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reference: (Wollen, n.d.)
This book explains the auteur theory and what it is about. It also briefly explains how the auteur theory became a thing and why it is now used even today.

They also bring up a bit of history on american cinema which just happens where Tim Burton is from. Tim Burton was born in Burbank California, United States.

I can use this in my essay to talk about how many auteurs do come from america.

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His influence by german expressionism  shown in Sweeney tod 

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His influence by german expressionism  shown in Sweeney tod 

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reference: (Anon, 2017)

As we can see in these two images Tim Burton gets a lot of inspiration from german expressionism. We can see this from the positioning of the characters from both Sweeney Tod by Tim Burton and Metropolis a German expressionism film.

This has really inspired to me to possibly work making a new production of my own and make it much darker.

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reference:(No Film School, 2016)

This article further explains the pint i brought up about Burton being an auteur and having an official name for his style.

It really goes into detail about how even in brightly coloured films such as Big Fish he uses things such as enlarged eyes to make his characters look alienated and stand out.

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How do you describe the work of Tim Burton? Easy-you describe them as "Burtonesque".

If you watch films like Beetlejuice, Edward Scissorhands, or Corpse Bride, it's quite clear that they were all directed by the same comically macabre individual, Tim Burton. Experiencing his brand of cinema is a lot like walking into an abandoned amusement park, or a haunted carnival, or a nightmarish circus-it's entertaining-and even endearing at times, but it's also extremely dark and deeply disturbing. His style is so unique that he has joined the ranks of filmmakers whose names have made the transition from moniker to adjective, like Stanley Kubrick, David Lynch, and Alfred Hitchcock. In this video essay, Fandor's Philip Brubaker defines exactly what "Burtonesque" is, from the concept of the "heroic loner" to his surrealistic humor.

Burton's body of work has gone through several changes throughout his career, but the "esque" of his style really comes from his earlier work from the late 80s to the mid-late 90s. Films like Beetlejuice, Edward Scissorhands, and his two contributions to the Batman franchise contain a number of his narrative tropes, as well as his iconic gothic/idyllic imagery.

In terms of the narrative, Burton's films, at least from this time, tend to feature a protagonist that Brubaker calls the "heroic loner", which is quite a departure from the traditional underdog hero that was (and still is) popular in films in that Burton's heroes aren't lowly nerds that desire companionship or acceptance from others in their community. His heroes are lowly nerds/goths/super crime fighters that are 100% happy with their lonely existence secluded from others. In Brubaker's own words:

Burton's heroic characters are troubled loners, isolated from the rest of the world. But some of them like it that way. Batman is a recluse, as is Edward Scissorhands. Pee-wee Herman is a happy loner.

Burton's gothic/idyllic dichotomy is very apparent in this still from 'Edward Scissorhands', in which he uses a juxtaposition of the town and Edward's home to drive the point home.

In terms of cinematic style, Burton's films are-interesting. They're dark, demented, and nightmarish, but they also have a strange innocence and element of childlike wonder, too. He creates a dichotomy between the gothic and idyllic-the dark and the light-but since it's Burton, the darks and lights are warped by the funhouse mirror of his creativity. In Beetlejuice, the dichotomy is between down home (and recently deceased) couple Adam and Barbara and the pretentious big city Deetz family. In Edward Scissorhands, it's between artificial leather-clad man with scissors for hands Edward and a (seemingly) artificial bubblegum pop suburban town.

As time went on, though, Burton's style changed-it became less edgy, less dark, less gothic. Even when he did make a return to form, like with Dark Shadows and Alice in Wonderland, it almost felt like Tim Burton was trying to make a "Tim Burton film", but wasn't quite getting it right. However, films like Big Eyes, Big Fish, and the newly released Miss Peregrine's Home for Peculiar Children, which are much more commercial and deviate greatly from his early work, do contain bits and pieces of that "Burtonesque" style that made his films so iconic.

'Big Eyes' (2014)

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'Burtonesque': Breaking Down the Gothic Cinematic Style of Tim Burton

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How do you describe the work of Tim Burton? Easy-you describe them as "Burtonesque". If you watch films like Beetlejuice, Edward Scissorhands, or Corpse Bride, it's quite clear that they were all directed by the same comically macabre individual, Tim Burton.

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Dark Humour- In Tim Butons dark humour is more common in his old films such as beetle juice. An example of this is when the main characters car is hanging from a wooden plank and the only weight keeping them from falling to there deaths is a dog. This dog then steps of and they die but this is still seen as funny. This is also shown later in the film when repeated jokes about suicide are brought up. "You know what they say about suicide victims. They become civil servants in the afterlife" This quote told by the character Otho is proven because one of the secretaries in the after life has slit wrists and says "If i had known i wouldn't of had my little accident" then raising her slit wrists.

Tim Burton has a thing for white picket fence houses being evil on the inside. This is called a cornucopia. He does this in many films such as Edward Scissorhands.

Fairytale themes- In this film we see that there is an evil step mum sticking to Tim Burtons classical fantasy style.

Stop Motion Animation- Even here we can see Tim Burton working with stop animation. This is shown by the giant snake we see when the ghosts try to leave the house. This design is later shown in his other stop motion animation films he worked on even the ones that he did not direct but had a lot of work to do with such as the snakes of the same design in A nightmare before christmas.

You can tell the music is in Burtons style because it is still classical gothic or horror styled like in Sweeney Tod swell but they have put a comedy twist onto it to make it funny as well as creepy.

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Reference: (charliee_grover, 2013)

This slide show briefly explains how Tim Burton is an auteur and who you recognise his style in his films or burton-esqe styled films.

"different angles of the characters helps build up tension" A good example of this is in Sweeney Tod. Shots change all the time showing the angle of sweeney's razor and the dead bodies of his victims building up tension for the audience as the story progresses and further draws you into the plot.

They also speak about the dark lighting and how it intrigues the audience. They explain how this mostly is because something bad is going to happen. An example of this is in Big Fish when he walks through the forest witch is very gothic. I believe this is why Sweeney tod has dark lighting the whole way through unless making the razors glint because from beginning till end bad stuff keeps on happening. The lighting is also dark in my third chosen film beetle juice shrouding betelgeuse himself in darkness as if he is of pure evil.

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Reference:  (Big Fish- Trailer, 2004)

Here is the trailer for Big Fish. This is a thrilling tail directed by Tim Burton combining weird and wonderful fantasy with everyday life. When it comes to combining the two worlds TB has no problems what so ever. It is as if he is part of both worlds and thats why he can create such beautiful viewings for us as an audience.

We get the emotion of a son that doesn't know his father or at least doesn't believe his stories. We are told this through the artistic scenery that represents TB's style perfectly though not gothic he keeps his style by showing us the weird and wonderful creatures that we see throughout the film.

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Reference: (Sweeney Tod: The Demon Barber of Fleet Street - Trailer, 2007)
This film was really good as for TB because of the era it was set in.The fact it is made in the Victorian period when clothing especially for a commoner was very gothic suiting TB's stylistic type filming. The costumes alone as well as the dark lighting show Tb's style as an auteur.

Another part of his style as an auteur is using the same or similar actors. His most used actors/actresses is Johnny Depp and Helena Bonham Carter. there is a famous quote saying Johnny Depp is the guy that Tim Burton always wanted to be, this may be why Helena Bonham Carter always plays Johnny deeps wife as she was really Burton's in real life. They are practically always in his films. They change there costumes and characters but they are always part of his style and you can see that in his films.

The songs in this film not only explains about what is going on currently in the film but also keep the audience entertained for the music is so well suited to his style.

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Sweeney Todd: The Demon Barber of Fleet Street - Trailer

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reference: (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GuyNP-XyFHs, 1988)

This Trailer of Beetlejuice. This was one of TB's first films as you can tell by the out dated graphics and CGI. However this doesn't make the 1988 film bad in fact TB's style shows the whole way though and you can really tell he relates to the character of Winona Ryder who plays the character Lydia Deetz. She is a gothic outcast that family doesn't understand her very much like himself that was seemed to be strange at a young age like her.
He uses his actors to show himself and his style through them and the costume of the characters.

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Beetlejuice - Original Theatrical Trailer

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Auteur: Tim Burton - So The Theory Goes
Reference: (So The Theory Goes, 2017)

This article explains how Tim burton is an auteur and what the auteur theory actually is. It goes into detail  about Tb's past and how he get like an  outsider. I t also say how he was always strange even from a young age, we can see his uniqueness come through in his work.

It goes into detail about how he felt society did't respect the differences he and many other people have.

"Burton spent a lot of his time as a child watching horror films (especially monster movies) and drawing."  This quote from the actual article shows that he was always around the scary and unusual elements that sparked his gothic style and helped him to progress as a director.

The quote also talks about him spending a lot of his time drawing as a child and this is where he most likely got his inspirations for his productions such as The corpses bride which is an animation.

Many people also believe that Tim Burton directed Nightmare before Christmas but infact he produced it. The film was done in an Burton-esque style and he was greatly involved but did not direct the film which shocks a lot of people.

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The auteur theory was first developed by New Wave directors, including Jean-Luc Goddard, as a way of distinguishing those who merely follow scripts and stick to the limitations placed on them by studios from those who impose their own vision onto their projects.

This theory has its fair share of critics. There are those who see film-making as a collective effort, and therefore it is unfair to see the final product as the sole work of the director. There are also actors, lighting and sound engineers, set designers, makeup artists, cinematographers, composers, screenwriters and film editors involved in the process who contribute a great deal to the project. While most of these artists contribute to the overall mise-en-scene (set design, character's behaviour,...), auteur critics do acknowledge that it is the mise-en-shot (camera positioning, duration of each shot, framing) that make the difference between films and can distinguish certain directors from everyone else.

Films made by Tim Burton are easily identifiable. They incorporate his beliefs and values. They feature actors and crew members that are frequently a part of his team. Furthermore, the stories are told from his perceptive, both in terms of themes and the style ( mise-en-shot).

Keeping genre, themes, mise-en-scene, and mise-en-shot in mind, these notes will analyse a number of Tim Burton films to prove that he is, in fact, an auteur in every sense of the word.

Burton's Point of View

Tim Burton spent the majority of his childhood as an outsider. He grew up in suburbia (Burbank, California) and because he wasn't like everyone else, he was often misunderstood. His childhood experiences living in the suburbs left him with the belief that society tries to stifle anything that makes people individual. His anti-society views started early on.

Burton spent a lot of his time as a child watching horror films (especially monster movies) and drawing. He enjoyed watching films with monsters who were misunderstood by those around them. The films that moved him were mainly stop-motion animations and films that reflected German Expressionism. Before he started directing his own films, he enjoyed the conceptual work he was able to do for Disney studios.

He was very introspective, looking at things in a symbolic and very poetic way. While he was not an avid reader, he did identify with the work of Edgar Allan Poe, Dr Seuss and Roald Dahl for its imagery and symbolism.

His experiences as a child helped give him a distinct point of view that now shapes his films in adult life. It's these beliefs that give his work their own distinct style.

His Signature

Genre

Due to his love for the unconventional, his films fit quite comfortably in the fantasy genre. They incorporate characters that one would not usually find, in situations that would never occur in the real world. For example, you would not find a ghost who wants to marry a human in real life. Nor would you come across a resurrected dog or someone who is able to chop hedges with his Scissorhands.

His films are characteristically quirky; they explore concepts that could never exist in the real world. Since his films are so typically 'fantasy', audiences come to expect quirky, unusual stories when a film is associated with him. However, even though they feature things that do not really exist, the films are centred around themes that are very human and relatable.

Themes

Since he is inspired by his childhood, his films his work has an element of whimsy, wonder and naivety. His heroines are usually kind-hearted and naive in a childlike manner, just like Victor in Frankenweenie or Edward in Edward Scissorhands. Along with the childlike innocence, he also explores dark themes, like Death in Beetlejuice or resurrection in Frankenweenie. He appreciates the fact that everyone has two sides to his or her personality and so, all of his films explore this delicate, contrasting balance of innocence/darkness and good/bad.

In accordance with the genre and his personal experiences, his heroines are usually different from other people in some way. They are misunderstood by those around them and as a result, they are alienated from others. This is exactly the case in Edward Scissorhands. When forced out of his house and into the centre of town, he is met with hostility because he is different from everyone else. People assume he is mean, violent and dangerous because of his hands when he actually the complete opposite.

His films also explore social issues such as peer pressure and conformity. Once again Edward Scissorhands is a good example of this. Society tries to force Edward to conform to their rules, by making him look like them, getting him to go to school and get a job and forcing him to behave the way they do. When he is unable to conform to their rules, he is rejected by nearly everyone in the town and forced back to the outskirts of town (and society).

Even when he is remaking a classic film, the original story is weaved around these themes in such a way that even though he didn't originally create the story, his version is very true to who he is and recognisable as his own. For example, both of his Batman films are darker than the rest and they explore social breakdown.

However, it is important to understand that a 'Tim Burton' film isn't merely a fantasy film or a film that includes the themes mentioned. His films add an extra element. It is his treatment of these things that makes his work distinct and establishes him as an auteur.

Filmmaking

This auteur has complete control over how his films look and feel. He has a say in everything present in each scene, from the actors to the symbols ever present in his films that help tell the narrative and reach audiences on a sub-conscious level.

As shown in original sketches he does during the process of making every one of his films, he envisioned the way the characters were supposed to look and feel and translated this vision to those working with him, who were then able to capture this vision on screen. What we see on screen is, in fact, a representation of the thoughts and ideas spilling out of his head.

He uses the set and the characters movements as instruments to send a message that he personally believes in. In a scene from Edward Scissorhands, Burton shows suburbia as being a mass of houses (in varying colours yet all exactly the same) with green hedges and cars parked neatly in the driveway. Everything is so stripped of individuality, yet the people are convinced that they are 'unique'. This setting is significant and created for a reason to further the audience's understanding of the narrative. Burton uses it to make a point about how conforming society is and how very little originality exists within it. These are his own beliefs coming through, and they are important in order to appreciate the character of Edward and to understand why his very unique abilities are looked down upon.

It is also important to mention the recurrent symbols present in his films. They are images that mean something to him and show up in all of his work in one way or another. The most common symbols include bats, dogs, skeletons, spiders, topiaries, black and white stripes, a model town and a graveyard setting. Most of these references stem back from his love of horror films and his upbringing. Big Fish features spiders and topiaries. Beetlejuice features a model town, a graveyard, a dog, and black and white stripes. The Nightmare before Christmas features bats, skeletons, and skulls. These symbols help make up Tim Burton's signature.

While it does take a team of professionals to create a film and therefore it could be argued that it could never be entirely according to the director's vision, Burton's use of particular actors and crew members who understand his vision allows him to create art that is quite true to him.

Johnny Depp has been in a number of his film, along with Helena Bonham Carter, Winona Rider, Conchata Ferrell, Martin Landou, Catherine O' Hara and Micheal Keaton just to name a few. These actors are able to take Burton's direction on who their characters are and how they behave and portray his characters exactly the way he would like them to be.

Tim Burton has also worked with composer Danny Elfman quite frequently. He creates the music for nearly all of Burton's films, taking the director's notes and translating it into music that matches his vision of how the film must be. When he is working on an animated film, he frequently works with Tim Allen. He knows that collaborating with people who understand what he wants out of his films produces work that audiences can easily identify.

As explained in his book, he doesn't include people in his films because he believes they will make the film commercially successful. He chooses them because they connect with his material. Just like he understands and relates to it, he makes the active choice to cast people who can relate to his films on a deeper level. At times, his choices have been criticised by the media and the Hollywood studios he was working with, but he always remains true himself and what feels right to him.

His influence is also apparent in the way the films are put together. Coming from an animation background, his style is very visual. He likes to incorporate a number of special effects, including stop-motion animation. Inspired by Super 8 films from the past, he has used this effect in Beetlejuice, The Nightmare before Christmas and Frankenweenie.

Conclusion

... an auteur is able to maintain a consistency of style and theme by working against the constraints of the Hollywood mode of production."

- Warren Buckland

The Batman films proved to be very difficult for Tim Burton. He was under severe pressure from the studio and media on all of the choices he made. Despite all of the opposition, he made the films the way he thought they should be. His versions treated the material in a way that remained true to his aesthetic. While the films were not well received by the public, he still looks back on the film proudly because he made the film he wanted to make.

Tim Burton has done many things in his career, but there is an underlying link between all of his work that makes it very clearly a Burton creation. His films are deeply personal; they come from his own feelings and beliefs which he translates onto the screen. A 'Tim Burton' film is about more than the storyline, or even the characters, but about the overall feeling, it sends to its audience that is relatable and identifiable.

He makes films that are true to who he is. When pressured to conform to studio rules or to what is 'marketable', he puts his own vision above all else and ironically, it has made him quite successful. He is a true auteur because, in every possible sense, he makes films his way.

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Keeping themes, mise-en-scene, and more in mind, these notes analysis Tim Burton films to prove that he is in fact an auteur in every sense of the word. This theory has its fair share of critics. There are those who see film-making as a collective effort, and therefore it is unfair to see the final product as the sole work of the director.

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Tim Burton: A German Expressionism Influence

This is a clip showing how Tim burton an auteur who has his own style was very inspired by German expressionism. Though he doesn't just get his whole gothic style from german expressionism as we see when we look at films such as Alice in wonderland, Big Fish and Charlie and the Chocolate factory where the colours contrast his other productions that are very dark. He however sticks to the weird and wonderful by having strange and unique characters that show is style is still there even though its not the same as his other work.

Reference: (Anon, 2017)

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Tim Burton: A German Expressionism Influence

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Tim Burton has an official name for a film created in his style even if not by him. Burton-esqe is the term used to describe a production inspired of taken the style of Tim Burton. This means when seeing a film like that you could say "That film was Burton-esqe"

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reference:  (Tommasini, 2015)

This article is about Danny Elfman and how he has produced a lot of Tim Burtons music for him. He did the music for two of the three films i am talking about. He did Beetlejuice and Big Fish but strangely did not work on the music for the musical Sweeney Tod.

He regularly works with Tim Burton to put sound and image together to create the iconic films we watch and the feelings we get from the music when paired with the imagery.

I think the reason that he did not do the music for Sweeney Tod was because it was a complete new genre and he had not really done musicals before. I also think that

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The self-taught Mr. Elfman gained attention as lead singer and songwriter for the new-wave band Oingo Boingo before he became known as a film composer. Growing up in Los Angeles, as he said recently in The New York Times, he spent every weekend of his childhood watching movies at his local theater, especially sci-fi, horror and fantasy films. He loved the scores of Bernard Herrmann, Elmer Bernstein and other Hollywood greats. During his young-adult years, he became hooked on 20th-century giants like Shostakovich, Stravinsky and Prokofiev.

All of those influences come through palpably in Mr. Elfman's suites, which were orchestrated for this project by a team supervised by Steve Bartek.

In the first Elfman-Burton collaboration, "Pee-wee's Big Adventure" (1985), the popular comedy starring Paul Reubens as Pee-wee, the boy who won't grow up, the suite starts surprisingly, with aggressive, mechanistic marches, like brutal episodes out of Shostakovich. At one point, a slinky, sad waltz melody wafts from the strings. Gradually, accents are nudged by dissonant chords, and the music morphs into a hard-bitten dance. Imagine Prokofiev in Hollywood.

From my knowledge of the films (and I have not seen them all), I was prepared for the fantasy and playfulness of Mr. Elfman's music, but not for its subtleties and stylistic fusions. In "Beetlejuice," some sumptuously grotesque orchestra music was punctuated by captivating, amplified choral howls.

In "Sleepy Hollow," sustained, French-sounding sonorities bleed from one chord to another during a wayward harmonic journey. In one angelic episode, a splendid boy soprano, Leif Christian Pedersen, sang tender, textless melodic lines. It was hard not to root for the aliens during "Mars Attacks!," since their music, for all its needling vehemence, was so delightfully sly.

As an ardent fan of "Edward Scissorhands," I was pleased to hear the familiar tingling celesta riffs and wondrously spectral sounds from the opening of the film played in this full orchestral version. Central to this suite was a demonic, Paganini-inspired violin solo, played with steamy virtuosity by Sandy Cameron. This episode, a shameless showstopper, detracted from the overall impression of the suite.

Another fine boy soprano, John-Dominick Mignardi, was the soloist in a sweet song from "Alice in Wonderland" that concluded the evening. The highlight for the audience had come just before, when the wiry Mr. Elfman appeared onstage to sing several of the songs he wrote for the character of Jack in "Tim Burton's The Nightmare Before Christmas," which he also sang on the 1993 soundtrack. The ovation he received was almost terrifyingly loud, with screeching like something out of a Burton film.

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Review: 'Danny Elfman's Music From the Films of Tim Burton,' Macabre Yet Sweet

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The self-taught Mr. Elfman gained attention as lead singer and songwriter for the new-wave band Oingo Boingo before he became known as a film composer. Growing up in Los Angeles, as he said recently in The New York Times, he spent every weekend of his childhood watching movies at his local theater, especially sci-fi, horror and fantasy films. He loved the scores of Bernard Herrmann, Elmer Bernstein and other Hollywood greats.

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This is an article from Metro news paper on Monday 11th September 2017. The article was called 60 seconds with Michael Keaton. Within the article they talk to him about working with Tim Burton on the new disney film Dumbo a remake of the original animated film. As James Mottram says in this part of the article it is new and beautiful but nothing like we have seen before which may suggest Tim Burton may be taking a new twist on his style.

Reference:  (Metro, 2017)

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Hear me out: Big Fish Is Tim Burton's best film

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Hear me out: Big Fish Is Tim Burton's best film

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Reference:  (Rawden, 2012)

This website talks about how this could possibly be Tim Burtons best film because after this his career started to drop slightly and he had apparently lost his style.

"Big Fish is remarkably organised" This quote shows that this film has been well thought out by Burton and his crew. He purposely does a non linear story line so you are never bored and switch at the perfect time from fantasy to everyday life in a hospital.

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There's never been a scientific study done to determine Tim Burton's most beloved movie, but I'm pretty comfortable in saying it's Edward Scissorhands. For most people, that seems to be the film that best portrays Burton in all his Burton-ish wonder. If you were to put that one aside however, you'd probably hear a pretty diverse group of opinions. A lot of people really into film would say Ed Wood. Weirdos would say Beetlejuice or Mars Attacks. Those more into the macabre would extol the virtues of Corpse Bride or Sweeney Todd. You'd get a wide range of answers, but one film you wouldn't hear selected very often is Big Fish, which makes no sense to me considering I think it's overtly Burton's best work. Hear me out...

The director's primary skill is creating alternate worlds and strange places. He has an incredible gift of perfectly matching tone and scenery. Everything about the locations he transports audiences to are vivid and full of wonder, even if they're dreary and desolate. More than anything else, those picturesque backdrops are the reason why he's famous, and in no film is he able to create more places of wonder than in Big Fish.

In each of Edward Bloom's stories, Burton finds fertile ground to play and create magical and unforgettable pictures. There's the circus, stuffed to the brim with giants, midgets, clowns, wild animals, racing motorcycles, popcorn-filled freeze frames and even a werewolf. There's the town of Spectre, boasting the greenest grass I've ever seen and the most unnervingly happy residents anyone has ever spoken to. There's Auburn University, lined with beautiful white sorority buildings and more daffodils than one could ever count. And most importantly, there's the real world.

The real world isn't often a place to be cherished in Tim Burton films, and the characters who most resemble us aren't often the ones we remember. Normalcy just isn't really his style, but in Big Fish, there's just as much beauty to be found in Edward Bloom's bedridden storyteller as there is in the giant catfish he spends his hours trying to catch. I wouldn't dare tell you humanity doesn't lie at the heart of even the strangest Burton creations, but here, there is reality and a familiarity to Will, Josephine, Sandra and even Edward himself.

I think that's why I fell in love with Big Fish so much the first time I saw it. There's a wonderful balance to the movie thanks to clever pacing. Just as we're beginning to forget the trappings of the real world amidst a journey behind enemy lines in World War II, we're thrust back into a dying man's bedroom. Just as we begin to grow irritated with Edward's bloviating, we're allowed to see him act out another one of his enchanting yarns. Big Fish is remarkably organized and careful, and those aren't necessarily qualities found in the rest of the director's catalog.

Tim Burton has made a lot of wonderful movies, but none offer as many smiles, heartbreaks and beautiful pictures as Big Fish. It starts with an amusing anecdote learned in adolescence and ends with a dying man being sent off in the most fitting way possible. In between, we're given one hell of a story, told in a way only Burton could possibly hope to capture. Big Fish is Tim Burton's best movie, and if you don't believe me, you should watch it again.

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Hear Me Out: Big Fish Is Tim Burton's Best Movie

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Tim Burton has made a lot of wonderful movies, but none offer as many smiles, heartbreaks and beautiful pictures as Big Fish. It starts with an amusing anecdote learned in adolescence and ends with a dying man being sent off in the most fitting way possible

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This is a spider diagram i made showing the three films that i want to use to show Burton's style. I have decided to look at the film Big Fish which many people slated as it is very brightly coloured and people thought this meant TB was moving away from his style. I plan to look at Sweeney Tod because it is a musical and shows Tb's sound and how he put his own twist on a piece told through song. The last film i plan to look at is Beetlejuice as this was one of Tb's first films and will show how his style has progressively changed to become the style of an auteur.

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Reference: (En.wikipedia.org, 1988)

Though this website is complex and over detailed it briefly explains the plot and does showcase how his style is played throughout.

In the scene set in a dessert with a giant snake you can really see where he got his ideas for later films such as The corpses bride.

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Beetlejuice is a 1988 American fantasy horror comedy film directed by Tim Burton, written by Michael McDowell, Warren Skaaren, and Larry Wilson, produced by The Geffen Company, distributed by Warner Bros., and starring Alec Baldwin, Geena Davis, Jeffrey Jones, Catherine O'Hara, Winona Ryder, and Michael Keaton as the title character. The plot revolves around a recently deceased couple who, as ghosts haunting their former home, contact Beetlejuice, an obnoxious and devious " bio- exorcist" from the Netherworld, to scare the home's new inhabitants away.

Beetlejuice was a critical and commercial success, grossing $74.7 million on a $15 million budget. It won the Academy Award for Best Makeup and three Saturn Awards: Best Horror Film, Best Makeup, and Best Supporting Actress for Sylvia Sidney. The film's success spawned an animated television series, video games, and a 2018 stage musical.

A sequel was officially announced on May 10, 2023, with a theatrical release date of September 6, 2024.

In Winter River, Connecticut, Barbara and Adam Maitland decide to spend their vacation decorating their idyllic country home. As they are driving home from a trip to town, Barbara swerves to avoid a dog, and the car plunges into the river. After returning home, she and Adam notice they now lack reflections and find a Handbook for the Recently Deceased.

They begin to suspect they did not survive the car accident. When Adam attempts to leave the house, he ends up in a strange and otherworldly desert-like landscape populated by enormous "sandworms". The encounter lasts only a few seconds for him, but after Barbara rescues him, she says he was gone for two hours.

The house is sold, and the new owners, the Deetz family, arrive from New York City. Charles Deetz is a former real estate developer; his second wife, Delia, is a self-proclaimed sculptor; and his teenage goth daughter, Lydia, from his first marriage, is an aspiring photographer. Under the guidance of interior designer Otho, the family transforms the house into a new-wave work of postmodern art.

Consulting the Handbook, the Maitlands travel to an otherworldly waiting room populated by other distressed souls, where they discover the afterlife is structured according to a complex bureaucracy involving vouchers and caseworkers. The Maitlands' caseworker, Juno, tells them they must remain in the house for the next 125 years on pain of a dire fate. If they want the Deetzes out of the house, it is up to the Maitlands to scare them away.

Adam and Barbara are invisible to Charles and Delia, but Lydia can see the ghost couple and befriends them. Against Juno's advice, the Maitlands contact the miscreant Beetlejuice, Juno's former assistant and a now freelance "bio-exorcist", to scare the Deetzes away.

But Beetlejuice quickly offends the Maitlands with his crude and morbid demeanor: they reconsider hiring him, though too late to stop him from wreaking havoc on the Deetzes. The small town's charm and the supernatural events inspire Charles to pitch his boss, Maxie Dean, on transforming the town into a tourist hot spot, but Maxie wants proof of the ghosts. Using the Handbook for the Recently Deceased, Otho conducts what he thinks is a séance and summons Adam and Barbara, using their wedding clothes, but they begin to age and decay, as Otho unwittingly performed an exorcism instead.

Horrified, Lydia summons Beetlejuice for help, but he will help her only on the condition that she marry him, enabling him to freely cause chaos in the mortal world. He saves the Maitlands and disposes of Maxie, his wife, and Otho, then prepares a wedding before a ghastly minister. The Maitlands intervene before the ceremony is completed, with Barbara riding a sandworm through the house to devour Beetlejuice.

Finally, the Deetzes and Maitlands agree to live in harmony within the house. Beetlejuice is stuck in the afterlife waiting room. He steals a number ticket from a witch doctor, who shrinks his head in return.

After the financial success of Pee-wee's Big Adventure (1985), Burton became a " bankable" director and began working on a script for with Sam Hamm. While Warner Bros. was willing to pay for the script's development, it was less willing to green-light Batman. Burton had become disheartened by the lack of imagination and originality in the scripts he had been sent, particularly . David Geffen handed Burton the script for Beetlejuice, by Michael McDowell (who wrote the script for "The Jar", an episode of Alfred Hitchcock Presents Burton directed).

Larry Wilson was brought on board to continue rewriting work with McDowell, though Burton replaced McDowell and Wilson with Skaaren due to creative differences. McDowell's original script is far less comedic and much darker; the Maitlands' car crash is depicted graphically, with Barbara's arm crushed and the couple screaming for help as they slowly drown. A reference to this remains: Barbara remarks that her arm feels frozen upon returning home as a ghost. Instead of possessing the Deetzes and forcing them to dance during dinner, the Maitlands cause a vine-patterned carpet to come to life and attack them by tangling them to their chairs.

The character of Betelgeuse-envisioned by McDowell as a winged demon, who takes on the form of a short Middle Eastern man-is also intent on killing the Deetzes rather than scaring them, and wanted sex from Lydia instead of marriage. In this version of the script, Betelgeuse need only be exhumed from his grave to be summoned, after which he is free to wreak havoc; he cannot be summoned or controlled by saying his name three times, and wanders the world freely, appearing to torment different characters in different manifestations. McDowell's script also featured a second Deetz child, nine-year-old Cathy, the only person able to see the Maitlands and the subject of Betelgeuse's homicidal wrath in the film's climax, during which he mutilates her in the form of a rabid squirrel before revealing his true form.

In another version of the script, the film concludes with the Maitlands, Deetzes, and Otho conducting an exorcism ritual that destroys Betelgeuse and the Maitlands transforming into miniature versions of themselves and moving into Adam's model of their home, which they refurbish to look like their house before the Deetzes moved in.

Co-author and producer Larry Wilson has talked about the negative reaction to McDowell's original script at Universal where he was employed at the time:

I won't name names here, but I worked at Universal Studios at the time. I was director of development for the director Walter Hill. I had a very good relationship with a very prominent executive at Universal. He liked me, and he liked what I was doing with Walter, and the material I was bringing in.

I gave him Beetlejuice to read, and I gave it to him on a Friday, and on Monday his assistant called me and said "well, he wants to meet with you". My initial reaction was "wow! He'd read it. He must have loved it or he wouldn't have wanted to see me so soon." But I went into his office, and he literally said, "what are you doing with your career?"

"This piece of weirdness, this is what you're going to go out into the world with? You're developing into a very good executive. You've got great taste in material. Why are you going to squander all that for this piece of shit" was basically what he was saying. It goes to show, right? Shortly after that, we sold it to the Geffen Company.

Skaaren's rewrite drastically shifted the film's tone, eliminating the graphic nature of the Maitlands' deaths while depicting the afterlife as a complex bureaucracy. Skaaren's rewrite also altered McDowell's depiction of the limbo that keeps Barbara and Adam trapped inside their home; in McDowell's script, it takes the form of a massive void filled with giant clock gears that shred the fabric of time and space as they move. Skaaren had Barbara and Adam encounter different limbos every time they leave their home, including the "clock world" and the sandworm world, identified as Saturn's moon Titan. Skaaren also introduced the of music accompanying Barbara and Adam's ghostly hijinks, although his script specified R&B tunes instead of Harry Belafonte and was to have concluded with Lydia dancing to " When a Man Loves a Woman".

Skaaren's first draft retained some of McDowell's Betelgeuse's more sinister characteristics, but toned the character down to make him a troublesome pervert rather than blatantly murderous. Betelgeuse's true form was that of the Middle Eastern man, and much of his dialogue was written in African-American Vernacular English. This version concluded with the Deetzes returning to New York and leaving Lydia in the care of the Maitlands, who, with Lydia's help, transform their home's exterior into a stereotypical haunted house while returning the interior to its previous state. It also featured deleted scenes such as the real-estate agent, Jane, trying to convince the Deetzes to allow her to sell the house for them (having sold it to them in the first place-Charles and Delia decline), and a revelation of how Beetlejuice had died centuries earlier (he attempted to hang himself while drunk-having been rejected by a woman-only to mess it up and die slowly choking to death, rather than quickly by snapping his neck) and wound up working for Juno before striking out on his own as a "freelance bio-exorcist".

Retrospectively, McDowell was impressed at how many people made the connection between the film's title and the star Betelgeuse. He added that the writers and producers had received a suggestion the sequel be named Sanduleak -69 202 after the former star of SN 1987A.

Burton's original choice for Beetlejuice was Sammy Davis, Jr. The producers also considered Dudley Moore and Sam Kinison for the role, but Geffen suggested Keaton. Burton was unfamiliar with Keaton's work, but was quickly convinced. Several actresses auditioned for the role of Lydia Deetz, including Sarah Jessica Parker, Brooke Shields, Lori Loughlin, Diane Lane, Justine Bateman, Molly Ringwald, Juliette Lewis, and Jennifer Connelly. Alyssa Milano was the runner-up for the role. Burton cast Ryder upon seeing her in . Anjelica Huston was originally cast as Delia Deetz but dropped out because of illness. O'Hara quickly signed on, while Burton claimed it took a lot of time to convince other cast members to sign, as "they didn't know what to think of the weird script".

Beetlejuice's budget was $15 million, with just $1 million given over to visual effects work. Considering the scale and scope of the effects, which included stop motion, replacement animation, prosthetic makeup, puppetry and blue screen, it was always Burton's intention to make the style similar to the B movies he grew up with as a child. "I wanted to make them look cheap and purposely fake-looking", he said. Burton wanted to hire Anton Furst as production designer after being impressed with his work on The Company of Wolves (1984) and Full Metal Jacket (1987), but Furst was committed to High Spirits, a choice he later regretted. He hired Bo Welch, his future collaborator on Edward Scissorhands and Batman Returns. The test screenings were met with positive feedback and prompted Burton to film an epilogue featuring Betelgeuse foolishly angering a witch doctor. Warner Bros. disliked the title Beetlejuice and wanted to call the film House Ghosts. As a joke, Burton suggested the name Scared Sheetless and was horrified when the studio actually considered using it. While the setting is the fictional village of Winter River, Connecticut, all outdoor scenes were filmed in East Corinth, a village in the town of Corinth, Vermont. Interiors were filmed at The Culver Studios in Culver City, California. Principal photography took place from March 11 to June 11, 1987.

The Beetlejuice soundtrack, first released in 1988 on LP, CD, and cassette tape, features most of the film's score, written and arranged by Danny Elfman. Geffen reissued the original 1988 soundtrack on vinyl in 2015, which was remastered and pressed to vinyl by Waxwork Records in 2019 for the film's 30th anniversary. The soundtrack features two original recordings performed by Harry Belafonte used in the film: " Day-O (The Banana Boat Song)" and " Jump in the Line (Shake, Senora)". Two other vintage Belafonte recordings that appear in the film are absent from the soundtrack: "Man Smart, Woman Smarter" and "Sweetheart from Venezuela". The soundtrack entered the Billboard 200 albums chart the week ending June 25, 1988, at No. 145, peaking two weeks later at No. 118 and spending a total of six weeks on the chart. This was after the film had already fallen out of the top 10 and before the video release in October. "Day-O" received a fair amount of airplay at the time in support of the soundtrack.

The complete score (with the Belafonte tracks included) was released in both the DVD and the Blu-ray as an isolated music track in the audio settings menu; this version of the audio track consists entirely of "clean" musical cues, uninterrupted by dialogue or sound effects.

Beetlejuice opened theatrically in the United States on March 30, 1988, earning $8,030,897 its opening weekend. The film eventually grossed $74,664,632 in North America. Beetlejuice was a financial success, recouping its $15 million budget, and the 10th-highest grossing film of 1988.

Beetlejuice was met with a mostly positive response. Based on 62 reviews collected by Rotten Tomatoes, Beetlejuice received an 85% overall approval rating with a weighted average of 7.2/10. The website's critical consensus reads, "Brilliantly bizarre and overflowing with ideas, Beetlejuice offers some of Michael Keaton's most deliciously manic work-and creepy, funny fun for the whole family." On Metacritic, the film has a weighted average score of 70 out of 100, based on 18 reviews. Audiences surveyed by CinemaScore gave the film a B on a grade scale of A to F.

Pauline Kael called the film a "comedy classic", while Jonathan Rosenbaum of Chicago Reader gave a highly positive review. Rosenbaum felt Beetlejuice had originality and creativity absent from other films. Vincent Canby of The New York Times called it "a farce for our time" and wished Keaton had more screen time. Desson Howe of The Washington Post felt Beetlejuice had "the perfect balance of bizarreness, comedy and horror".

Janet Maslin of The New York Times gave the film a negative review, writing that the film "tries anything and everything for effect, and only occasionally manages something marginally funny" and "is about as funny as a shrunken head". Roger Ebert gave the film two out of four stars, writing that he "would have been more interested if the screenplay had preserved their [Alec Baldwin and Geena Davis] sweet romanticism and cut back on the slapstick". Ebert called Keaton "unrecognizable behind pounds of makeup" and said "his scenes don't seem to fit with the other action".

In his book Comedy-Horror Films: A Chronological History, 1914-2008, Bruce G. Hallenbeck praised the film's lively script, assured direction, offbeat casting, and "delightfully off-kilter, Edward Gorey-like look", citing the explorer with the shrunken head and the animated sandworm as particularly memorable visuals.

At the 61st Academy Awards, Beetlejuice won the Academy Award for Best Makeup, ( Steve La Porte, Ve Neill and Robert Short), while the British Academy of Film and Television Arts nominated the film for Best Visual Effects and Makeup at the 42nd British Academy Film Awards.

Beetlejuice won Best Horror Film and Best Make-up at the 1988 Saturn Awards. Sidney also won the Saturn for Best Supporting Actress, and the film received five other nominations: Direction for Burton, Writing for McDowell and Skaaren, Best Supporting Actor for Keaton, Music for Elfman and Special Effects. Beetlejuice was nominated for the Hugo Award for Best Dramatic Presentation. Beetlejuice was 88th in the American Film Institute's list of Best Comedies.

In February 2022, a sequel produced by Brad Pitt's studio Plan B Entertainment alongside Warner Bros. was reported to be in development.

Due to the film's financial success, a Beetlejuice animated television series was created for ABC. The series ran for four seasons (the final season airing on Fox), from September 9, 1989, to December 6, 1991. Burton served as the show's developer and executive producer.

The character of Beetlejuice was later prominently featured in the Teen Titans Go! episode "Ghost with the Most", which aired in October 2020 as part of the show's sixth season. In this appearance, he was voiced by Alex Brightman, reprising his role from the Broadway musical.

Adventures of Beetlejuice: Skeletons in the Closet is a video game released for MS-DOS in 1990.

Beetlejuice is a video game developed by Rare and released for the Nintendo Entertainment System in 1991.

Beetlejuice: Horrific Hijinx from the Neitherworld! is a video game created by Rare and published by LJN for the Nintendo Game Boy. It is based on the animated series.

A Beetlejuice-themed fun pack for the toys-to-life video game Lego Dimensions was released on September 12, 2017. The pack includes a Beetlejuice minifigure and constructable Saturn's Sandworm, and adds a Beetlejuice-themed open-world area and battle arena to the game. In the Beetlejuice-themed open-world area, Beetlejuice is voiced by Christopher Swindle, Adam Maitland is voiced by Jeff Shine, Barbara Maitland and Delia Dietz are voiced by Krizia Bajos, and Harry the Head-Shrunken Hunter is voiced by Tom Kane. Beetlejuice also features prominently in an episode of Teen Titans Go! included as part of the game. In the Teen Titans Go! episode, when the Titans travel to the Lego world, Raven summons Beetlejuice by saying his name three times and gets to go to the Beetlejuice world. Beetlejuice says if Raven wants to win the Lego building competition, she should resort to cheating and use magic, but tricks her into making a giant gargoyle that the Titans have to fight.

In 2016, work began on a Broadway stage musical adaptation of the film directed by Alex Timbers, produced by Warner Bros., with music and lyrics by Eddie Perfect and book by Scott Brown and Anthony King. The musical was debuted by readings starring Christopher Fitzgerald, Kris Kukul (musical director), and Connor Gallagher (choreographer). It premiered at the National Theatre in Washington, D.C. for a limited run from October 14 to November 18, 2018, with Alex Brightman in the title role.

In December 2019, it was announced that the production would play its final performance at the Winter Garden on June 6, 2020. The producers were unable to find another theater to house the show due to the COVID Broadway shutdown in March 2020. The show reopened at the Marquis Theatre on April 8, 2022, and closed on January 8, 2023, at a financial loss, having been unable to recoup its $21 million investment. Subsequent productions opened across the world, including a North American national tour.

On March 10, 1998, Beetlejuice became the first of more than 5.2 billion DVDs shipped by Netflix, which launched as a mail-based rental business.

1. ^ Rubin, Rebecca (May 9, 2023). "'Beetlejuice 2,' Starring Michael Keaton and Jenna Ortega, to Hit Theaters in 2024". Variety. Archived from the original on May 10, 2023.

2. Salisbury, Mark; Burton, Tim (2006). Burton on Burton. Faber and Faber. p. 54. ISBN 0-571-22926-3.

3. McDowell, Michael. "Beetle Juice (2nd Draft)". Dailyscript.com. Archived from the original on June 3, 2013.

4. Burton, Tim (1988). ^ Beetlejuice. Warner Bros. Studios.

5. ^ Brew, Simon (October 23, 2014). "Larry Wilson interview: Cindy, Beetlejuice, sequels, Aliens". Den of Geek. Archived from the original on November 15, 2019.

6. Skaaren, Warren. "Beetle Juice". Dailyscript.com. Archived from the original on June 18, 2013.

7. ^ Schaaf, Fred (2008). "Betelgeuse". The Brightest Stars. Hoboken, New Jersey: Wiley. pp. 175-76. ISBN 978-0-471-70410-2.

8. ^ "'Beetlejuice' Could Have Starred Sam Kinison and 'Day-O' Was Almost Cut". August 25, 2015. Archived from the original on August 29, 2021.

9. ^ Hughes, David (2003). Comic Book Movies. Virgin Books. p. 38. ISBN 0-7535-0767-6.

10. ^ Spacek, Nick (January 1, 2019). "Beetlejuice OST (30th anniversary)". Starburst Magazine. Archived from the original on May 5, 2021.

11. ^ "Beetlejuice". Rotten Tomatoes. Fandango Media. Archived from the original on January 9, 2010.

12. ^ "Beetlejuice". Metacritic. Fandom, Inc. Archived from the original on July 16, 2016.

13. ^ Canby, Vincent (May 8, 1988). "Beetle Juice is Pap For The Eyes". The New York Times.

14. ^ Maslin, Janet (March 8, 1988). "Beetlejuice (1988)". The New York Times.

15. ^ Hallenbeck, Bruce G. (2009). Comedy-Horror Films: A Chronological History, 1914-2008. McFarland & Company. pp. 155-158. ISBN 9780786453788.

16. ^ "AFI's 100 Years...100 Laughs" (PDF). American Film Institute. Archived from the original (PDF) on March 16, 2013.

17. ^ Grobar, Matt (February 28, 2022). "'Beetlejuice 2': Brad Pitt's Plan B Boards Sequel In Early Development At Warner Bros". Deadline Hollywood. Archived from the original on March 31, 2022.

18. ^ "VIDEO: Alex Brightman Plays an Animated BEETLEJUICE On Last Night's TEEN TITANS GO!". October 6, 2020. Archived from the original on October 10, 2020.

19. ^ Osborn, Alex (May 31, 2017). "Teen Titans Go!, The Powerpuff Girls and Beetlejuice Packs Coming to LEGO Dimensions". Archived from the original on July 5, 2017.

20. Paulson, Michael (September 20, 2022). "'Beetlejuice' to Close on Broadway". The New York Times. Archived from the original on April 4, 2023.

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Beetlejuice is a 1988 American fantasy horror comedy film directed by Tim Burton, written by Michael McDowell, Warren Skaaren, and Larry Wilson, produced by The Geffen Company, distributed by Warner Bros., and starring Alec Baldwin, Geena Davis, Jeffrey Jones, Catherine O'Hara, Winona Ryder, and Michael Keaton as the title character.

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(Metro, 2016)

"Tim Burton's Best In 20 Years" this advertisement suggests that Tim Burton has not made a film as good as this in the last 20 years.

It also shows Tim Burton as a brand because his name is nearly as big as the production title. Also the fact that even though he is not in the advertisement you know it will be a good film because his name is on it.

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reference:(the guardian, 2001)

In this article the guardian describes Burtons style and talks about him being an auteur.

At one point the interviewer says " I realised that the Burton I spoke to in 1989 was different from the one I had just met, even though his responses were eerily similar." This shows that though Burton still keeps to himself and his style it has slightly changed over time.

Even the interviewer could tell that this man has progressively changed throughout his career.

I think that the reason that his style has changed so much is because film itself is changing and no matter what your style is as a film maker you have to be able to direct your style at anyone even if that means changing it slightly. If you truly love film then you will be able to understand and develop your filming skills at a new audience just as Tim Burton has done while still keeping his basic style.

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The scene: a press-junket hotel suite.

The celebrity interviewee: Tim Burton. The key statement: "What I was trying to do was make it clear, but somewhat ethereal at the same time. And to mythicise it, and somewhat demythicise it - that was the effort."

The subject: Planet of the Apes.

No, wait a second - it was Batman.

Before interviewing Tim Burton in New York for Planet of the Apes, I had almost forgotten that I'd spoken to him 12 years before on the eve of Batman's opening. I think my memory loss was a result of the success studio publicity machines have had in pushing him as Hollywood's king of quirk, a title that capitalises even on his bouts of hibernation.

Burton has become the kind of figure you know well, but only in a certain way. His image is by now spookily indelible: he's the beret-clad, bestubbled auteur who appears to be at his wits' end while still commanding enormous sets. International audiences have embraced him as a twinkling-eyed survivor of Californian suburbia, the one movie-maker with an art-school sensibility capable of turning out blockbusters. Going one better than Fellini, he became part of the title of a film he only produced: Tim Burton's The Nightmare Before Christmas.

When I scanned my notes I realised that the Burton I spoke to in 1989 was different from the one I had just met, even though his responses were eerily similar. Where once he was halting and self-deprecating, now he romps into an interview with clear expectations of the questions he's going to be asked and high-energy glee at responding and often deflating them.

Before Batman opened, he waxed uneasy about the movie's prospects and said he actually liked talking to journalists because it took his mind off the movie's opening. "In a way," he said, "it's the most awful time, because there's tension and pressure, and it's a pressure that you have nothing you can do about. You don't know what to do with yourself." Burton did know what to do with himself in the days before the Planet of the Apes premiere: enter "promote mode" in a lather and never leave till those opening grosses start coming in.

He has evolved as if he were Steven Spielberg's warped, guilt-free, Gentile younger brother. Mars Attacks! was his 1941, a flop of Stygian dimensions; Sleepy Hollow was his Raiders of the Lost Ark, a smartly crafted neo-genre picture that put him back on form commercially. But where Spielberg is now respectable, Burton has retained a perverse allure. Last weekend, as Planet of the Apes kicked off its run in the States, the Style section of the New York Times featured a piece about hanging out with Lisa Marie, Burton's model-turned-actress fiancée of long standing. The centrepiece was Lisa Marie's walk down Broadway in a blouse that barely covered her bottom.

And rather than follow Sleepy Hollow with a personal project like ET, Burton has come forth with another genre film - a remake, or, as he insists, a "reimagining" of a movie that became a genre unto itself.

The original Planet of the Apes took the 1963 novel by Pierre Boulle and applied its central reversal of apes acting like humans and humans acting like apes to the turmoil of America in 1967. In his book Planet of the Apes as American Myth: Race, Politics, and Popular Culture, Eric Greene traces how the movie and its four sequels dramatised the convolutions of American attitudes toward the civil-rights movement and Vietnam, imperialism and student revolt. Burton's movie is a remake, but of all five movies. And it draws on other classic pictures, too, including Spartacus and The Wizard of Oz, as well as Boulle's original novel - particularly in the notion of an amorous attraction between an astronaut hero and a chimpanzee.

The best that can be said is that it's still a Burton movie, with a singular combination of motley humour and visual majesty. Working from a script with a trio of authors (William Broyles Jr, who wrote Cast Away, and Mark Rosenthal and Lawrence Konner, of, among other things, Mighty Joe Young), Burton continues to jam together jarring story points and clashing moods, and to tell his story from a point of view alternating between earnestness and camp.

Like other Burton productions, the movie resembles a Christmas tree drooping with an overload of ornaments. Yet some of those ornaments unfold and reveal secret treasures, startling even the actors. Take Tim Roth, who plays the evil chimp General Thade in a perpetual snarl. After a climactic bout with Mark Wahlberg's stolid American astronaut, Leo Davidson, Burton directed him to retreat into a crouch under a countertop in a fossilised American spaceship. Roth told me he had no idea why Burton told him to move there. Only afterwards, thinking about it, did the actor realise that a position of defeat completed the arc of his character and the political agenda of the movie.

To Roth, Thade views humans "a bit like Cecil Rhodes saw Africans", as aliens to be crushed to his will. What happens to Thade at Leo Davidson's hands is a piece of doggerel poetic justice. "I didn't know why he was directing me to go there," says Roth, "and I don't know if that is why. But I loved the motion of it." The movie's shock ending, however, makes you wonder whether film-makers afraid of goosing the audience with a simple "Gotcha!" are like skaters determined to increase the number of twists and turns from triples to quadruples. It's a stunt, and by giving in to it Burton devalues the good work that he's done with Thade.

The pluses and the minuses of Burton's work stem from the same source: his determination not to over-think any aspect of his pictures. This is something he articulated only haltingly at the time of Batman. When asked why he seemed to switch tones in a cavalier manner, he said: "I always have a very subconscious approach. I prefer that, because when things work, they sort of surprise me."

For Planet of the Apes, he's going on the offensive: "I love this material because it's a kind of 'fuck you' to literal-minded people. It makes you use both sides of your brain when literal-minded people don't want to - they want you to put things in categories for them." His bold pronouncements are a way of marking his back yard. Inside its borders he aims to be as spontaneous as ever, as reliant on luck and accident, and as dismissive of conventional artistic unity.

When Planet of the Apes opened in America with a record-breaking three-day take of nearly $70m, Fox executives chalked it up to three reasons: the pull of the original property, the escalating star power of Wahlberg, and the out-there reputation of Burton. And Burton is certainly responsible for the wildly variable reviews. Critics hailed it for being funny and imaginative or damned it for being unfunny and obvious. They called it overly clear or inscrutable. They interpreted it as being as political as the first one or not political enough.

Burton has built that confusion into the movie itself. It's related to his own elusive directorial attitude. You can see how one school of critics can take dialogue about man's inhumanity toward apes and simians' unsimianity toward humans as bald statements of morality. ("Next you'll tell us these beasts have souls." "Of course they do.") But they're invariably stated with such vaudevillian theatricality that they register as send-ups.

Doubtless the chaos underlying the project freed Burton to work his wayward will on it. The script went through several incarnations by assorted writers under the auspices of several different directors (Oliver Stone, James Cameron, Philip Noyce, Chris Columbus) until Broyles came up with the version that snagged Burton's interest. Oddly enough, both Broyles and Adam Rifkin, who wrote the first revisionist "Apes" script way back in 1988, came up with an apes-as-Romans, human-as-slaves motif. Burton hired Rosenthal and Konner for rewrites that continued even after shooting began. And if fresh pages showed up on the set and the ending was jigged and rejigged, that's nothing new, though he did go close to the wire: he had his first exhibitors' screening just eight days before the US theatrical premiere. ("The first time they showed me the poster and on the bottom it said: 'This film has not yet been rated,'" Burton says. "I said why not be accurate and say 'This film has not yet been shot'?")

Part of the new-look Tim Burton is to the good. I was growing weary of the rehashed tale of the disaffected, arty adolescent from bland suburban Burbank, growing up distant from his parents and finding solace in the Roger Corman-Vincent Price adaptations of Edgar Allan Poe. I was willing to take it as the backdrop for his short, black-comic masterpiece Frankenweenie (1984), about a boy named Victor Frankenstein who brings his dead bull terrier back to life. But it wasn't as if Burton went east and attended Juilliard. He went to California Institute of the Arts in Valencia, a Disney-founded school that's been a spawning-ground for the company's animators as well as those who break away, like Burton and John Lasseter, the wizard behind Toy Story.

Anyway, when I suggest that teen suburbanites are exactly the ones who can lose themselves completely in the creation of fantasy locations like Gotham City or Sleepy Hollow or the Planet of the Apes, Burton quickly agrees. "When people are deprived of a sense, their other senses get heightened," he says. "If you're culturally devoid of something - of weather, of artistry, of interesting architecture, all the way down the line to culture itself - you're either forced to give in and get that car dealership, or you manufacture those things for yourself. The pain you go through, I also recognise, is the thing that makes you.

"And more perversion and subversion goes on in suburbia than anywhere else. There are worlds within worlds. You look at these weird televangelists and you see they're filling theatres with thousands and thousands of people, and they're kind of entertaining, but it's like - Whoah! These are intense worlds. Whenever I'm in a hotel, I like to go into a ballroom where there is a group of people that for one reason or another has gathered. And it's always weird, isn't it? This convention or that convention. The energy of the room is always amazing."

When describing the special energy he found in Planet of the Apes, Burton brings up one of his favourite precedents: "Before theatre, before people wrote things, they gathered around the campfire and asked, 'What is this story about Lizard Girl?' Do you know what I mean?" The Lizard Girl and Planet of the Apes appeal to the pure fable-maker in Burton, the fellow who wants to create images that are ultimately indefinable and irreducible. "In the reversal that is dead centre here," he says, "You're watching apes, but they're like humans, and you never quite know where you stand in relation to that. I'd love for a literal-minded person to look at one of the apes in this movie and give me the lowdown on him, or her. Just when you think you're going somewhere, something else happens. I love that. What this movie should do is put new images to unanswerable questions - the ones we all love to talk about and none of us have the answers to. Darwin's theory, religious theories; are we evolving or devolving?"

Unlike the original book and movie, the apes no longer live in a stratified, ordered society. There's still a stalwart and adventurous female chimpanzee, this time named Ari (Helena Bonham Carter), who immediately sees that Wahlberg's Leo is a strangely compelling sort of human. But the evil Thade is a chimpanzee, too, and both Thade's and Ari's champions are samurai silverback gorillas.

"Here's the thing," Burton says. "We didn't want to do a remake. Because the original is a classic, but beyond being a classic, it is a 'classic of its time'. The fact is, you look back at the late 60s, you can rattle off what the issues of the day were in a second. Even for me at the time, I remember the issues were very clear-cut. But nowadays... I like to do this experiment. What are the three main issues of today? You get three different answers. What is happening is that we're getting more fragmented.

"Globalisation, mobilisation, too much information - these are supposed to be good things, but I wonder if it's undermining our sense of where are we going and who we are. It's so fragmented, it's hard to tell. So in my Planet of the Apes, I wanted to represent that fragmentation. The first movie had that simple metaphor of the apes acting just like humans and the humans acting just like animals. Here we're coming into their culture at a different time, and it's more like now. Factions are moving off in all directions. You've got some apes that are turning more human; then you've got your ape purists. And the self-esteem has not all been beaten out of the humans. It's all a little greyer. The people who said you shouldn't remake that first movie are right: you can't recreate the same issues for this time. You can't recreate Charlton Heston!"

At the time of Batman, Burton downplayed the notion of doing a sequel, then came back to the franchise for Batman Returns. Planet of the Apes, though, seems to beg for a sequel because it raises a multitude of unanswered questions. How did its humans learn to talk? Is the ape planet really Earth this time or not? If not, why are the apes and humans on it speaking English? Do they all stem from the lab animals and astronauts on Leo's spaceship?

"I don't think of sequels per se," Burton says, "but this is the kind of material that circles around on itself. That's what I think people should get from the ending. What's tied into the mythology of the Planet of the Apes movies is this unsettling quality - and that's not just from thinking you know where you are and not knowing, but also from finding out that what goes around comes around. You don't ever form a complete circle, but you get this circular structure. Even though I had to build it with snippets and clues, I did think about this film in a way I didn't think about other movies - about the Big Picture, the circular motion. And maybe 50%, maybe 90% of that isn't in the movie, but it is definitely underlying the whole thing.

"I'm not an intellectual, really; I respond to things emotionally. Still, I tried to step back and analyse Planet of the Apes. I started to see an image of the structure: that uncertain, turning-around kind of thing. And that's the peculiar beauty of it."

It's a beauty that has little to do with the arid topography of the original. "I'll tell you where this stemmed from," Burton says. "From the beginning, we decided we wanted to weave more ape mannerisms into it, both how they move and react and how they think. Not that we wanted to make them ape apes, but we had to locate those areas where they connect to the human. With a lot of the actors, I talked about there being some things that apes do that are recognisable as human, and some things that are just ape; sometimes we tried to move on where they were connected, but when we want to go ape, we 'go ape' - and there's a shock. All of this takes on a life of its own.

"There were a lot of different inspirations. When we were trying to figure out battle styles, we realised - you know what? The way apes really move, they move like samurais in samurai movies. They've got this strength, and this quick and elegant but also sort of spastic macho kind of movement."

All this objective talk about a project feels like something novel for Burton, a director who told me 12 years ago that "when you're making a movie, it's a very interiorised world". Maybe he's become, in his own idiosyncratic way, a professional. At any rate, the making of Planet of the Apes does correspond to a lot of his ongoing obsessions, including his belief that masks can release personality rather than hide it. "When you cover up," he says, "You can let something else weird leak through. It goes back to the original Greek theatre: it's all masks and that's great."

But in some ways he hasn't changed at all. In 1989, he told me, "When you're making a movie, there's just this gloom that hangs around you." Even with the success of Planet of the Apes virtually assured (the exhibitors went nuts for it), Burton still spoke of torture and despair in the movie-making process. When I asked him why Roth said his directorial method was based on "mischief", Burton responded: "Danny Elfman, the composer, tells me the only time he thinks I'm happy is when I'm on the scoring stage and I see the pressure's on him and it's a little off me. But it's not meant as a mean thing, because I love him and I love my actors - they're the ones doing it and they had the hardest job in the movie. With all that crap on, they can't hear each other, can't see each other half the time. I guess I feel so tortured most of the time, when I see someone else feeling tortured I get a little perverse glee out of it."

Burton - the complete works

Pee-wee's Big Adventure
1985 Big-screen version of surreal kids TV show.

Beetlejuice 1988
Charming skewed cartoonish comedy from the 30-year-old wonderboy that did wonders on a low budget. Michael Keaton was never more memorable than as the wild-haired, gravel-voiced underworld exorcist. Dead funny.

Batman 1989
The full Burton imagination was unleashed for the first time in a dark and disturbing take on the Caped Crusader. Keaton was the lead but Nicholson stole the show.

Edward Scissorhands
1990 Marvellous and mysterious fantasy that collided the Gothic of Burton's imagination with the suburbs of his childhood. Made an item of Johnny Depp and Winona Ryder and gave a role to Burton's hero, Vincent Price, as the inventor of Depp's lost boy with talons for fingers. As culty as they come.

Batman Returns 1992
A classy sequel, in many ways more memorable than the first, with Michelle Pfeiffer's Catwoman bringing a more human dimension to a series that went rapidly downhill post-Burton.

Ed Wood 1994
Affectionate black-and-white biography of the cheerful, persistent, cross-dressing and entirely talentless 50s director of no-budget pics and weirdo casts.

Mars Attacks! 1996
A financial disaster (cost $70m, US take $37m). Its malevolent aliens lost out to the same summer's Independence Day (US $307m).

Sleepy Hollow 1999
Like a cross between a Hammer horror (with Christopher Lee) and Monty Python's Black Knight sketch but gorgeous to look at, even by Burton standards.

Rob Mackie

* Planet of the Apes is released on August 17
Topics

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Beret-wearing Hollywood auteur Tim Burton is as famous for his brave flops as his hits. But his latest, Planet of the Apes, is already breaking box-office records. He tells the distinguished film critic Michael Sragow how he reinvented a cult classic

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reference:  (Sanders, 2009)

"Burton's 'heroes' follow in a long line of outsiders" This quote shows that Burton has a long list of weirs and wacky characters that are outside of the box and can't be put back in. In every film he creates he has to have at least one abnormality, some of these characters are listed below in the image from a book.

They mention his stop motion animation which he used even in BeetleJuice as well as his the films that were soul based around his stop motion characters such as 'The Corpse Bride'.

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reference: (Langford, 2005)
"Establishing such individualising traits makes a claim for that director's creative 'ownership' of the films he has directed: the director earns a status as creative originator - an auteur"

This explains an auteur in detail. they explain what it means to be an auteur and how you have to use a new sense of creativity that one has never been seen before.

I can use this in my essay to explain how Burton has done that and why he is an auteur.