“I am not complete”, says Edward in Tim Burton’s movie Edward Scissorshands. This quote captures the essence of most of Burton’s characters. Why does he always create incomplete, lonely, socially in-accepted and misunderstood characters with weird appearances? And yet, how can his characters be at the same time so lovable and unforgettable?

The secret relies in his great ability to portray multiple dimensioned characters, which combine a scary, extravagant, inhumane and even creepy appearance with a deep, intimate, sweet and human psychology. Weird as it may seem, the audience gets to identify in a personal way with characters who are “horrific” and dead like Beetlejuice or the Corps Bride, or evil and damaged like the Joker or Sweedney Todd, or specially “handicapped” like Edward who belong to fantastic and radically different worlds to ours.

These characters are full of symbolisms, their struggle and internal conflicts, are a reflection of universal feelings which we all have experienced sometime; their lacks and psychological problems are inherent to human and social behaviors, and that creates the bond. As Burton observes: “Who can pretend to know about themselves? It’s too complicated, there are too many crossed signals, split sides and dynamics. Does anybody know who they are, really? Does anybody feel integrated? I mean, I don’t know anybody who does. I certainly don’t pretend to know myself. So for me, I find this dynamic to be realistic. And I enjoy it.” And we enjoy it too, when portrayed on the screen.

Moreover, the contrast between the dark, grotesque and weird appearance of many of his characters with their humanistic psyche, is in fact a great metaphor and a critic to social prejudices towards the importance we give to the outlook of people. Burton confesses he had feelings of isolation and being alone in his youth and adult beginning: “I felt incapable of communicating. That feeling that your outlook and how people see you crash with what you have in your interior, a very common sensation.” So, he nourishes his characters with tints of his own personal experience, and manages to gets those feelings across.

To construct his memorable characters, he looks into the conflict and the contradiction within them. One of his most beloved, as it was a personal project, is Edward Scissorhands, “The idea had to do with the image and the way of looking at things. A character who wants to touch but can’t, which is creative and destructive at a time, this kind of contradiction can create and ambivalence.” These nuances bring the characters to live.

Other important process he goes through when developing characters, is the creation of their backgrounds, the importance of recreating their past experiences and traumas, which will conform their attitude. When working on Charlie and the Chocolate factory, he developed a back story for the character, which was not in the book. In order to understand his psyche, he came up with his personal vision:“I think he just comes across as really emotionally repressed and stunted. When people get traumatized they just sort of, kind of shut down. Also related to that, I’ve met people that are kind of geniuses in one area but are completely deficient in all other social or every other area of their life. So, the mixture of those things was what I sort of thought of him as.”

When working with actors, he spends long time with them exploring the character’s traits and gives them certain freedom to choose some sentences or concepts with which they can connect. For Alice in Wonderland, he included some lines from the book that weren’t in the script for the actors, because he believes that “ if an actor connects to something and feels passionate about something,…you usually get something better from them because it’s something meaningful they can grasp onto.” When working with animation or stop-motion, the hard work is driven towards the facial expressions, small gestures and specially the movements and expressivity of the eyes. He tries to include as much as human traits and essence to the characters to make them feel as natural and real as possible.

When he was asked in an interview about why did he accepted to do Batman back in 1989, his answer was clear, “I like catwoman, I like the Penguin, I like Batman… it is a good picture of characters. I like their duality…”. They gave him a wide specter to play around with, and he was challenged by that. His fascinating approach to specific human feelings has become an imprint in all of his work, and no matter what the stories are about, the weight of his productions relies on the power of his characters.

Now, Burton’s new production is just round the corner, to be released in March. With Alice in Wonderland in his hands, Burton has created a great expectation. He was attracted to this story because of the wide range of interesting characters, very attached to the kind of psychological issues he likes to explore; plus the whole imagery of the fantastic world around them. His goal is to make the story flow with the main character as a unity, as he feels that in earlier versions of the movie the character was not well grounded to the events that took place. He puts it this way: “Every character is weird, but I tried to give them their own specific weirdness so they’re all different. I think all those characters and this imagery indicates some type of mental weirdness that everybody goes through, but the real attempt was to try to make Alice feel more like a story as opposed to a series of events.” I bet his Alice will become another memorable character.

Although he’s well-known for his trajectory in filmmaking, Burton has a wide background in other artistic disciplines such as drawing, painting, photography and even poetry, where the center of his creation is also always character driven. Now and until April, The Museum of Modern Arts in New York has an exhibition of his artistic work, where you can appreciate some of his sketches and drawings of tortured, misunderstood characters, like the Girl with many eyes, Oyster Boy, Stain Boy or the Pin Cushion Queen, amongst many others. His figures are thin and fragile in appearance, but strong in emotions, with weak arms and legs, but with big and expressive eyes. Pale faces and skins, but full of color in the robes and distinguished items. Each of his paintings expresses through the character an emotional concept, in a very particular Burton-like way. Many of these characters are also part of his poetry book The Melancholy Death of Oyster Boy and Other Stories where brief poems narrate the tragic stories of the characters.

Voodoo Girl
Her skin is white cloth,
and she’s all sewn apart
and she has many colored pins
sticking out of her heart”
(…)
But she knows she has a curse on her,
a curse she cannot win.
For if someone gets,
too close to her,
the pins stick further in.

Burton has been classified under many different labels, because of his particular style, from dark to macabre or at least unconventional. He doesn’t see himself as a dark person at all, and he rejects labels. Burton claims that the concept of something “normal” sounds scary to him. I agree, in the sense that no one can establish the rules and parameters to define what is normal or abnormal. As Burton has said “One person’s craziness is another person’s reality.”

Overall, Burton has proved to have a gift to convey intimate feelings through his characters. He achieves to change the way in which we look at things, which can change the whole perspective of reality. Is the bottle half full or half empty? In one of his movies, Big Fish written by John August, there is a sentence which summarizes this: Young Ed Bloom, says to the gigantic woman, “ Has it ever occurred to you that maybe you’re not too big? That maybe this place is just too small?“. It is the way in which we address things what constructs our reality, and Burton uses his characters as points of view through which we can look at the world in different ways. Put the ingredients together: psychological observation, back stories, contradiction and actors’ motivation, plus hard work and hues of his personal experience, mix them all up with care, and you have a slice of a Burton’s delicious cake.

>Written by d/visible contributor Rebeca Arnal .

This entry was posted on Monday, February 1st, 2010 at 2:55 pm and is filed under Film, Art & Design. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.