Tim Burton

Timothy Walter "Tim" Burton

25 August 1958

An American film director, producer, artist, writer, and animator. As a preteen, Burton would make short films in his backyard on Evergreen Street using crude stop motion animation techniques or shoot them on 8 mm film without sound (one of his oldest known juvenile films is The Island of Doctor Agor, that he made when he was 13 years old). Burton studied at Burbank High School, but he was not a particularly good student. He was a very introspective person, and found his pleasure in painting, drawing and watching films. His future work would be heavily influenced by the works of such childhood heroes as Dr. Seuss and Roald Dahl. 

Burton is known for his dark, gothic, macabre, and quirky horror and fantasy films such as Beetlejuice, Edward Scissorhands, The Nightmare Before Christmas, Ed Wood, Sleepy Hollow, Corpse Bride, Sweeney Todd: The Demon Barber of Fleet Street, Dark Shadows and Frankenweenie.

As director, producer, writer

• The Lord of the Rings (1978)
• The Muppet Movie (1979)
• The Fox and the Hound (1981)
• Tron (1982)
• Faerie Tale Theatre: Aladdin and His Wonderful Lamp (1984) 
• The Black Cauldron (1985)
• Pee-wee's Big Adventure (1985)
• Alfred Hitchcock Presents: The Jar (1986)
• Amazing Stories: The Family Dog (1987)
• Beetlejuice (1988)
• Batman (1989)
• Beetlejuice (1989-1991)
• Edward Scissorhands (1990)
• Singles (1992)
• Batman Returns (1992)
• Stay Tuned (1992)
• Hoffa (1992)
• Family Dog (1993)
• Tim Burton's The Nightmare Before Christmas (1993)
• Cabin Boy (1994)
• Ed Wood (1994)
• Batman Forever (1995)
• Mary Reilly (1996)
• James and the Giant Peach (1996)
• Mars Attacks! (1996)
• Sleepy Hollow (1999)
• Planet of the Apes (2001)
• Big Fish (2003)
• Catwoman (2004)
• Charlie and the Chocolate Factory (2005)
• Tim Burton's Corpse Bride (2005)
• Sweeney Todd: The Demon Barber of Fleet Street (2007)
• Coraline (2009)
• Waking Sleeping Beauty (2009)
• 9 (2009)
• Alice in Wonderland (2010)
• Dark Shadows (2012)
• Abraham Lincoln: Vampire Hunter (2012)
• Men in Black 3 (2012)
• Frankenweenie (2012)
• Big Eyes (2014)
• Alice Through the Looking Glass (2016)
• Miss Peregrine's Home for Peculiar Children  (2016)

Quotations

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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.

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I have a problem when people say something's real or not real, or normal or abnormal. The meaning of those words for me is very personal and subjective. I've always been confused and never had a clearcut understanding of the meaning of those kinds of words.

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It's good as an artist to always remember to see things in a new, weird way.

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Visions are worth fighting for. Why spend your life making someone else's dreams?

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One person's crazyness is another person's reality.

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Movies are like an expensive form of therapy for me.

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I think a lot of kids feel alone and slightly isolated and in their own world.

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I am not a dark person and I don't consider myself dark.

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I think of Ray Harryhausen's work - I knew his name before I knew any actor or director's names. His films had an impact on me very early on, probably even more than Disney. I think that's what made me interested in animation: His work.

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It's hard to find logic in things sometimes. That's why I can't analyze things too much, because it often doesn't make much sense.

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In Hollywood, they think drawn animation doesn't work anymore, computers are the way. They forget that the reason computers are the way is that Pixar makes good movies. So everybody tries to copy Pixar. They're relying too much on the technology and not enough on the artists.

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I am not a big technology person. I don't go on the Internet really much at all. Drawing is like a zen thing; it's private, which in this day and age is harder to come by.

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I've always been misrepresented. You know, I could dress in a clown costume and laugh with the happy people but they'd still say I'm a dark personality.

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Anybody with artistic ambitions is always trying to reconnect with the way they saw things as a child.

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I never really got nightmares from movies. In fact, I recall my father saying when I was three years old that I would be scared, but I never was. I was much more terrified by my own family and real life, you know?

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I started to do stop-motion when I was a kid. You take a Super 8 and make some models, and move, click, move, click. All that. I love all forms of animation, but there is something unique and special to stop-motion: it's more real and the set is lit like a set. But I think it's also a kind of lonely and dark thing to want to do.

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I always liked strange characters.

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I've always been more comfortable making my decisions from the subconscious level, or more emotionally, because I find it is more truthful to me; Intellectually, I don't think like that because I get uncomfortable.

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There's something quite exciting when you have a history with somebody and you see them do new and different things.

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Anybody who knows me knows I would never read a comic book.

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When it comes to art and science, people don't like a lot of either. Instead of being open to it, they're closed off about it.

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I don't look at my films or my old drawings much, so that was an interesting way to kind of reconnect with myself a bit.

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I get so tired of people saying, 'Oh, you only make fantasy films and this and that', and I'm like, 'Well no, fantasy is reality', that's what Lewis Carroll showed in his work.

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There's something about seeing this little inanimate object coming to life that's just very exciting. That's why with 'Nightmare' I held out for so long to do it.

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I did some sports. It was a bit frustrating. I wasn't the greatest sports person.

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I remember early in my career with Disney, which was a very strange time in the company - there were a couple of executives who were very supportive of me and kind of let me do my own thing.

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It's like getting into film - I didn't say early on, 'I'm going to become a filmmaker,' 'I'm going to show my work at MoMA.' When you start to think those things, you're in trouble.

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I don't know what it was, maybe the movie theaters in my immediate surrounding neighbourhood in Burbank, but I never saw what would be considered A movies.

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People say I am stuck in childhood, but it's not that. I remember seeing a Matisse retrospective, and you could see he started out one way, and then he tried something different, and then he seemed to spend his whole life trying to get back to the first thing.

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