"It's hard to believe that ever played on the Disney Channel," said Tim Burton, looking a little shellshocked today at the Museum of Modern Art. The museum had just screened part of his long-lost short film Hansel and Gretel, a mad hallucination of neon fluids, fire, vomiting windows and a witch wielding candy-striped nunchucks and weaponized cookie cutters. It was the first time an audience had seen it since 1983, when the short debuted on cable. "I think they showed it once at 3 a.m. on Halloween night."
Of course, that was well before Tim Burton was, you know, Tim Burton.
Today he's a brand, a genius, a legend, a misfit, you name it -- Hollywood's resident purveyor of gothic fantasy just this side of accessible. A quarter-century after his Disney misadventures, the filmmaker and former animator appeared to introduce MoMA's upcoming Burton retrospective, a comprehensive six-month installation (opening Nov. 22) comprising 14 features and hundreds more shorts, storyboards, painting, models, puppets, costumes and other artifacts from his archives.
"A lot of stuff was just for projects and thought processes," he said, explaining the material's roots and his motivations to review it with MoMA assistant film curator Ron Magliozzi. "It was a really interesting thing for me to go back. I thought I'd left certain images a long time ago, but then you realize you're still obsessed with certain things and all that. So this has been a real re-energizing process for me. So I'm very honored and appreciative to have this..." He paused, gestured his hands circularly in front of himself. "Whatever you want to call it."
The crowd laughed and applauded, which Burton hastily interrupted while pointing at the screen. "Those things were never meant to be seen!" he shouted. "The reason they don't have a copy is because I tried to burn them all myself. There may be one out there or something."
Having earlier been informed of the two-year-plus curatorial process, Movieline asked how that rare revisitation had influenced his most recent work. "I don't think about things or re-look at things afterward," Burton replied. "But now, going through stuff and seeing it again, there is some Sweeney Todd in there. I got into liking to throw paint in water balloons, so I did that in Batman as well." The effect dominates the climax of Hansel and Gretel, in which dozens of splattering paint bombs explode around the fleeing kids.
"And I didn't make that connection until I saw some of this stuff again," he continued. "It's not something I think I want to do all the time, but every now and then -- since I had never done it -- go back and sort of connect with yourself in a way? It's kind of like having a child: It re-energizes you. That reconnection gets your nerve endings going again. So it's been good that way."
But did glancing back at Planet of the Apes teach him anything?
"Well, never make a movie on a drunken bet," he said. "That's all I'd say. Here's the thing with me: The best thing I can say about myself is that I get intrigued by weird things. That was something where I got so intrigued by it that, you know... You do things for different reasons. Actually that might have been a drunken bet, come to think of it. But I enjoyed it. I've met a lot of people who say this or that. I don't know. It was kind of like a Saturday morning cartoon to me in a way, but I enjoyed it. It's always fun to sit around the craft service table and hear apes talking about their real estate and what they did over the weekend."