Fresh from the success of Beetlejuice Beetlejuice, Tim Burton has played down reports he is set to work with Warner Bros again on a reboot of its 1958 classic which is in development at the studio.
“I have no real projects at the moment,” the director told a conversation at the Marrakech Film Festival.
“One thing I learned very early on is that until I’m on the set doing something I don’t know if I’m doing it. I’ve had projects, I was doing a Superman once, I did another project that I worked for a year upon, and it didn’t happen. When those things happen, it’s quite traumatic, it’s quite emotional. So, I’m very protective of myself,” he said.
“In Hollywood, when you’re doing something, you may think you’re doing something, until they tell you you’re not doing something. You get quite traumatized by those situations, so I wait until I’m on the set, and then I will tell you, ‘Yes’, because I’m actually doing it. But before then, I don’t know.”
The director’s denial does not mean he may not yet direct the film. He also played his cards close to his chest on Beetlejuice Beetlejuice.
The conversation also turned to Burton’s complex relationship with the Hollywood studios and in particular Disney, with the director saying he had often felt like “the black sheep of the family” at the latter.
Acknowledging that he had made nearly all his films in the studio system, Burton said he now questioned how he had navigated his way through.
“Any film is a challenge to get made whether it’s independent or through a studio, but that mostly everything I did from Pee-wee’s Big Adventure onwards was through a movie studio and that I kind of survived all this time through that system, I find amazing,” he added.
Touched on his relationship with Disney, where he began his career and then returned to make live action Dumbo reboot, Burton said he always felt like a fish out of water.
“I was never really a Disney kind of person so that was what was so strange to me, to work there. When I tried to do animation, I was not very good, and they even recognized that… I felt like a weird black sheep of the family, where I got opportunities to do things, but with a certain kind of apprehension, a kind of concern about who I was and what I was doing,” he said.
The wide-ranging talk also took Burton back to his 1985 film Pee-wee’s Big Adventure, starring Paul Reubens.
The interviewer asked him about his loyalty to Reubens, whose career faltered after his highly mediatized arrested for indecent exposure in an adult theatre in Florida in 1991.
Burton was one of the first directors to cast him in the wake of the furore with a part as Penguin’s father in Batman Returns. The director said he had had a sense of gratitude for Reubens following their collaboration on Pee-wee’s Big Adventure.
“It was a first film and it was very special to be able to do it,” he said, adding on Reubens’ later downfall. “It was the first time in my life where I experienced cancel culture. It was a long time ago. I just feel it was a bit extreme. When you work with an artist, and they support you… I felt the way I felt. It was a very strange time.”
In a deliciously Burton-esque moment, quizzed by a fan on what he dreams about, the director revealed a recent dream involving Donald Trump.
“I was at dinner at Donald Trump’s house. He wasn’t living Mar-a-Lago but a suburban house. I needed a haircut, so he personally gave me a haircut. It turned out to be a weird version of like a mullet and his hair and then I woke up,” he said.