LONDON (AP) — Imagination tim burton creates ghosts, ghouls, Martians, monsters and sociopaths, all of which will be on display at an exhibition opening in London in time for Halloween.
But do you know what he’s really scared of? artificial intelligence.
Burton said Wednesday that he was “really concerned” after seeing a website that used AI to combine his drawings with Disney characters.
“It wasn’t an intellectual thought, it was just an internal, intuitive feeling,” Burton told reporters at a preview of the “Tim Burton World” exhibition at London’s Design Museum. . “I looked at them and thought, ‘Some of these are pretty good.’ … (But) it gave me a weird kind of scary feeling in my heart.”
Burton said he believes AI is unstoppable because “once people can do it, people will do it.” But when asked if he would use this technique for this work, he laughed it off.
“To conquer the world?” he laughed.
The exhibition reveals Burton as an analog artist who began experimenting with paint and colored pencils in his suburban California home as a child in the 1960s.
“I wasn’t a very talkative person in the early days,” Burton says. “Painting was a way to express myself.”
Decades later, after films like Edward Scissorhands, Batman, The Nightmare Before Christmas, and Beetlejuice, his ideas still start with drawings. The exhibition includes 600 items from the film studio’s collection and Burton’s personal archives, evolving from sketches to the big screen through collaboration with set, production, and costume designers. Follow ideas.
London is the final destination of a 10-year exhibition that has toured 14 cities in 11 countries. It has been reconfigured and expanded with the addition of 90 new objects for operation in the British capital, where Burton has lived for a quarter of a century.
The show includes early drawings and oddities, such as the “Crash Litter” sign that teenage Burton won in a contest, designed for a Burbank garbage truck. Burton’s studio has also been recreated, right down to a tray of paints and a “Curse of Frankenstein” mug filled with pencils.
Hundreds of drawings, plus props, puppets and set designs, including Johnny Depp’s “Edward Scissorhands” claws and the black latex Catwoman donned by Michelle Pfeiffer in “Batman Returns.” Symbolic costumes such as costumes are on display.
“We had very generous access to Tim’s archives in London, which are filled with thousands of drawings, stop-motion film storyboards, sketches, character notes, and poems,” says the exhibition. said curator Maria McClintock. “And how to integrate such a wide-ranging and winding career within one exhibition was a fun challenge, but definitely a challenge.”
Barton, who is unable to look at the exhibits in detail, said viewing them was not an enjoyable experience at all.
“It’s like seeing your dirty laundry posted on the wall,” he said. “It’s really amazing. It’s a little overwhelming.”
Burton’s long-awaited horror-comedy sequel “Beetlejuice Beetlejuice” The film, which opened at the Venice Film Festival in August, is currently filming the second series of Netflix’s Addams Family-themed series Wednesday.
More recently, he has become a major Hollywood director, and his American Gothic style has given rise to the adjective “bad necks.” But he still feels like an outsider.
“Once you feel that way, it never leaves you,” he said.
“Every movie I’ve made has been a struggle,” he added, noting that earlier films such as 1985’s “Pee-wee’s Adventures” and 1988’s “Beetlejuice” received some negative reviews. pointed out. “It seems like it was a comfortable, wonderful, easy journey, but each one leaves a scar.”
McClintock said Burton is “a very emotional filmmaker.”
“I think that’s what drew me to his films as a kid,” she said. “He really admires the misunderstood outcast, the benevolent monster. So it was a very strange but fun experience to spend so much time in his brain and creative process.
“His films are often described as dark,” she added. “I don’t agree with that. And even if they’re dark, there’s some kind of hope in that darkness. In his movies, you always want to be in the dark.”
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“The World of Tim Burton” opens Friday and runs through April 21, 2025.
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This article corrects that Catwoman’s costume is from Batman Returns, not Batman.
