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Tim Burton
Biography
Any Tim Burton
biography will tell you that his childhood was far from normal. Perhaps
that's what made him one of the greatest fantasy directors of all time.
Real
name: Timothy William Burton
Known as: Tim Burton
Born: 25 August 1958
From: Burbank,
California, USA
Notable works:
Batman,
Big Fish, Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, Edward
Scissorshands, Ed Wood, Sleepy Hollow
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Burton
grew up in Burbank, California,
the youngest of three brothers. He was an unsettled child, often
watching horror and low-budget films to escape from reality. Twice he
got in trouble for staging an axe murder, prompting onlookers to call
the police!
After
graduating from high school, Burton won a
Disney scholarship to attend the
California
Institute of the Arts in Valencia, in California. He
studied
for three years before becoming an animator apprentice for Walt Disney Studios,
a job he found creatively stifling.
In
the 1980s Burton started making films of his own, primarily horror and
fantasy. His early works include a Japanese adaptation of Hansel and Gretel
and Frankenweenie,
a spin off of Frankenstein
about a boy who brings his dog back to life (which he's currently
remaking).
Burton's
career gained momentum in the mid-1980s when he directed a string of
successful films, namely Pee-Wee’s
Big Adventure, Beetlejuice
and Batman.
But it wasn’t until the he started working with Johnny Depp in the
1990s that he made his real mark in the fantasy movie realm.
Johnny Depp and Tim Burton on the set of the
2005 movie Charlie and
the Chocolate Factory
No Tim
Burton biography would be complete without mention of his collaboration
with Johnny, least of all one on a web site dedicated to fantasy! When
those two get together, magic happens. Every time.
Their quirky outlook is
a ideally suited to the fantasy genre and has resulted in many of my
favorite fantasy films, most notably Edward Scissorhands
(which Burton co-wrote
and directed and Depp starred in).
Burton’s highly imaginative nature
gives his movies an edge. He creates worlds in which the lines between
fantasy and reality are blurred and characters venture on the edge of
sanity
One of my
friends worked as an extra on Willy
Wonka and the Chocolate Factory (2005). She told me
Burton has an incredible creative
energy. “His mind is everywhere at once,” she says, “and
yet he remains incredibly focused.”
Every
Tim Burton biography reflects the director’s life’s journey from a
place of darkness in an unhappy childhood to a place of magic in the shadowy world of
fantasy.
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