“Me, the Hollywood outsider. For years I have felt like Dumbo ».- time.news

by time news
from Valerio Cappelli

Festive welcome for the master of the Gothic. «I love Italy with its Fellini, Bava and Argento. The marginalized characters in my films are a reflection of my childhood. My Disney drawings? They were awful. Now I’m going to do Wednesday, on the Addams Family. ‘

Tim Burton arrives at the Film Festival with his disheveled hair, his “disheveled”, gothic, fairytale, visionary filmography, inhabited by marginalized characters who are “the reflection of my childhood”, populated by dreamlike and imaginary creatures now by monsters who feed his dark dense humor. His films full of butterflies and bats flow through the clips. “But don’t call me a dark director, it’s the most wrong thing you can say about me, I have this label left and I don’t want to be considered that way, it’s something that has marked me,” he says, denying himself.

How can you believe him as they scroll through her images of Edward scissor hands, a hymn to someone who seeks to love by wounding and cutting. “It’s a real story, it represents my childhood, I was like that, I felt like that.” And so we go back to Burbank, California, the anonymous suburb where he grew up, a completely muffled town that prompted him to work on his imagination, where his father on full moon nights took off his dentures and was a werewolf doing a great fear; where he spent his time “looking at the sky and the trees from the window”.

He defines himself as “an outsider, one outside the box”. And it doesn’t dissolve the paradox of having worked so hard in the mainstream of Hollywood studios, in e out at the same time: «I was in an unusual position, despite everything I still haven’t understood how it could have happened, cinema there is a question of business, real money. Fortunately, they didn’t really understand what I was doing. Mine Batman it was a source of confusion, those who said it was too dark compared to the previous one, those who claimed the exact opposite… ». With Johnny Depp he has worked in seven films, Hollywood has banned him for family affairs. “I left Los Angeles years ago, obviously I’d go back to working with Johnny. Today you can no longer say anything, it is an oppressive situation ». And then the 1980s as an animator at Disney: “Horrible,” says Burton, “I spent dark days with talented people dealing with films that required a lot of work without opportunities. I invented a fox, it looked as if it had been hit by a car. I was doing primitive drawings. I was so incapable and incompetent that I went on to do other things. ‘

Yet he fell back, as a director of Dumbo in live action: «Since that film I had a nervous breakdown, I felt like Dumbo, the flying elephant made fun of for his huge ears. I was like him, a creature that has nothing to do with the environment in which he is. I was traumatized, I haven’t made films anymore ». Now her first TV series awaits her, Wednesday, “About the Addams family: you may remember mine Beetlejuice, but with more depth “. They tell him that Loredana Berté would like to act in one of his films, for The Corpse Bride she would have run there. He has an expression like: “Loredana who?”. He is here in Rome because the Film Festival gave him the Lifetime Achievement Award: “It’s like going to your own funeral,” but he adds that he is joking. Italy awarded him with the Golden Lion, with the David for Lifetime Achievement. He mentions Mario Bava, Dario Argento and Federico Fellini. The perfect synthesis of his cinema: the colorful imagery and the disturbing element that make up his hypnotic rainbow. From his America instead, only nominations: “I have no regrets.” The (non) answer on the imagination is brilliant: where does it come from? “You go to a bar, order a drink and then you see.”

October 23, 2021 (change October 23, 2021 | 21:16)

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