Burton on Burton by Tim Burton

Author:Tim Burton [Mark Salisbury]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Performing Arts, Individual Director
ISBN: 9780571248711
Google: uMArccgmO-0C
Publisher: Faber & Faber
Published: 1995-01-02T00:00:00+00:00

A fraught moment in Earth Versus the Flying Saucers (1956)

I’ve always liked all those Irwin Allen films – those ‘Celebrities Getting Killed’ movies. That’s a genre in itself, where you have Charlton Heston married to Ava Gardner, and his father is Lorne Greene, who is about three years younger than his daughter Ava Gardner. You get all these weird mixes of people in those movies. So that was one aspect of it, yeah. I don’t think there was one overriding thematic thing. But it seemed like a good idea just to blow away celebrities with ray-guns.

Although Gems is credited with both the screen story and screenplay of Mars Attacks!, he dedicates his novelization of the movie to Burton, who ‘co-wrote the screenplay and didn’t ask for a credit’. Gems claims Burton’s contribution to the script cannot be underestimated. ‘He has a fantastic instinct for film structure. I come from the theatre where you tell a story through characters and dialogue, but Tim comes from animation, where you tell characters and story through pictures. A lot of the process was me writing and Tim drawing. He would say everything in terms of pictures.’

We went through the cards picking out the ones we liked, just as a starting point, to get a feel for it – we didn’t follow them literally. They’re kind of funny, taken on their own – they have great captions, like ‘Burning Cattle’. So we picked out our favourites. That’s how you start with an animated film, too.

In H. G. Wells’ novel The War of the Worlds – to which both the Mars Attacks! cards and the film adaptation owe much – mankind is saved from the Martian invaders not by military strength but by the common cold: a plot point that Gems loosely co-opted in his screenplay, which called for music to be responsible for destroying the Martians. Exactly what type of music, Gems left open. It was Burton who decided upon Slim Whitman.

That came from the dynamic of those 1950s movies. In most of them, at the end it comes down to one thing that will kill the aliens, and often I remember it being some sort of sound-wave, like in Earth Versus the Flying Saucers or Target Earth. I recall Slim Whitman’s voice from when I was a child, and his voice was very sonic. It was almost like one of those sonic frequencies that might tap right into the brain and destroy. His voice seemed very science-fictiony too, almost like that instrument, the theramin.

Burton’s initial instinct was to once again utilize stop-motion animation to create the Martians. A team of animators, headed by Manchester-based Ian Mackinnon and Peter Saunders, was hired, set up shop in Burbank and began work on stop-motion effects, only to be replaced by George Lucas’s Industrial Light & Magic, who would eventually design and animate the Martians using CG (computer-generated) imagery.

We did some testing with stop-motion. But with the amount of characters we had, and because they all looked the same, it just didn’t work.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.