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easily have come from Burton himself. The adaptation features
rising star Asa Butterfield (The Boy in the Striped Pajamas,
Hugo) as a teenager, Jake, who travels from Florida to a remote
Welsh island to join a group of children with odd abilities and
afflictions.
“One of the themes of the story is about celebrating your peculiarity
and your weirdness,” says Butterfield. “It is very surreal
and gothic and odd, which I think Tim is best at capturing, compared
to any other director. It feels like a Tim movie even when
you read the script.”
Indeed, it’s a story that will ring with familiarity to any Burton
devotee. It has a coterie of outsiders, children with immense
strength or who possess a fiery touch. There are twins who, like
mini-Medusas, can turn creatures to stone with just one look.
One boy is invisible. Another is full of bees. Jake’s love interest
(played by Ella Purnell from Never Let Me Go and Maleficent),
meanwhile, is lighter than air and needs iron boots to prevent
her from floating away. Their peculiarities extend into their personalities,”
Purnell says. “Miss Peregrine, who is the weirdest of
them all, leads them. She can change into a bird and she has a
real birdlike quality to her.”
Miss Peregrine (played by Burton’s latest muse, Eva Green)
is the pipe-smoking, time-watching and shape-shifting guardian
who protects the youngsters from their terrifying predators, the
Hollowgasts. Green sees echoes of Burton in all the children.
“They don’t fit in the outside world, and I think Tim felt like
this as a child,” Green says. “Lots of people feel like that and
identify with that. I still feel like this. This is a movie that says
that you just have to accept it, embrace it and celebrate it. It is
beautiful to be different.”
The book is certainly very singular, appealing to Burton not
only through its outlandish adventure story but also via its presentation.
Its author, Riggs, embellished his novel with a series
of haunting black-and-white photographs. “What I loved about
Ransom was his approach with the old photographs,” Burton
says. “They tell you a story without you knowing everything.
There is something very poetic, creepy, haunting and mysterious
about them. It reminded me why we like folktales and fables and
fairy tales. They describe something and there is a mystery to it.
It is not literal, necessarily. There’s something hidden about it.”
Burton’s film unfolds in a world brimming with fairy-tale tropes,
a realm that exists on the boundaries of our own. The story plays
out in a landscape studded with topiary centaurs, or gnarled and
misshapen trees. The children live in a gothic mansion. Even the
real world of Wales is magical, mysterious and misty.
And his highly individual stylistic embellishments shine through,
whether it’s via a stop-motion sequence with dueling toys or
through a nod to one of his favorite movie scenes of all time: the
fighting skeletons in Jason and the Argonauts (1963).
The Eyes Have It
peculiar children. The creatures are terrifying, but also
rather sad.
“They are like something out of a child’s nightmare,”
Burton says of the Hollowgasts. “I am a monster fan, so for
this film I tried to find something where there was still this
humanity to them.”
This is typical Burton, says Green, who also worked with
the director on Dark Shadows (2012). “He has such an understanding
of all outcasts,” she says. “All of them are beautiful.
Even the evil characters in his movies have humanity. There is
something very poetic about his work. Sometimes people say
that Tim’s work is dark. I don’t think so. It’s something actually
very beautiful, very sensitive.”
Burton has an aversion to categorization and has often felt
frustrated by accusations that his work isn’t light and lively
enough. “I always get accused of that,” he says. “It happens
over and over.
“I could wear white linen suits and dye my hair blond and
make happy movies and they’d still think, What is he doing?
Something is wrong. I could make The Sound of Music and
people would say, ‘It’s too dark.’ Once you get categorized,
that’s it. You get, ‘Oh, well, it’s very Burton.’ Well, who am I?
I don’t like thinking of myself as a thing.”
Burton’s desire to explore themes and worlds close to his
heart, his ability to make the mundane magical and the magical
mundane, has led to the coining of the term “Burtonesque.”
It seems that what makes Burton unique also binds him. He
smiles at the irony. “It is peculiar,” he says. “Even though it
makes my skin crawl, I will take that as a compliment. Really, I
got into film because I like making things. That was always my
primary concern.”
His life, like everyone’s, has been shaped by particular episodes—even
beyond the bricking of his windows, his penchant
for monster movies and his abhorrence of school cliques. He
recalls a nuisance telephone call that left him with a fear of
the phone. Growing up without seasons on the West Coast,
he’d search for Christmas ambience in the aisles of Kmart. During
Halloween, he decorated neighborhood houses in Burbank
with spiders and skeletons.
“You are a product of where you grew up,” he says. “Because
Burbank was a blank environment with no seasons, no change
of weather, it forced me to internalize. You create your own
kind of world because there is a blank canvas. And as much as
it terrified me, I wouldn’t change that for the world.”
Thanks to that blank canvas, we now have the peculiar world
of Tim Burton.
by Will Lawrence
Then there are the eyes. Eyes are always important to Burton—he
even made the film Big Eyes in 2014, about Margaret
Keane, the painter of saucer-eyed waifs—and some of the
monsters that hunt the children in Miss Peregrine have
lost their own eyes entirely and feast on the eyeballs of
Photo: Lea Gallo