tim Burton is waving, not drowning. The genius behind Edward Scissorhands, Corpse Bride and the Netflix hit Wednesday has an unusual approach to speaking to the press. He accentuates his remarks with extravagant, octopus-like rotations of his very long arms. He’s also polite, friendly, and as eccentric as one might hope. The director is talking to me by Zoom from what appears to be a small, dark room in his London home. He cuts a reassuringly gothic figure. He is dressed in black, his hair sticks upward (“A comb with legs would have outrun Jesse Owens, given one look at this guy’s locks,” Johnny Depp remarked after first meeting him), and he could still pass for an extra on a Universal horror film from the Thirties.
He has just had to down tools on his new movie, Beetlejuice 2, because of the Hollywood actors’ strike – a frustration given that he was less than two days away from completing shooting on the long-awaited film (which brings back Michael Keaton and Winona Ryder from the 1988 classic horror comedy).
Burton talks of trying to do the new Beetlejuice “in the same spirit” as the first film. Yet it’s not the only one of his old movies he has been thinking about recently. The filmmaker and artist strikes a wistful, melancholic note when remembering Paul Reubens (aka Pee-wee Herman) the anarchic comedian who died at the end of July. Reubens gave Burton his big break, hiring him to direct Pee-wee’s Big Adventure (1985). But the comic’s career was derailed after controversy in his private life involving pornography and drugs. Burton, however, always stayed loyal to him.
“I worked with him,” Burton says. “I had him in Batman Returns and he did some voices in The Nightmare Before Christmas. I’d always send him a Christmas card. And I did speak to him a few months ago. I talked to him for about 45 minutes… but I had no idea what his situation was.” (Reubens had privately been diagnosed with cancer.) The director had had “a weird idea” for a project on which they might have collaborated once more – but that obviously won’t happen now.
There’s a poignant moment at the end of Edward Scissorhands (1990) when the mob turns on the innocent young hero who has scissor blades for hands. I put it to Burton that the same thing has happened in symbolic fashion to the film’s star Depp and to Reubens, who both had very public falls from grace.