Tim Burton
Timothy Walter Burton[a] (born August 25, 1958) is an American director, producer, writer, and animator. Known for pioneering goth culture in the American film industry, Burton is famous for his gothic horror and fantasy films. He has received numerous accolades including an Emmy Award, and a Golden Globe Award as well as nominations for two Academy Awards and three BAFTA Awards. He was honored with the Venice International Film Festival's Golden Lion for Lifetime Achievement in 2007 and was given the Order of the Arts and Letters by Culture Minister of France in 2010.
This article is about the film director. For the American musician, see Tim Burton (musician). For the English YouTuber, see Shmee150.
Tim Burton
- Film director
- film producer
- screenwriter
- animator
1971[1]–present
Lisa Marie (1993–2001)
Helena Bonham Carter (2001–2014)
Monica Bellucci (2023–present)
2
Burton made his directorial film debut with the comedy Pee-wee's Big Adventure (1985) and gained prominence for Beetlejuice (1988) and Edward Scissorhands (1990). Burton also directed the superhero films Batman (1989) and Batman Returns (1992), the animated films Corpse Bride (2005) and Frankenweenie (2012), the science fiction films Mars Attacks! (1996) and Planet of the Apes (2001), the supernatural horror film Sleepy Hollow (1999), the fantasy-dramas Big Fish (2003), Alice in Wonderland (2010), Dark Shadows (2012), and Dumbo (2019), and the musicals Charlie and the Chocolate Factory (2005) and Sweeney Todd: The Demon Barber of Fleet Street (2007) and the biographical dramas Ed Wood (1994) and Big Eyes (2014). Starting in 2022 Burton has directed several episodes for Netflix series Wednesday, for which he received a nomination for the Primetime Emmy Award for Outstanding Directing for a Comedy Series.
Burton has frequently collaborated with Winona Ryder, Michael Keaton, Johnny Depp, Jenna Ortega, Helena Bonham Carter (his former domestic partner), Catherine O’Hara, Eva Green and Christopher Lee as well with composer Danny Elfman, who scored all but three of Burton's films. Burton has released several books including The Melancholy Death of Oyster Boy & Other Stories (1997).
Early life and education[edit]
Burton was born on August 25, 1958, in Burbank, California, the son of Jean Burton (née Erickson, 1933–2002), later the owner of a cat-themed gift shop, and William "Bill" Burton (1930–2000), a former minor league baseball player who was working for the Burbank Parks and Recreation Department.[5][6]
As a preteen, Burton would make short films in his backyard at 2101 North Evergreen Street using crude stop motion animation techniques or shooting on 8 mm film without sound (one of his oldest known juvenile films is The Island of Doctor Agor, which he made when he was 13 years old). Burton attended Providencia Elementary School, Luther Middle School, and Burbank High School,[7] but was not a particularly good student. He played on the water polo team at Burbank High. Burton was an introspective person and found pleasure in artwork, painting, drawing, and watching movies. His future work would be heavily influenced by the works of such childhood heroes as Dr. Seuss and Roald Dahl.[8]
After graduating from Burbank High School in 1976, Burton attended the California Institute of the Arts in Valencia, Santa Clarita, to study character animation.[9] As a student at CalArts, Burton made the shorts Stalk of the Celery Monster and King and Octopus.[10]
Career[edit]
1981–1987: Early work and breakthrough[edit]
Stalk of the Celery Monster attracted the attention of Walt Disney Productions, which offered Burton an animator's apprenticeship at its animation division.[9] He worked as an animator, storyboard artist, graphic designer, art director, and concept artist on films such as The Fox and the Hound (1981), Tron (1982), and The Black Cauldron (1985). His concept art never made it into the finished films.
While at Disney in 1982, Burton made his first short, Vincent, a six-minute black-and-white stop motion film based on a poem written by Burton, which depicts a young boy who fantasizes that he is his hero Vincent Price, with Price himself providing narration. The film was produced by Rick Heinrichs, whom Burton had befriended while working in the concept art department at Disney. The film was shown at the Chicago Film Festival and released, alongside the teen drama Tex, for two weeks in one Los Angeles cinema. This was followed by Burton's first live-action production, Hansel and Gretel, a Japanese-themed adaptation of the Brothers Grimm fairy tale for the Disney Channel, which climaxes in a kung fu fight between Hansel and Gretel and the witch. Having aired once in 1983 at 10:30 pm on Halloween and promptly shelved, prints of the film are extremely difficult to locate, fueling rumors that the project did not exist. The short would finally go on public display in 2009 at the Museum of Modern Art, and again in 2011 as part of the Tim Burton art exhibit at LACMA.[11][12] It was again shown at the Seoul Museum of Art in 2012.[13]
Burton's next live-action short film, Frankenweenie, was released in 1984. It tells the story of a young boy who tries to revive his dog after it is run over by a car. Filmed in black-and-white, it stars Barret Oliver, Shelley Duvall (with whom he would work again in 1986, directing an episode of her television series Faerie Tale Theatre), and Daniel Stern. After Frankenweenie was completed, Disney fired Burton, under the pretext of him spending the company's resources on a film that would be too dark and scary for children to see.[14]
Actor Paul Reubens saw Frankenweenie and chose Burton to direct the cinematic spin-off of his popular character Pee-wee Herman, stating on the audio commentary of 2000 DVD release of Pee-wee's Big Adventure that as soon as the short began, he was sold on Burton's style. Pee-wee Herman gained mainstream popularity with a successful stage show at The Groundlings and the Roxy which was later turned into an HBO special. The film, Pee-wee's Big Adventure, was made on a budget of $8 million and grossed more than $40 million at the North American box office. Burton, a fan of the eccentric musical group Oingo Boingo, asked songwriter Danny Elfman to provide the music for the film. Since then, Elfman has scored every film that Tim Burton has directed, except for Ed Wood,[15] Sweeney Todd: The Demon Barber of Fleet Street, and Miss Peregrine's Home for Peculiar Children.
Additionally, Burton directed episodes of the 1985 revival of the '50s/'60s anthology horror series Alfred Hitchcock Presents and Shelley Duvall's Faerie Tale Theatre.
1988–1994: Batman films and acclaim[edit]
Burton directed his next big project: Beetlejuice (1988), a supernatural comedy horror about a young couple forced to cope with life after death and the family of pretentious yuppies who invade their treasured New England home. Their teenage daughter, Lydia (Winona Ryder), has an obsession with death which allows her to see the deceased couple. Starring Alec Baldwin and Geena Davis, and featuring Michael Keaton as the obnoxious bio-exorcist Beetlejuice, the film grossed $80 million on a relatively low budget and won an Academy Award for Best Makeup. It would be converted into a cartoon of the same name, with Burton playing a role as executive producer, that ran on ABC and later Fox.
Burton's ability to produce hits with low budgets impressed studio executives, and he received his first big-budget film, Batman. The production was plagued with problems. Burton repeatedly clashed with the film's producers, Jon Peters and Peter Guber, but the most notable debacle involved casting. For the title role, Burton chose to cast Michael Keaton as Batman following their previous collaboration in Beetlejuice, despite Keaton's average physique, inexperience with action films, and reputation as a comic actor. Although Burton won in the end, the furor over the casting provoked enormous fan animosity, to the extent that Warner Brothers' share price slumped. Burton had considered it ridiculous to cast a "bulked-up" ultra-masculine man as Batman, insisting that Batman should be an ordinary man who dressed up in an elaborate bat costume to frighten criminals. Burton cast Jack Nicholson as The Joker (Tim Curry being his second choice) in a move that helped assuage fans' fears, as well as attracting older audiences not as interested in a superhero film. When the film opened in June 1989, it was backed by the biggest marketing and merchandising campaign in film history at the time, and became one of the biggest box office hits of all time, grossing over $250 million in the U.S. and $400 million worldwide (numbers not adjusted for inflation) and earning critical acclaim for the performances of both Keaton and Nicholson, as well as the film's production aspects, which won the Academy Award for Best Art Direction. The success of the film helped establish Burton as a profitable director, and it proved to be a huge influence on future superhero films, which eschewed the bright, all-American heroism of Richard Donner's Superman for a grimmer, more realistic look and characters with more psychological depth. It also became a major inspiration for the successful 1990s cartoon Batman: The Animated Series, as the darkness of Burton's film and its sequel allowed for a darker Batman on television.
Burton claimed that the graphic novel Batman: The Killing Joke was a major influence on his film adaptation of Batman:
Personal life[edit]
Burton was married to Lena Gieseke, a German-born artist. Their marriage ended in 1991 after four years.[71] He went on to live with model and actress Lisa Marie; she acted in the films he made during their relationship from 1992 to 2001, most notably in Sleepy Hollow, Ed Wood, and Mars Attacks!. Burton developed a romantic relationship with English actress Helena Bonham Carter, whom he met while filming Planet of the Apes. Marie responded in 2005 by holding an auction of personal belongings that Burton had left behind, much to his dismay.[72]
Burton and Bonham Carter have two children: a son, born in 2003 and a daughter born in 2007.[73] Bonham Carter's representative said in December 2014 that she and Burton had broken up amicably earlier that year.[74] It is unclear whether or not they were married; Bonham Carter has used the word divorce when discussing the end of their relationship[75] while other news outlets state that they never married.[74] The Independent reported in September 2023 that Burton and Bonham Carter had indeed been married for years before their separation.[76]
On March 15, 2010, Burton received the insignia of Chevalier of Arts and Letters from then-Minister of Culture Frédéric Mitterrand.[77] The same year, Burton was the president of the jury for the 63rd Cannes Film Festival, held from May 12 to 24 in Cannes, France.[78]
Burton's relationship with Italian actress and model Monica Bellucci was reported in February 2023. They met in October 2022 at the Lyon's Lumière Film Festival.[79] Bellucci first spoke publicly about their relationship in June 2023.[80]
Exhibitions and books[edit]
From November 22, 2009, to April 26, 2010, Burton had a retrospective at the MoMA in New York with over 700 "drawings, paintings, photographs, storyboards, moving-image works, puppets, maquettes, costumes and cinematic ephemera", including many from the filmmaker's personal collection.[81] From MoMA, the "Tim Burton" exhibition traveled directly to Australian Centre for the Moving Image in Melbourne. Running from June 24 to October 10, 2010, the ACMI exhibition incorporated additional material from Burton's Alice in Wonderland, which was released in March 2010.[82]
"The Art of Tim Burton" was exhibited at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art from May 29 to October 31, 2011, in the Museum's Resnick Pavilion.[83] LACMA also featured six films of Tim Burton's idol, Vincent Price.[84] "Tim Burton, the exhibition/Tim Burton, l'exposition" was exhibited at the Cinémathèque Française from March 7 to August 5, 2012, in Paris, France.[85] All of Tim Burton's movies were shown during the exhibition.
"Tim Burton at Seoul Museum of Art" was exhibited as a promotion of Hyundai Card at Seoul Museum of Art from December 12, 2012, to April 15, 2013, in Seoul, South Korea.[86] This exhibition featured 862 of Burton's works including drawings, paintings, short films, sculptures, music, and costumes that have been used in the making of his feature-length movies. The exhibition was divided into three parts: the first part, "Surviving Burbank", covered his younger years, from 1958 to 1976. The second, "Beautifying Burbank", covers 1977 to 1984, including his time with CalArts and Walt Disney. The last segment, "Beyond Burbank", covers 1985 onward.[87]
"Tim Burton and His World" was exhibited at the Stone Bell House from March 3 to August 8, 2014, in Prague, Czech Republic.[88] The exhibition later premiered at the Museu da Imagem e do Som in São Paulo, Brazil, on February 4, 2016, and lasted until June 5.[89] The exhibition was later held in Artis Tree in Taikoo Place, Hong Kong, from November 5, 2016, to January 23, 2017.[90] The exhibition returned to Brazil from May 28 to August 11, 2019, being held at the Centro Cultural Banco do Brasil in Brasília.[91]
Burton's first exhibition in the United States in nearly a decade, Lost Vegas: Tim Burton, opened in October 2019 at The Neon Museum in Las Vegas.[92]
Burton also wrote and illustrated the poetry book The Melancholy Death of Oyster Boy & Other Stories, published in 1997 by British publishing house Faber and Faber, and a compilation of his drawings, sketches, and other artwork, entitled The Art of Tim Burton, was released in 2009. A follow-up to that book, entitled The Napkin Art of Tim Burton: Things You Think About in a Bar, containing sketches made by Burton on napkins at bars and restaurants he visited, was released in 2015.