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.
Recommended Videos
Burton said Wednesday that seeing a website that had used AI to blend his drawings with Disney characters āreally disturbed me.ā
āIt wasnāt an intellectual thought ā it was just an internal, visceral feeling,ā Burton told reporters during a preview of āThe World of Tim Burtonā exhibition at Londonās Design Museum. āI looked at those things and I thought, āSome 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 āonce you can do it, people will do it.ā But he scoffed when asked if heād use the technology in this work.
āTo 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.
āI wasnāt, early on, a very verbal person,ā Burton said. āDrawing was a way of expressing myself.ā
Decades later, after films including āEdward Scissorhands,ā āBatman,ā āThe Nightmare Before Christmasā and āBeetlejuice,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 exhibitionās 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 ācrush litterā sign a teenage Burton designed for Burbank garbage trucks. Thereās also a recreation of Burtonās studio, down to the trays of paints and āCurse of Frankensteinā mug full of pencils.
Alongside hundreds of drawings, there are props, puppets, set designs and iconic costumes, including Johnny Deppās āEdward Scissorhandsā talons and the black latex Catwoman costume worn by Michelle Pfeiffer in āBatman Returns.ā
āWe had very generous access to Timās archive in London, stuffed full of thousands of drawings, storyboards from stop-motion films, sketches, character notes, poems,ā said exhibition curator Maria McLintock. āAnd 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 heās unable to look too closely at the items on display.
āItās like seeing your dirty laundry put on the walls,ā he said. āItās quite amazing. Itās a bit overwhelming.ā
Burton, whose long-awaited horror-comedy sequel āBeetlejuice Beetlejuiceā opened at the Venice Film Festival in August, is currently filming the second series of Netflixā Addams Family-themed series āWednesday.ā
These days he is a major Hollywood director whose American gothic style has spawned an adjective ā āBurtoneqsue.ā But he still feels like an outsider.
āOnce you feel that way, it never leaves you,ā he said.
āEach film I did was a struggle,ā he added, noting that early films like āPee-weeās Big Adventureā from 1985 and āBeetlejuiceā in 1988 received some negative reviews. āIt seems like it was a pleasant, fine, easy journey, but each one leaves its emotional scars.ā
McLintock said Burton āis a deeply emotional filmmaker."
āI think thatās what drew me to his films as a child,ā she said. "He really celebrates the misunderstood outcast, the benevolent monster. So itās been quite a weird but fun experience spending so much time in his brain and his creative process.
āHis films are often called dark,ā she added. āI donāt agree with that. And if they are dark, thereās a very much a kind of hope in the darkness. You always want to hang out in the darkness in his films.ā
___
āThe World of Tim Burtonā opens Friday and runs until April 21, 2025.
___
Associated Press journalist Kwiyeon Ha contributed to this story.
___
This story has corrected that the Catwoman costume is from āBatman Returns,ā not āBatman.ā