“I have always liked the neo-Gothic style carried by works like Frankenstein of Mary Shelley, told 20 minutes the filmmaker honored last month at the Lumière Festival in Lyon. It matches my mindset since childhood”
We should therefore not be surprised to see him at the head of Wednesday, Netflix series available from this… Wednesday on Netflix. The director ofEdward Scissorhands (1990) was persuaded by showrunners Alfred Gough and Miles Millar to direct four episodes of the series which brings the world of one of his idols back to life: the artist Charles “Chas” Addams (1912-1988), the creator of The Addams Family on which the series is based.
“The dark side of this universe has something very reassuring for someone like me,” he says. It shows that people who don’t fit into the boxes can find love and happiness without conforming to patterns that don’t fit them. The director also very quickly created the look of the creatures in his drawings, all dressed in black with his messy hair and his sunglasses.
At home with the Addams family
“I have always felt at home in the Addams family, he admits. More in the drawings than in the films: when Gomez is embodied by Raúl Julia, for example, it is too good to correspond to the universe of Charles Addams. Tim Burton prefers him Luis Guzmanmore in keeping with the original Gomez and who was cast in the series.
“Authors like Charles Addams or Edward Gorey (1925-2000) clearly had a decisive influence on my artistic development,” explains Tim Burton. It feels as soon as vincent (1982), the director’s first short film, a black and white tribute to the actor Vincent Price as in his paintings and drawings exhibited at the Cinémathèque in 2012. “While I felt very alone in sunny California where I grew up, these artists showed me that I had similar, he says. They are the ones who made me want to develop my own universe while staying close to the monster movies that I loved. »
In Lyon, Tim Burton was walking around with a little plastic monster. Proof that the gothic geek is alive and well in this tall 64-year-old teenager who proudly wears the dark colors of monsters of all stripes.