Tim Burton talks about his dread of AI as an exhibition of his work opens in London

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Creations are on display at The World of Tim Burton exhibition at the Design Museum, in London, Monday, Oct. 21, 2024. The major exhibition sees Tim Burton's personal archives on display for the first time, featuring 600 items from his nearly fifty years long career. (AP Photo/Alberto Pezzali)

LONDON ā€“ The imagination of Tim Burton has produced ghosts and ghouls, Martians, monsters and misfits ā€” all on display at an exhibition that is opening in London just in time for Halloween.

But you know what really scares him? Artificial intelligence.

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Burton said Wednesday that seeing a website that had used AI to blend his drawings with Disney characters ā€œreally disturbed me.ā€

ā€œIt wasnā€™t an intellectual thought ā€” it was just an internal, visceral feeling,ā€ Burton told reporters during a preview of ā€œThe World of Tim Burtonā€ exhibition at Londonā€™s Design Museum. ā€œI looked at those things and I thought, ā€˜Some of these are pretty good.ā€™ ā€¦ (But) it gave me a weird sort of scary feeling inside.ā€

Burton said he thinks AI is unstoppable, because ā€œonce you can do it, people will do it.ā€ But he scoffed when asked if heā€™d use the technology in this work.

ā€œTo take over the world?ā€ he laughed.

The exhibition reveals Burton to be an analogue artist, who started off as a child in the 1960s experimenting with paints and colored pencils in his suburban Californian home.

ā€œI wasnā€™t, early on, a very verbal person,ā€ Burton said. ā€œDrawing was a way of expressing myself.ā€

Decades later, after films including ā€œEdward Scissorhands,ā€ ā€œBatman,ā€ ā€œThe Nightmare Before Christmasā€ and ā€œBeetlejuice,ā€ his ideas still begin with drawing. The exhibition includes 600 items from movie studio collections and Burton's personal archive, and traces those ideas as they advance from sketches through collaboration with set, production and costume designers on the way to the big screen.

London is the exhibitionā€™s final stop on a decade-long tour of 14 cities in 11 countries. It has been reconfigured and expanded with 90 new objects for its run in the British capital, where Burton has lived for a quarter century.

The show includes early drawings and oddities, including a competition-winning ā€œcrush litterā€ sign a teenage Burton designed for Burbank garbage trucks. Thereā€™s also a recreation of Burtonā€™s studio, down to the trays of paints and ā€œCurse of Frankensteinā€ mug full of pencils.

Alongside hundreds of drawings, there are props, puppets, set designs and iconic costumes, including Johnny Deppā€™s ā€œEdward Scissorhandsā€ talons and the black latex Catwoman costume worn by Michelle Pfeiffer in ā€œBatman Returns.ā€

ā€œWe had very generous access to Timā€™s archive in London, stuffed full of thousands of drawings, storyboards from stop-motion films, sketches, character notes, poems,ā€ said exhibition curator Maria McLintock. ā€œAnd how to synthesize such a wide ranging and meandering career within one exhibition was a fun challenge ā€” but definitely a challenge.ā€

Seeing it has not been a wholly fun experience for Burton, who said heā€™s unable to look too closely at the items on display.

ā€œItā€™s like seeing your dirty laundry put on the walls,ā€ he said. ā€œItā€™s quite amazing. Itā€™s a bit overwhelming.ā€

Burton, whose long-awaited horror-comedy sequel ā€œBeetlejuice Beetlejuiceā€ opened at the Venice Film Festival in August, is currently filming the second series of Netflixā€™ Addams Family-themed series ā€œWednesday.ā€

These days he is a major Hollywood director whose American gothic style has spawned an adjective ā€” ā€œBurtoneqsue.ā€ But he still feels like an outsider.

ā€œOnce you feel that way, it never leaves you,ā€ he said.

ā€œEach film I did was a struggle,ā€ he added, noting that early films like ā€œPee-weeā€™s Big Adventureā€ from 1985 and ā€œBeetlejuiceā€ in 1988 received some negative reviews. ā€œIt seems like it was a pleasant, fine, easy journey, but each one leaves its emotional scars.ā€

McLintock said Burton ā€œis a deeply emotional filmmaker."

ā€œI think thatā€™s what drew me to his films as a child,ā€ she said. "He really celebrates the misunderstood outcast, the benevolent monster. So itā€™s been quite a weird but fun experience spending so much time in his brain and his creative process.

ā€œHis films are often called dark,ā€ she added. ā€œI donā€™t agree with that. And if they are dark, thereā€™s a very much a kind of hope in the darkness. You always want to hang out in the darkness in his films.ā€

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ā€œThe World of Tim Burtonā€ opens Friday and runs until April 21, 2025.

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Associated Press journalist Kwiyeon Ha contributed to this story.

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This story has corrected that the Catwoman costume is from ā€œBatman Returns,ā€ not ā€œBatman.ā€


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