Tim Burton Collective

by admin on January 11, 2018

1.) Big Fish

This film has an emotionally nostalgic and interesting story about life, legacy, and the constant need to know where you come from before you know where you’re going. Being one of Burton’s most spectacular casts, which uniquely includes very few of his repeat stars, Big Fish covers over two overlapping narratives that follow Ed Bloom, a man of many quotes and earthly stories. Albert Finney stars as Ed in his old age, a man who’s on his deathbed and also whose stories of splendor have become the only part of happiness between him and his son, played by Billy Crudup, who feels as though he’s never really known his father- he’s honestly only ever known him for his inspiring stories from his life.

2.) Sweeney Todd

Love, revenge, insanity and just so much blood — what could be more essential than Tim Burton directing the adaptation of Sweeney Todd, the Victorian story of an unfairly trapped barber whose weapon of choice is his razor when getting revenge? On the other hand, once gossip got out that Burton was sourcing Stephen Sondheim’s Sweeney Todd musical for inspiration, critiques immediately laughed at the concept of Johnny Depp, Helena Bonham Carter, Sacha Baron Cohen, and Alan Rickman singing the tunes of a Broadway masterpiece — specifically Depp, whose musical abilities had always been really with the guitar. While  Burton’s Sweeney might not have had the most stage-worthy singing, it was more than made up for everything else.

 3.) Beetlejuice

This film is truly a breakthrough classic, and a crucial and blockbuster hit for Burton and his future colleagues, Michael Keaton and Winona Ryder. Beetlejuice actually started as a much darker drama about a deceased couple that was just married. However, Burton rewrote the whole entire story into a more kooky afterlife slapstick absurdity, helping to construct his signature style. Keaton’s scene-stealing title character only uses up less than 20 minutes of total screen time.

4.) Edward Scissorhands

Referred to by Burton himself as being the epitome his most autobiographical work, Edward Scissorhands has both claimed cult status among its gigantic fanbase and has lasted through the years for new generations to explore and love as well. This film is decorated with practical and ridiculous makeup effects and costume designs in addition to fantastic performances by its actors, especially the dreamboat Johnny Depp. And finally and most importantly, Edward Scissorhands is known as the original embodiment of a Burton film and will probably be the one movie to which his films are compared to the rest of his career.

5.) Nightmare Before Christmas

Everyone knows the stories, and everyone is familiar with the rhymes too. Every time you watch this movie, since October of 1993, you are always hoping you’ll have all 66 minutes of it memorized. The story features the misadventures of Jack Skellington, Halloweentown’s well-known pumpkin king, who is bored with the same old yearly routine of scaring people in the “real world.” When Jack stumbles upon Christmastown by accident, he gets a new perspective of life — he plans to take Christmas under his control by kidnapping Santa Claus and claiming the throne of Christmas. However, Jack soon finds out that even the best-laid plans of mice and skeleton men can go pretty, pretty horribly..

Watch the video below to learn about the Tim Burton theory!

By Rondi Adamson

From The Ottawa Citizen, 07.27.2001

The great writer Isaac Bashevis Singer once told talk-show host Dick Cavett that he would not kill even a mosquito. “Are you saying,” asked the incredulous Cavett, “that you think the life of a mosquito has the same worth as the life of a man?” Singer replied, “I have seen no evidence to the contrary.”

Nor have I.

Earlier this month, a boy was attacked by a shark off the coast of Florida — while he was swimming in the shark’s habitat — and had his arm bitten off. I hope the boy continues his recovery, but I was dismayed when the shark was taken out of the water and shot, in order to get the boy’s arm back, and bystanders applauded.

How would humans feel if every animal we killed/maimed/ mutilated came chasing after us to get back their missing body parts — often their skin and coats? And what if they brought along a gaggle of their own kind to cheer them on? We would be outraged, because, you know, they’re just animals and who, exactly, do they think they are? We can do as we please to them. We can walk into their ever-dwindling territories and if one of them — bear, cougar, shark — should dare object, he had better watch out.

On Monday, I saw an advance screening of Tim Burton’s remake of Planet of the Apes. The 1968 original, directed by Franklin J. Shaffner, was a powerful indictment against the way people treat animals. From the harrowing sequence in which Charlton Heston and his fellow astronauts are first hunted down by the apes, to the way the humans are treated like criminals — or used for scientific research — the message is clear. We are barbaric in our disregard for the feelings of other living creatures, creatures that experience fear and pain and love just as we do. If the tables were turned, we would be plenty unhappy.

Ultimately, Heston discovers they are not on an alien planet, but back on Earth. Man destroyed the world he knew, and brought about the simian world in which he now finds himself trapped. The new Planet of the Apes offers criticism of man’s fundamental inhumanity, but provides humans a far more comforting explanation for the existence of an ape-world.

However, one scene stands out. An assortment of chimps, orangs and gorillas is seated around a table, enjoying dinner as human servants mill about. An enlightened chimp (played by Helena Bonham Carter) says she believes humans have souls, to the shocked gasps of those around her.

Sound familiar? Those of us with Christian friends know full well the arrogant attitudes of some members of that society. Only humans have souls, and an embryo in a petri dish is more important than a living, breathing animal already roaming the planet. I wonder what Jesus would say about that? I wonder what he would think about six billion of us taking more and more habitat away from animals, and then being astonished when the animals occasionally make a foray onto our turf. Ottawa police recently shot and killed a moose in the city. Though the moose apparently took a nap, authorities said they couldn’t get close enough to it to use a tranquilizer gun, so the cops ended up shooting it dead. Hey, why make any special effort? It’s an animal.

We humans are insensitive to animals’ welfare or comfort, unless somehow it affects us. We eat them, wear them, use them for research and entertainment, hunt them for sport and hang parts of them on our walls — without any of it being necessary.

We are free to inflict torture on many of them without fear of legal reprisal. Things are changing in that area, but far too slowly. A man in California was recently sentenced to three years in prison for killing a dog, a ridiculously short sentence, and yet this was nothing short of a breakthrough. In Canada, Bill C-17, which would have been a step forward towards criminalizing animal abuse, died on the table last year. Efforts are being made to ensure that its successor, Bill C-15, is more successful in passing through Parliament. I’m not holding my breath. There is, I fear, no end to our lack of compassion.

And why not? Animals don’t vote, they have no money, and — don’t forget — they have no souls. I am not suggesting that we should give animals free reign. I am simply suggesting that we shouldn’t have it either, and that we ought to seriously rethink how we treat living beings who don’t happen to be human. Gandhi made the high and mighty wait to speak with him while he fed goats and tended to other animals. Like Singer, he saw no difference in their relative worth.

I’m afraid I sometimes do, and it’s usually people who come up short. Last week, out for dinner with a friend, I looked around the restaurant and saw a lot of slobbering, overweight jaws wolfing down big slabs of dead animals and all I could think was, “Damn you all to hell!”

By Richard Alleva

From Commonweal, vol 121 n 21, 12.02.1994

America, being the Emersonian land of self-reliance and self-invention, is also a nurturer of spectacular cranks. Think of Brook Farm and Oneida, Bronson Alcott and Aimee Semple McPherson, Christian Science and Scientology. And cranks have always been charming fixtures in the supporting casts of American movies, especially comedies. But, in the last two decades, as American films have become more freewheeling and kooky, cranks have often been the protagonists of Hollywood scripts rather than subordinate characters. And their crankishness often turns out to be justified. What is Warren Beatty as Bugsy but a visionary among thugs, and isn’t the glorified Jim Garrison of J.F.K. a would-be savior of his country?

Now, two minor, eccentric movies give us two more real-life cranks as their heroes.

Ed Wood is the story of Hollywood’s worst director, the man who gave us the sci-fi dud of duds, Plan Nine from Outer Space and the transvestite atrocity, Glen or Glenda? , ineptitudes so klutzily personal that their maker has become a pillar in the pantheon of camp. Tim Burton’s film treats Wood as a sweet simpleton who cannot see his own transvestism as weird or his own lack of talent as anything other than originality. As portrayed in this film, Wood is the patron saint of all who choose to do their “own thing” in the teeth of convention, tradition, or accepted good taste. An Emersonian hero of B flicks.

Ed Wood displays the three most salient qualities of Tim Burton’s previous work (the Batman movies, Beetlejuice, Edward Scissorhands): his visual skill; his unshakably sweet nature; and his fundamental disdain for, or indifference to, truly dramatic storytelling.

First, Burton’s skill. Ed Wood had no real visual flair, but he revered the great stylist Orson Welles for his stubborn individualism in the face of studio pressure. Accordingly, Burton and his cinematographer have created a black-and-white look that miraculously echoes both the underlit, cheesy appearance of Wood’s output and the glorious expressionism of Citizen Kane. Somehow, Burton keeps the two styles from colliding, partly by never allowing either to dominate for too long a time. And, for Ed Wood’s big moments, the Wellesian texture rightly prevails. For instance, when Ed runs down the aisle of the theater that’s about to premier his latest bomb, the choreography mimics Kane’s run into his newspaper office upon his return from Europe. But whereas Kane is hailed by his adoring staff, Ed’s arrival is booed and hissed by a mob of juvenile delinquents. The glory of the A’s has become the humiliation of the B’s.

Burton’s sweetness is evident in his depiction of the bond between Wood and Bela Lugosi, dope-addicted and semi-crazy in the last years of his life. It’s a loving, mutually parasitic relationship in which the old has-been depends on the young producer for roles, income, and a sympathetic ear, while Wood needs Lugosi’s name on his credits to entice investors, but shows real compassion for the fallen star. Delivering the only performance of distinction in this movie, Martin Landau endows Lugosi with ruined theatrical magnificence, Central European gemutlichkeit, and doped-up, boozed-out misery. Because of Landau’s performance, the several close-ups of the hypodermic tracks on Lugosi’s arms aren’t merely disgusting but also redolent of pitiable mortality.

But now the down side. Ed Wood, for all its charm, is ample proof that Burton can’t shape a story to any real dramatic purpose, isn’t interested in character development, and can’t bring his narrative to a true climax. Ed has a few moments of doubt about his abilities after his first fiasco, dismisses them, doubts himself again after the next bomb, revives, and so it goes. The structure of this movie is a seesaw, not a mountain climb. Our hero’s meeting with Orson Welles in which the great man tells Wood to follow his dream against all odds, is meant to be the story’s dramatic peak but only reinforces our perception of Ed as a freak of fatuousness.

Locked into this fatuousness is Johnny Depp, a game actor. He has been allowed (or forced?) by his director to wear an idiotic rictus of a smile from first shot to final credits. This smile embalms Depp’s performance.

Jonathan Swift’s genius for satire was fueled by his disgust for humanity, and that disgust had one source in his revulsion from, and fascination with, bodily functions. Similar revulsion and fascination permeate The Road to Wellville, but certainly haven’t resulted in a satire of Swiftian brilliance.

Set at the nineteenth-century Battle Creek health spa of the vegetarian crusader and antisex fanatic, Dr. John Kellogg, this T. Coraghessan Boyle story is composed of three plot strands: the marital woes of Bridget Fonda and Matthew Broderick, which Fonda believes will be cured by Kellogg’s regimen; a con man’s plot to use Kellogg’s recipe for corn flakes to make a rival product; and the enmity between the doctor (Anthony Hopkins) and his adopted son (Dana Carvey). I don’t know what Boyle made of these situations in his novel, but they go absolutely nowhere in this Alan Parker adaptation. The most interesting one, the Hopkins-Carvey conflict, is resolved by a cuddle and kiss. (This, after Kellogg, Jr., blows his foster father’s establishment to kingdom come!)

It’s easy to see the satirical point of The Road to Wellville. It’s the same point made nonsatirically by Oliver Sacks in his chapter on the drug L-DOPA in his book, “Awakenings”:

. . . the delusions of vitalism or materialism, the notion that “health,” “well-being,” “happiness,” etc., can be reduced to certain “factors” or “elements” — principles, fluids, humors, commodities — things which can be measured and weighed, bought and sold. . . The fraudulent reduction comes from alchemists, witch-doctors, and their modern equivalents, and from patients who long at all costs to be well.

Thus, in this movie, Dr. Kellogg: “The bowels are our passage to health!” But, once this point is made in the first fifteen minutes, Alan Parker can’t develop it, only elaborate and overelaborate on it. All story developments, most characterizations, all social observation and historical insight are overwhelmed by Parker’s obsessive need to gross out the audience. Viewers are treated to scenes of vomiting, enema insertion, clitoral massage, farting, masturbation (female variety) on a bicycle, masturbation (male variety) within a kind of electronic jock strap, and much examination of feces. I know that Alan Parker began his career in the late sixties and has made at least a dozen movies (three of them — Fame, Shoot the Moon, and The Commitments — excellent). But his latest film prompts just one question: Is Alan Parker fourteen years old?

Anthony Hopkins emerges with credit, not his usual glory. His characterization is a triumph of physical transformation: a Bugs Bunny grin, a Teddy Roosevelt stance, a voice trapped and roaring in the adenoid — you’ve never seen this Anthony Hopkins before. But, I’m afraid, once the lights come up and the final credits roll, you don’t continue seeing him in your mind’s eye. It’s an artfully crafted performance but lacks resonance.

To be sure, no actor can completely survive a director who has lost all perspective on his own material. The tooth-sucking self-satisfaction that Anthony Hopkins quite rightly projects as Kellogg’s is also, I’m afraid, the most salient quality of this movie. While making a film about a supreme crank, Alan Parker apparently turned into one

By John Anderson

From Newsday (New York, NY), 07.27.2001

(2 STARS) PLANET OF THE APES. (PG-13) U.S. Air Force pilot, sucked up by a celestial wormhole, is spit out on a planet ruled by fascist primates. Tim Roth dominates as the big bad ape, the set design is inspired, but you might say the human element is lacking. And that ending? Possibly written by a chimp. With Mark Wahlberg, Helena Bonham Carter, Michael Clarke Duncan, Paul Giamatti, Estella Warren, Charlton Heston. Screenplay by William Broyles Jr., Lawrence Konner, Mark Rosenthal, based on the novel “Monkey Planet” by Pierre Boulle. Directed by Tim Burton. 1:40 (violence). At area theaters.

SLINKING, SNARLING AND sniffing his enemies with murderous intent, Tim Roth’s uber-primate General Thade gives the new and not quite improved “Planet of the Apes” nearly the juice it needs to save itself, if not the entire movie summer. But in trying to reverse the plotline of the original five films, director Tim Burton has also reversed their attitude, too: Instead of clumsily executed, overly serious sci-fi, we now get something glitteringly facile, and cripplingly glib.

Flipping the apes-as-slaves motif of “Conquest of” and “Battle for the Planet of the Apes,” Burton’s film proposes an ape-run planet in which humans are not just enslaved but, in Thade’s view, dangerous enough to warrant total extinction. Into this totalitarian nightmare rockets Air Force pilot Leo Davidson (Mark Wahlberg), refugee from the space station Oberon, who valiantly follows one of his ship’s worker chimps through an electro-magnetic time warp and finds himself hip-deep in monkeys and metaphor.

Burton’s film, marked by the visual grandeur that has always been his calling card, is saddled with a script by William Broyles Jr., Lawrence Konner and Mark Rosenthal that goes for the gag every time it can – often feebly, sometimes desperately. This is done largely, but not always, by quoting liberally from the celebrated 1968 ancestor of the entire cult, the film in which Charlton Heston – who appears here to deliver an ironic, albeit self-serving anti-gun message – found his destiny in the Forbidden Zone.

Sometimes it works. Sometimes it doesn’t. “Damn them all to Hell!!!” Heston bellows, as Thade’s ailing ape father, who knows the legacy of humankind. “Take your stinking hands off me, you damned dirty human!!” a soldier ape tells a beaten Leo, the latter struggling to his feet. “Can’t we all just get along?” asks the sniveling Limbo (Paul Giamatti), the comical slave trader whose Rodney King line resurrects, with little apparent thought, the race-relations subtext of the old “Apes” series.

Roth aside, the cast is a handicap: Wahlberg can’t carry a movie like this; the ubiquitous Estella Warren, playing a human, is singularly unconvincing. But what makes Burton’s ape world more compelling than the original is that the gap between primate and man is so much smaller than it was back when Heston crash-landed. His character, Taylor, found an ape civilization advanced to about the point of the early Renaissance; had Galileo been an advocate of human rights – humans being mute and mangy – he would have been excommunicated by the movie’s fundamentalist orangutans/guardians of primate culture.

In the new film, the apes are pre-Hastings, post-Athens, a little to the right of the Caesars’ Rome. Apt, given the movie Burton is really remaking.

It may simply be that Stanley Kubrick’s presence is as palpable this summer as it has been in 20 years, but Burton’s “Apes” isn’t just a classic western (Leo drops in, fights evil, rides on). It’s also “Spartacus.” Thade, like Laurence Olivier’s Crassus, uses the slave revolt instigated by Leo to consolidate political power. Leo, reluctant hero, is able to organize the human swarm into a fighting force willing to confront the overwhelming power of the empire’s “legions” and die for freedom. Ari (Helena Bonham Carter), child of a senator and with a pretty obvious cross-species attraction for Leo, sides with the enemies of her race (see Jean Simmons). There are scenes in obvious homage to Kubrick’s gladiator movie, but to explain them further would give away the ending upon which the enjoyment of this “Apes” no doubt depends.

And yes, there is a “surprise ending.” The guess is here that knowing laughs will anticipate that final befuddling shot, with irritation to follow: While most of this “Planet of the Apes” is built on a fairly solid, inventive narrative structure, the twist Burton leaves us with is just a joke – something in keeping with the rest of his film, but somewhat unworthy of the decades-long devotion on which he and Fox are hoping to cash in.

By Nigel Andrews

From Financial Times (London), 02.01.1992

The New Man, as we all know, is gentle, caring and Politically Correct. He helps with the washing up and changes baby’s nappies. He makes sure the goldfish has fresh water, the dog has a good book and the cat is on a high-fibre vegetarian diet. He croons his wife to sleep and then spends all night studying Dr Spock.

We have to ask at this point: Where is the New Man in modern cinema? The film heroes on video this month include Arnold Schwarzenegger stomping around futuristic Los Angeles smashing everything and everyone in sight in Terminator 2 (Guild); Bruce Willis brawling and ladykilling across New York and Europe in Hudson Hawk (20:20); a whole lot of gun-toting blacks blasting us out of our sofas in New Jack City (Warner); and Gerard Depardieu battering Isabelle Huppert into romantic submission in the French film Loulou (Artificial Eye).

Popular ideology likes the New Man. Popular entertainment loathes him. And video culture may be part of the reason. With its stress on short-attention-span storytelling, where every scene must pack a punch to keep the home viewer’s finger off the fast-forward button and his mind off the rival TV channels, video demands high-definition heroes with no-nonsense virility.

The world sometimes makes penance for this by throwing charity money at a film like Dances With Wolves (Guild). But there is a deep and essential Jekyll-and-Hyde duality in the simultaneous rise of the caring male in modern sociological fashion and the Cro-Magnon super-hero in modern cinematic fashion.

Indeed in today’s movies the sensitive male must be surreal to be believed. He must be the crazed, poetic, topiarising youth created by a mad scientist in Edward Scissorhands (Fox), where he is played by Johnny Depp in all-Gothic leather as if he were Harpo Marx mugged by Kenneth Anger. Tim Burton’s fantasia in small-town America comes to us from the same writer-director who gave us Batman (Warners). In this, you recall, the hero is a masked avenger by night (all-male superhero) and a home-loving fellow by day (New Man), played by a Michael Keaton best-known previously for man-with-apron roles like Mr Mom.

In Edward Scissorhands the New Man is a gentle, adorable freak. In period guise he is much the same in Peter Medak’s film of the Craig-Bentley case Let Him Have It (1st Independent), where Bentley is a sweetnatured fellow of deprived IQ driven towards violence by his evil twin Craig. Medak builds a stylish, moody picture of 1950s Britain in this true-life tale of travestied justice–Bentley was hanged for a policeman’s murder he neither committed nor probably abetted–and he sharpens without caricaturing the contrast between the gangling, slow-witted hero and his pintsize Mephistopheles pal.

As the sum of these films shows, the cinema has a wonderful counterbalancing instinct. Every ideological posture that a new age brings provokes an equal and opposite counter-posture. For every gentle chap brought shyly towards the centre of action from screen left, his opposite is sent stomping in from screen right.

Which brings us back to the Stone Age superheroes we started with. I have tried to dislike Terminator 2, with its preposterous superhunk throwing his weight around post-nuclear L.A. But dear me, I would rather have Arnold Schwarzenegger in this mad, mythopoeic, metamorphic form than Kevin Costner tending the winsome Indians in Dances With Revisionism.

I cannot so keenly recommend Hudson Hawk or New Jack City: sometimes thick-eared machismo is just thick-eared machismo. But you should try the European thinking man’s answer to Mr Schwarzenegger, namely Monsieur Depardieu. In Maurice Pialat’s Loulou our Gerard is not so much a New Man, more an ageing hippie driven by Bachanialian demons. He sweeps a stunned-looking Isabelle Huppert off her feet, pushes aside her maturer boyfriend (Guy Marchand) and generally behaves as if he would not recognise Political Correctness between the sexes if it fell down from the sky and beaned him.

From The Los Angeles Times, 03.06.1992, Home Edition

Playing with Blame It on the Bellboy only at the El Capitan on Hollywood Boulevard is Tim Burton’s 29-minute Frankenweenie (1984), which is such an inspired, deft pleasure that it is almost worth the price of admission–almost because of today’s steep ticket prices and because Bellboy is not that good.

Shot in a luminous black-and-white, Frankenweenie anticipates subsequent Burton features–Beetlejuice and Edward Scissorhands in particular–in its love of the poignancy of old horror movies. Inspired by a school experiment on a frog, a small boy (Barret Oliver) turns the attic of his family’s home into a lab rigged up with household electrical appliances with which he intends to bring his beloved but recently deceased dog Sparky back to life. (It’s not for nothing that his family’s name is Frankenstein.)

Frankenweenie, written by Lenny Ripps from an idea by Burton, is a subtle parable on the fear of the unknown. It has terrific style, an appropriately thunderous score (by Michael Convertino and David Newman) and boasts Shelley Duvall and Daniel Stern as the boy’s initially perplexed parents.

From The Toronto Sun, 10.28.2000

Twentieth Century Fox has taken the movie world by surprise by being the first to nail down release dates for their biggest films during the competitive summer 2001 season, Variety reports.

Prime among them is Sleepy Hollow director Tim Burton’s retelling of The Planet Of The Apes, which has been pushed back to July 27 from an original release date of July 4, Variety said.

The film stars Mark Wahlberg, Tim Roth and Helena Bonham Carter in a reinterpretation of the sci-fi original, which starred Charlton Heston as an astronaut who crash-lands on a world ruled by talking apes.

Although most of the studios won’t be locking in their big summer projects for some time, Fox has already staked its claim to the prime slots.

From USA Today, 11.14.2000

In Hollywood, a well-known name is power. Trade publication The Hollywood Reporter today ranks more than 800 film directors based on bankability — the ability to draw financial backing (and moviegoers) based on the director’s name alone.

The top 10:

1 Steven Spielberg (Jurassic Park, Saving Private Ryan, E.T., Raiders of the Lost Ark)

2 James Cameron (Titanic, Terminator)

3 George Lucas (Star Wars, American Graffiti)

4 Ron Howard (Apollo 13, How the Grinch Stole Christmas)

5 Tim Burton (Batman, Edward Scissorhands)

6 Martin Scorsese (Raging Bull, GoodFellas)

7 John Woo (Face/Off, Mission: Impossible 2)

8 Ridley Scott (Blade Runner, Gladiator)

9 Robert Zemeckis (Back to the Future, Forrest Gump)

10 Michael Bay (The Rock, Armageddon)

From The Toronto Star, 10.02.1988, Sunday Second Edition

The blockbuster horror comedy Beetlejuice hits video this month, just in time for Halloween. We asked Catherine O’Hara, the SCTV star who plays its sort-of villain, Delia Deetz, to take us behind the scenes.

What was your first reaction to this very strange script?

“When I first read it, I didn’t know what the heck it meant. But it was intriguing. I pictured Beetlejuice being played by this lecherous old creep, and it scared me. But then they told me Michael (Keaton) was going to play it, and that changed it completely for me. It turned into what it is, as opposed to what I thought it was. My thinking was probably a little too linear.”

What about Delia? Did you base her on anyone real?

“Basically, I just thought of myself on my worst day. Initially I thought she was going to be this one-dimensional witch. I mean, she is the villain and everything, but instead of making her just mean, which is how I first read it, she just became someone that gets in everybody’s way because she’s so insecurely self-obsessed.”

Most people who’ve seen the movie say the “Day-O” dinner party is their favorite scene.

“That scene’s had such incredible response. I remember us all sitting around after the preview, trying to figure out why it works so well. But really, none of us had a clue.

“Filming it was interesting–we made each other laugh a lot. We had to shoot it in sequence because of the lip-synch, and there were a lot of reshoots for close-ups and angles, so we must have done it about a hundred times. The sight of Dick Cavett dancing around with his bum in the air . . .”

This had to be a pretty creepy set. Ever get scared?

“The worst was getting French-kissed by a snake–a fake snake. But the scene was cut, so I guess it didn’t work. There was one scene where they wound eight feet of snake body around my legs, and then pulled, so that when they ran it backwards, it looked like it was attacking me. Except the prop guy pulled too hard and I shot six feet into the air. I didn’t feel hurt, but I looked around and saw everyone looking at me as if I were dead. So I started to cry, because maybe I was dead.”

What sort of video library do you have at home?

“I’ve got The 10th Victim . . . we did it on SCTV once. It’s funny, sometimes I’ll be having a discussion about a classic movie, and suddenly realize that I’ve never seen it and that I’m actually talking about a parody we did. I’ve also got a couple of Jacques Tati films, and Dinner At Eight and Holiday Inn, and three copies of It’s A Wonderful Life. And After Hours and Heartburn, of course.

What’s coming up for you?

“I wish I knew. But I am doing a character on Marty Short’s Ed Grimley cartoon show. We all are–Joe Flaherty, Andrea Martin, Dave Thomas. And I’ve got a small part in the new Batman movie (like Beetlejuice, directed by Tim Burton and starring Michael Keaton). It’s a death scene. I get to demonstrate how The Joker is going to destroy the world. Jack Nicholson is The Joker. He and Michael will be a great team.”

By Denise Abbott

From Hollywood Reporter — International Edition, vol 361 n 49, 02.29.2000Inside production designer Rick Heinrichs’ spooky settings for Sleepy Hollow

An ominous windmill lurks in the shadows of Sleepy Hollow and eventually becomes the backdrop for the film’s climactic good vs. evil sequence in which the Headless Horseman confronts Ichabod, Katrina and Young Masbath. In a sense, the scene showcases every aspect of the film’s production design. “One of the things we were trying to do,” explains production designer Rick Heinrichs, “was inspire a sense of scary portentousness in the village. I think it’s different from Irving’s Sleepy Hollow, which is described as a dozing Dutch farm community. If our Sleepy Hollow is asleep, it’s a fitful sort of sleep, with nightmares.”While the windmill is more fantasy than reality — with its “pure Burton Batwing” sails — Heinrichs considers the image a metaphor for the town’s restless spirits. “It’s a derelict windmill until Ichabod releases the lever and the sails begin to turn. It’s as if it’s being brought back to life. There’s a ‘living dead’ vibe going on.”

Heinrichs, who has known director Tim Burton for 20 years since their days at Disney’s animation studio, had hoped to build the windmill as a single practical structure that could supply both interior and exterior settings. But safety concerns and the desire to maintain a controlled theatrical environment made Heinrichs decide on a combination of several interior and exterior sets, full-scale and miniature. He built a 60-foot-tall forced-perspective exterior (visible to highway travelers miles away), a base and rooftop set and a quarter-scale miniature. The interior of the mill, which was about 30-feet high and 25-feet wide, featured wooden gears equipped with mechanisms for grinding flour.

A wider view of the windmill was rendered on a Leavesden soundstage set with a quarter-scale windmill, complete with rotating vanes, painted sky backdrop and special-effects fire.

“It was scary for the actors who were having burning wood explode at them,” Heinrichs recalls. “There were controls in place and people standing by with hoses, of course, but there’s always a chance of something going wrong.”

For a final shot of the burning mill exploding, the quarter-scale windmill and painted backdrop were erected against the outside wall of the “flight shed,” a spacious hangar on the far side of Leavesden Studios. “The special-effects crew would set the vanes on fire and put the flames out after each take. They have a way of sealing things and applying the flammable material on top, although, after the course of several nights, it does do a number on the structure. For scheduling reasons, we shot the postexplosion first, so I was delighted that the blades fell where we wanted. Cables were used to try to make them land correctly, but it really comes down to luck.”

The flight shed interior served as the staging ground for a heart-stopping chase sequence, with Ichabod, Katrina and Young Masbath escaping the windmill conflagration in a horse-drawn coach, riding into the depths of the Western Woods with the Headless Horseman in hot pursuit. The hangar’s interior walls were knocked down to create a 450-foot run, with a 40-foot width still allowing for coach and cameras. Heinrichs tailored the sets so cinematographer Emmanuel Lubezki could shoot from above without seeing the end of the stage. “They’d start the horses at one end, and by the time they gathered full speed, they had to slow down so they wouldn’t smash into the wall. They were able to photograph only about six seconds worth of film at a time. Had we tried to do the coach chase outdoors, it could have been disastrous because of weather and the sheer size of what Lubezki would have had to light. So we just repeated the action over and over along the length of our interior forest set. After being edited, the sequence read as if they’d traveled two miles.”

The film’s strong design element necessitated that nearly everything be built from scratch. “One of the great accomplishments for us was building a functioning hydraulically powered windmill with carved wooden gears,” says Heinrichs. “Special effects worried that the teeth would grind down and break off. They wanted to use multigears running on separate motors. I thought, ‘Windmills have been used for hundreds of years; it’s got to work.’ It was magnificent to see.

“There’s a theatrical truth to the set that I know the actors really appreciated,” continues Heinrichs, who used a combination of real materials, painted backings and old-fashioned perspective techniques to create what he calls “stylized naturalism.””(Actor) Ian McDiarmid had just finished working on Phantom Menace, and he was so delighted not to be working on a blue-screen stage. There was mood, atmosphere and actual quality the actors could play off of and react to. It’s as close to old Hollywood as you can get.”