Tim Burton: 'The love and life and death stuff was stewing from the start' Tim Burton's gothic office in Belsize Park in north London belonged a century ago to Arthur Rackham, the celebrated illustrator of Peter Pan and Alice in Wonderland and The Fairy Tales of the Brothers Grimm. In the upstairs studio room of the house, one restless and teeming imagination has been seamlessly replaced by another. "Rackham apparently used to have all his fairy models hung from these spars," Burton tells me, nodding toward the exposed beams above his head. In the mullioned light of large leaded windows, which look out on a rambling walled garden that seems to come from another age altogether, you could half believe some wisp of them hangs there still. "People definitely believe they hear strange things here at night," Burton suggests, "but it's a good vibe." The director bought this suitably spirited work space not long after he moved to London a decade ago. It is half a mile up the road from the pair of adjoining mews houses he shares with his partner, Helena Bonham Carter and their two young children. It would be hard to have magicked up a better stage for his own lucrative daydreams; the gory mannequins and wide-eyed prostheses and scattered sketches and artwork and storyboards that inhabit corners of his room, remnants and cast-offs from Corpse Bride and Edward Scissorhands and The Nightmare Before Christmas and Sleepy Hollow all seem perfectly at home here. And so, sitting in the middle of it all, wild-haired in the autumn sunlight, does their creator. Burton is, famously, not the most garrulous of men. His generous visual gifts come at the expense of much in the way of verbal pyrotechnics. Which is to say you don't have to chat to him for very long to understand why Bonham Carter likes to call him "a home for abandoned sentences." He tends to return the compliment by sometimes making affectionately snide remarks about her talkativeness; in this, and most other ways, they seem to make a perfect pair. Burton is not so much vague in conversation as fleeting. Immediately a phrase half conveys its sense, he is already articulating its caveats or some further association. He's a dot-to-dot talker, happy for you to do the grunt work of making connections. When Johnny Depp, the third point of that celebrated creative triangle, first met Burton, to discuss Edward Scissorhands, his initial thought about the director was "get some sleep." Burton seemed to the actor "a pale, frail-looking, sad-eyed man with hair that expressed much more than last night's pillow struggle." Thoughts were as likely articulated with frenzied movements of the hands, "the way he waves them around in the air uncontrollably, nervously tapping on the table," or with sudden stares "eyes wide and glaring out of nowhere, curious, eyes that have seen it all." They got on, Depp recalls, because they could stumble through and intuitively fill in the holes of each other's stilted syntax. It's probably always a bit that way, you imagine, but particularly when Burton is asked to explain the genesis of some of his ideas or, worse, relate them to events of his past or present. He does his best, in good faith, but makes it clear he'd much sooner let his films tell his story. At least his latest, Frankenweenie, makes a good place to start. Frankenweenie: trailer In some senses Frankenweenie is the film Burton has been making all his life. A beautiful and big-hearted stop-motion animation in black and white, about a boy in a bland and sinister American suburb who brings his beloved pet dog back to life, it was the first film Burton ever properly imagined. He did a short version of it 28 years ago, when he was working as an animator at the Disney studios soon after he left college in California. It was not released back then because Disney considered it too macabre a tale; soon afterwards Burton was let go by the studio. That he has returned to Disney to make it now - after grossing for the empire more than a billion dollars with his last film, Alice, the 12th highest-earning film of all time - no doubt feels a little like a score finally settled. Burton laughs when I suggest as much, but he doesn't deny he's enjoyed getting his own way in the end. "Frankenweenie means a lot to me," he says of the film that will open the London film festival this week. The thing about it was, first time around in the early 1980s, it came at a strange moment in Disney's history. They didn't know what they were doing really at the time. There was a whole group of really talented people not being allowed to do very much. It was a bit Shakespearean as these older guys from Snow White days were clinging on to power. I wasn't a very good animator, at least not in their tradition, so I had the opportunity to be left on my own for a year or two in a room and just draw. At first, that felt like Burton's dream come true. He had grown up, unhappily, as a near neighbour to the Disney studio in the Los Angeles suburb of Burbank. Watching movies, particularly horror movies, and working out how he might make them, had been his entire adolescent life. It was amazing to be 21 and paid to be drawing all day, but then after a couple of years I got the feeling I wouldn't go anywhere. Eventually they gave me a little bit of money to do that stop-motion film Vincent [based on his own infatution with the films of Vincent Price] and after that I did something with Frankenweenie... There were plans to show the latter film back then on a double bill with Pinocchio, but the test screenings seemed to convince the corporation's market researchers that children would be traumatised. It was suggested that Burton think a bit more about happy endings, which of course sounded like fighting talk. "After a couple of years I felt like Rapunzel trapped in the tower and nothing I did ever saw the light of day," he says. But some people at Warner Bros saw the short Vincent and that was how I got to do Pee-wee's Big Adventure. That film made more than $40m, after which Burton never looked back (or had to worry about saccharine endings again). The jump to directing live action from animation also, he says, had the happy consequence of forcing him to speak to other people. I think up to that point people thought I was a deaf mute or something. It would be fair to say I wasn't a big speaker, back then..." He trails off. I'm interested in where the story itself, Frankenweenie, came from. All of Burton's work, with its ghoulish archetypes, feels loosely autobiographical at least in a psychological sense, but this story, a moving and ultimately triumphant piece about a lonely childhood, haunted by death, feels particularly intimate and personal. What made him want to return to it? "For me it's always been a memory type of piece," he says. Everything in it is based on somebody I knew or a composite of some people, and all the places and emotions and kid politics are very real to me. It was a way to apply every memory and every feeling you had and put it in one place. One of the curious things about going back to the story, he says, is that while it was always rooted in ideas of his own childhood, "as you get older you perhaps see a wider picture of those things." He's added the context of feral classmates, who steal the Frankenstein experiment with nightmarish consequences, and an inspirational science teacher, Mr Ryzkruski, again based on his late friend and mentor Vincent Price. Burton's accounts of his own growing up have generally been fairly circumspect, though he has never left much doubt that his career has been in part an imaginative retort to the emotional privations of those years. The detail that tends to surface is the strange fairy-tale fact that his parents bricked up the windows of his bedroom, leaving only a small chink of light for him to see out of, and leading him to identify with those Edgar Allan Poe heroes who were buried alive. His father had been a professional baseball player before Burton was born, and was a travel agent afterwards. He seems to have been a role model his son had no wish to live up to. Burton claims also not to have got on with his mother to the extent that, by the age of 12, he had moved out to live with his grandmother, and by 16 he was in an apartment of his own, later working to put himself through college at CalArts. Having been forced to grow up fast, he subsequently seemed to want to protect his childlike imagination against all comers. In the past he has said, somewhat oddly: "I've had therapy but I've never discussed my parents." Is this film, in which the boy Victor refuses his father's exhortations to play ball and hides in the attic with his born-again dog, another form of catharsis? "Loosely," he says. But the parents in the film are more a wish fulfilment really. It's a more positive situation in a way. My parents suffered from that ideal of a perfect nuclear family. They found that a difficult pressure, I think... His dog was always more reliable? Well, I had a dog, but it didn't look like the dog in the film. The way I drew Sparky, it was like a heart. A kind of lump of heart. And that was the emotion of it. A dog can be your first love, and I was that way. Unconditional. You don't get it often with people. You don't get it with all animals. But my dog had that soulful quality and it got distemper, which meant it was not going to live for long - though in the end it survived for longer. And I guess at the time I was watching Frankenstein, so all that love and life and death stuff was kind of stewing from the beginning. Death never seems to have been far from Burton's adult thoughts - his defining characters tend to relish their dance with mortality - but was that his first experience of that feeling? "Certainly with the dog there was a powerful spectre of death looming, I guess," he says. But then I got it from the movies. Pretty much every film I loved had a bit of that, Dracula and so on. The thing about parents I don't understand is how they forget about how important those issues are for children. In those old Disney movies there is death and horror all the time. Children need that, I believe. It's how they understand the world. It was back then, in his bricked-up bedroom, that Burton started to take the idea of animation literally. Like Victor in Frankenweenie, he wanted to bring things to life. He lived near a cemetery and would go there and wonder about the scary guy who dug graves. Looking back, he suggests it is a little alarming how solitary he felt. Despite all of his success, the sense of being an outsider has stayed with him - along with its antidote. 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. The film seems in thrall to that lost innocence in a way: is that something he is always trying to recapture? "People say I am stuck in childhood," he says, "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. The surprise. It's something like the fact that you only get to see the strangeness of life once, in a truly fresh way. I think the films are sometimes a kind of symbol for that. I often wonder about it, but I don't analyse it too much... Burton's moment of transcendence came one day when he was an art student, and he decided not to try to draw how he had been taught to draw, in life classes, how other people did it, but just to do what came naturally to him. I remember it very clearly. It was a kind of drug experience. It was as if it unlocked a chemical inside me and after that I started drawing in this slightly mind-blowing, freeing way for me. His films still all start in his sketch pad; it's fascinating to see how his initial line drawings of the Penguin in the Batman films, or Augustus Gloop in Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, or the Queen of Hearts in Alice in Wonderland, survive to define the look of the multi-million-dollar finished products. He generally carries a pencil and paper with him, though he has to be a little more covert in his activities these days, for fear of being caught in the act of creation by paparazzi or fans with iPhones. I used to be able to just go to the mall and draw whoever I wanted, but that's not so easy now. I will sit in a dark corner of a bar more likely and get a sketch book out, you know. Sometimes when I am around I see someone, a character, and I will go back and draw if that seems a good thing to do. But the kind of act itself is important. It is a good way of calming down. 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. He and Bonham Carter seem to make a determined effort not to suffer too gated a life. I live a mile or two away from them and have a few times seen one or other of them out shopping or in a cafe or walking on nearby Primrose Hill with their son and daughter, suitably shock-haired and windswept. Burton came to parenthood pretty late in life, at 45, but he seems to relish "the surprising little creatures," Billy, aged nine, and Nell, five. "We took our daughter to school for the first time today, which went well," he says, with the relief of someone who has experienced the opposite. When I first took my boy, all the other kids walked in and we had to prise his hands off us, like bend each one of his fingers back, and then off the gate, and he was screaming like we were murdering him. You have a bit more respect for parents when you become one... and we are lucky to have a lot of help and all that. He and Bonham Carter famously have the capacity to retreat to their own space within the relationship, retaining their separate parts of the linked houses, which are currently being renovated. They like to joke about the circumstance. He always visits, which is really touching. He's always coming over," says Helena of Tim. "Having two houses means we can get out of each other's hair, which, let's face it, we've both got a lot of," says Tim of Helena. Burton sometimes does a lot of his thinking at night, he suggests, so it's good to wander. He has to find space for his extended family, as it were. Elsewhere he has noted: "I treat my films like mutated children... they may have flaws, they may have weird problems, but I still love them." That love was perhaps tested most severely on Alice, which employed every digital animation technology available to create its surreal look. Burton winces just slightly when I ask him about it. "I had never done anything like Alice before," he says. It was like working back to front. I don't think I will do anything in that way again. Usually there are at least a couple of people in the frame when you are working to give you something to go on. But, with Alice, everything had to be done completely separately. The world of computer graphics is scarily boundless, he suggests, for a director. You can sort of do anything, though there are some elements of limitation. I didn't use any one specific technique. It was sort of amazing that anything came out at all. The corporeal nature of Frankenweenie has been a necessary relief. "It's great that you can pick up the puppets and touch them," he says with feeling. It's like an old movie, doing your water reflections with mirrors, doing one frame at a time. I liked the idea of going back to that, it does re-energise the spirit. There have been periods in his career when Burton looked like being sucked into the big-budget machinery of Hollywood like Veruca Salt into Willy Wonka's inventions. That he has resisted and lived to tell the tale says something about that spirit, which you guess can be both wildly combative and mischievous. As he gets older, he says, he tends to feel less rather than more responsible. "It's even more important I guess to kind of do things you care about," he says. And then he shakes my hand and goes off to have his photograph taken next to the fake tombstones in his garden. Frankenweenie is released nationwide on 17 October. It opens the 56th BFI London film festival at a gala screening on Wednesday