2906 Burton fast final

54
Tim
Burton,
at Home
in His
Own
Head
On a recent morning Mr. Burton,
dressed entirely in black,
was talking about his new animated
feature, “Frankenweenie,”
which will be released
by Walt Disney on Oct. 5.,
and which tells the charming
story of a young boy (named
Victor Frankenstein) who
reanimates the corpse of his
dead pet dog.
Not only does “Frankenweenie” hark back
to the start of your career, it seems torefer
to many of the features you’ve made since
the original short. Is that by design?
If I really thought about it, that’s something
I would probably not do. [Laughs.]
I don’t consciously make those points of:
I did this, I’m going to put that in there
as a reference to myself. Things that
I grew up with stay with me. You start
a certain way, and then you spend your
whole life trying to find a certain simplicity
that you had. It’s less about staying
in childhood than keeping a certain
spirit of seeing things in a different way.
How much of your childhood are we seeing
in Victor’s isolation?
I felt like an outcast. At the same time
I felt quite normal. I think a lot of kids
Mr. Burton with accessories at his
home in London, including a picture
of the actor Larry Hagman.
feel alone and slightly isolated and in
their own world. I don’t believe the
feelings I had were unique. You can
sit in a classroom and feel like no one
understands you, and you’re Vincent
Price in “House of Usher.”
I would imagine, if you talk to every
single kid, most of them probably
felt similarly. But I felt very tortured
as a teenager. That’s where “Edward
Scissorhands” came from. I was probably
clinically depressed and didn’t
know it.
Were you encouraged to try sports?
My dad was a professional baseball
player. He got injured early in his career,
so he didn’t fulfill that dream of
his. He ended up working for the sports
department of the city of Burbank. I
did some sports. It was a bit frustrating.
I wasn’t the greatest sports person.
CAESAR 07/2020