Tim Burton

Info

Full Name: Timothy Walter Burton
Date of birth: August 25, 1958 (67 years old)
Location: Burbank, California
Country: USA

Tim Burton has been active for 39 years, participating in 31 movies that average a 7.2/10 score.

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Tráiler en VOSE de 'Harry Potter' T1

Biography

In the sunny, uniform Burbank of the sixties, in the shadow of the Hollywood studios, a pale boy grew up preferring monsters to baseball and B movies to birthday parties. That odd child, born on 25 August 1958, son of a former minor league baseball player turned city employee and of the owner of a cat themed gift shop, showed early promise: as a teenager he won a local contest and his anti littering design decorated Burbank's rubbish trucks for months. He would end up imposing his gothic, melancholy aesthetic on the entire industry: few signatures are as recognisable at first glance as Tim Burton's.

The apprentice Disney never understood

Devoted to the horror films of Vincent Price, he studied animation at CalArts on a Disney fellowship and joined the studio as an apprentice, where drawing adorable foxes plunged him into despair. Out of that crisis came two now mythical shorts: 'Vincent' (1982), a stop motion poem narrated by Price himself, his childhood idol, and 'Frankenweenie' (1984), the tale of a boy who resurrects his dog, which Disney deemed too dark. They fired him, and it was the best news of his life.

Paul Reubens rescued him to direct 'Pee-wee's Big Adventure' (1985), made for a pittance and turned into an unexpected hit, and three years later came the ghostly 'Beetlejuice' (1988), shot for barely 15 million, with an unleashed Michael Keaton and a very young Winona Ryder, which won the Oscar for best makeup and anointed him Hollywood's great macabre prankster.

Batman and gothic for the masses

Warner then handed him its crown jewel, and casting the comedian Keaton as the hero unleashed thousands of protest letters from fans, until the film silenced them all: 'Batman' (1989), with a rampant Jack Nicholson as the Joker, passed 400 million dollars and proved superhero cinema could be dark, adult and enormous. The sequel, 'Batman Returns' (1992), with Michelle Pfeiffer's Catwoman and Danny DeVito's Penguin, pushed his universe even further; he then handed over the saga's wheel and stayed on as producer of 'Batman Forever' (1995). Years later he would spend months preparing a Superman with Nicolas Cage that was never shot, today one of Hollywood's most legendary ghost films.

Between the two he signed his most personal work: 'Edward Scissorhands' (1990), the fable of the unfinished boy who cannot caress without wounding, admittedly autobiographical, the first of his eight films with Johnny Depp and Vincent Price's big screen farewell as the inventor. Few films distil their author better: pastel coloured suburbs, a gothic heart and the loneliness of being different.

The Depp era: from Ed Wood to Sweeney Todd

With Johnny Depp he formed one of modern cinema's most celebrated creative pairings. Together they honoured the worst director in history in 'Ed Wood' (1994), shot in black and white out of love for the original, a box office flop turned cult totem, which won Martin Landau the Oscar for his Bela Lugosi, beheaded half a village in 'Sleepy Hollow' (1999), with Christina Ricci and another rescued idol, Christopher Lee, whom he would cast again and again, reinvented Willy Wonka in 'Charlie and the Chocolate Factory' (2005) and sharpened razors in the musical 'Sweeney Todd: The Demon Barber of Fleet Street' (2007), with Helena Bonham Carter as Mrs Lovett and Golden Globes for both film and star.

In between came the Martian mayhem of 'Mars Attacks!' (1996) and a clarification always worth repeating: 'The Nightmare Before Christmas' (1993) sprang from his imagination and he produced it, but it was directed by Henry Selick, however much the whole world calls it "the Tim Burton movie". His own animation Oscar came close with the nominated 'Corpse Bride' (2005), as it would later with 'Frankenweenie' (2012), the feature with which Disney, in one of fate's ironies, let him remake the very short it had fired him over. And nearly all of it played to the scores of Danny Elfman, his composer on practically his entire filmography.

From Alice to Dumbo: the weary giant

After his debated take on 'Planet of the Apes' (2001), an assignment he himself remembers with thorns, he signed 'Big Fish' (2003), the fable about fathers and sons shot shortly after losing his own parents, which many consider his most moving work, four times nominated at the Golden Globes. Then he delivered the biggest commercial hit of his career: 'Alice in Wonderland' (2010), with Mia Wasikowska, Depp as the Mad Hatter and Helena Bonham Carter as the Red Queen, which passed a billion dollars and kicked off the wave of live action remakes of the Disney classics.

Then came 'Dark Shadows' (2012), with Depp as the vampire Barnabas, the biopic 'Big Eyes' (2014), which won Amy Adams a Golden Globe, the fantasy 'Miss Peregrine's Home for Peculiar Children' (2016), adapted from Ransom Riggs' bestseller, with his new favourite leading lady Eva Green, and the return to Disney with 'Dumbo' (2019), a bittersweet experience after which he confessed to feeling like the elephant himself: a strange creature trapped in an enormous circus. He needed to find himself again.

Wednesday and the return of Beetlejuice

The rediscovery arrived, unexpectedly, from television, his first directing for the small screen in decades. On 'Wednesday' (2022) he directed the first four episodes, Emmy nomination included, and godfathered, as producer, Jenna Ortega's Wednesday Addams: the show became the most watched English language series in Netflix history, with more than 250 million views in its first 90 days, a record that still stands, released its second season in 2025 and is already shooting a third, bound for Paris.

And in 2024 he closed the circle with 'Beetlejuice Beetlejuice', the sequel that waited 36 years: it opened the Venice Film Festival, brought back Keaton, Ryder and Catherine O'Hara, added Ortega and Monica Bellucci and brushed 450 million dollars at the box office after his biggest American opening ever. He is now preparing a Warner remake of the B movie classic 'Attack of the Fifty Foot Woman', penned by the writers of KPop Demon Hunters. His trophy cabinet holds the honorary Golden Lion from Venice (2007), the Lumière Award (2022), France's Order of Arts and Letters and the memory of the exhibition of his drawings that broke attendance records at New York's MoMA before travelling the world.

Muses, loves and connected houses

His love life has unfolded inside his own universe. He was married to the German artist Lena Gieseke, had a long relationship with the actress Lisa Marie, his muse across the nineties, seen in Mars Attacks! and Sleepy Hollow, and between 2001 and 2014 shared his life with Helena Bonham Carter, a regular in his films and mother of his two children, Billy, whose godfather is Johnny Depp, and Nell; the couple lived, very much in their style, in two connected London houses. His last known relationship was with Monica Bellucci: they reconnected at the Lyon festival where he received the Lumière Award, he directed her in Beetlejuice Beetlejuice, and the story ended, with an affectionate joint statement, in September 2025.

His singular imagination overflowed the borders of cinema a long time ago: he directed music videos for The Killers, produced other people's gems such as 'James and the Giant Peach' (1996) and '9' (2009), and the adjective "Burtonesque" now sits in the film lover's vocabulary to describe any gothic tale with a tender heart. Almost five decades after those monster drawings in Burbank, his creatures populate Halloween, bookshelves and streaming platforms the world over. The odd kid won the game: he made oddness the most beloved thing of all. And somewhere in Burbank, a rubbish truck once carried his first exhibited work. Who does not carry a little Edward Scissorhands inside?