Tim Burton received a lot of love at the Festival Lumière de Lyon! The director ofEdward Scissorhands, Ed WoodDumbo and Funeral ritesdid not hide his emotion when he was invited by Thierry Frémaux to receive the fourteenth Louis Lumière prize crowning an exceptional career.
“I had never been welcomed with so much enthusiasm, even by my family,” repeated Tim Burton. For a long time, people tended to avoid me like the plague. I who don’t like to look at myself in photos, I see myself on all the walls of the city as if my head were at a price. »
“The most expensive therapy in the world”
Tim Burton’s ears vibrated to the cries of the fans who accompanied him on each of his trips: “We love you Tim”, shouted some hoping to have photos, posters, DVDs or figurines signed. The filmmaker who acknowledges “expressing himself better through drawing and cinema than through speech” often had difficulty in holding back his tears in the face of the fervor of the welcome reserved for him. The journalist Mehdi Omais confessed to him thatEdward Scissorhands had saved his life by helping him to accept himself. “For me too, cinema has a sanctuary long before it became therapy, the most expensive therapy in the world,” admitted the director.
In the evening, he obviously no longer knew how to react to the thunderous shouts and applause of the spectators who had come to attend the presentation of his prize. Alice Taglioni at the piano was followed on stage by Vincent Dedienne then Imany who sang for him. Receiving his trophy from the hands of Monica Bellucci, Tim Burton could not hide his emotion at having been honored in “the city where cinema was born”. Even the Hôtel de Ville in Lyon was decked out in the director’s colors while its chimes played the theme of The Nightmare Before Christmas Mr. Jack to welcome him. “I feel like I’m in a dream,” he confessed to 20 minutes in a brief conversation.
A series then a return to the cinema
The dream continued the next day when the director perpetuated one of the finest traditions of the festival: shooting a remake of Leaving the Lumière factories, the first film in the history of cinema shot in 1896. “I want to see chaos”, he explained to the lucky ones who had the chance to participate in the film. Among them, we recognized Vincent Lindon, Claude Lelouch or Eric Métayer. It took three takes for Tim Burton to be satisfied with this 45-second short film screened in front of his “extras” before being archived at the Lumière museum where it joined those of, among others, Francis Ford Coppola, Jane Campion or Quentin Tarantino.
Tim Burton experienced new crowds to unveil his commemorative plaque and present a night of cinema that filled the huge Halle Tony Garnier. But it is soon time for him to come back to reality after the closing party of this Sunday evening. “I’m going to get back to work quickly to finish Wednesday, a Netflix series on which I still have a lot of work to do. But I know that I will do cinema again in live action and also animated films, a medium that is always in me, ”he promised. We all look forward to this.