Fish.”
“It’s very difficult when your parents, you know, when they’re gone, no matter what your relationship with them was,” Burton says. “It’s like `A Christmas Carol.’ It’s like the Ghost of Christmas Past comes to you. You hear those chains. And you start thinking about things in ways you hadn’t really before. So I thought this was a great way of presenting that. You don’t want to just come out and say this stuff because it’s too sappy in a way. That’s what I liked about this. It was emotional, but it’s there in different ways.”
“Tim has never been one to come out and bat you on the head and say, `This is the message. I want you to feel this way,”‘ says Bruce Cohen, one of “Big Fish’s” producers. “And that was one of the reasons why we wanted him for this film. We needed the emotion of the story to sneak up on the audience.”
“Look,” Burton says. “I don’t know [anything] about jack. And I’ve never been accused of being a storyteller. That’s always been the knock against me; critics say I can’t tell a story out of a paper bag. But the last thing I would want to see is a sappy father-and-son story, and this could have very easily turned into, you know, `You’re not teaching Radio. Radio’s teaching you.”‘
Burton says he good-naturedly chided Sony Pictures executives (who also bankrolled “Big Fish”) for the “Radio” advertisement containing that offending line. (“Now, watch, I’ll probably get a radio thrown through my windshield,” Burton says, laughing.)
“Tim will never give into expectations, he’s too smart for that,” says Christina Ricci, who worked with Burton on “Sleepy Hollow.” “He always comes up with a way to put his own stamp on conventions.”
On his plate
Next up for Burton is another opportunity to do just that — a new version of Roald Dahl’s “Charlie and Chocolate Factory.” On the surface, it looks like “Apes” all over again, a reworking of a movie that lives large in the public consciousness, even if, like “Apes,” it wasn’t all that great in the first place. Warner Bros. has already announced a release date — June 2005 — even though Burton collaborator (“Big Fish” screenwriter) John August hasn’t completed the script yet.
“I’m trying, you know,” Burton says. “I’m trying to start at the beginning as opposed to the other way. There is a set date, but I’m emotionally avoiding it so we can start with a finished screenplay.”
And Burton is pretty adept at avoidance if the cause is just. After a couple of early-December promotional appearances for “Big Fish,” he beat a hasty retreat home to London to girlfriend Helena Bonham Carter and their baby boy, Billy, born Oct. 4. Burton won’t go into too much depth about fatherhood — he doesn’t want to be a Happy Meal, remember — saying simply that childbirth is the “weirdest thing of all, the most natural thing that seems the most unnatural. And it’s the reason we’re all here!
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“That’s why I’m always amazed at literal people because it’s like every day, don’t you see something that’s completely surreal? And shouldn’t you?” Burton asks, taking up “Big Fish’s” theme of wonder. “A birth is the most surreal thing you could ever witness. It’s like an `Alien’ movie. So I love these literal people. They’re missing the whole . . . thing.”