![]() Thoughts were as likely articulated with frenzied movements of the hands, "the way he waves them around in the air uncontrollably, nervously tapping on the table", or with sudden stares "eyes wide and glaring out of nowhere, curious, eyes that have seen it all". Burton seemed to the actor "a pale, frail-looking, sad-eyed man with hair that expressed much more than last night's pillow struggle". When Johnny Depp, the third point of that celebrated creative triangle, first met Burton, to discuss Edward Scissorhands, his initial thought about the director was "get some sleep". He's a dot-to-dot talker, happy for you to do the grunt work of making connections. Immediately a phrase half conveys its sense, he is already articulating its caveats or some further association. Burton is not so much vague in conversation as fleeting. (He tends to return the compliment by sometimes making affectionately snide remarks about her talkativeness in this, and most other ways, they seem to make a perfect pair). Which is to say you don't have to chat to him for very long to understand why Bonham Carter likes to call him "a home for abandoned sentences". His generous visual gifts come at the expense of much in the way of verbal pyrotechnics. And so, sitting in the middle of it all, wild-haired in the autumn sunlight, does their creator.īurton is, famously, not the most garrulous of men. It would be hard to have magicked up a better stage for his own lucrative daydreams the gory mannequins and wide-eyed prostheses and scattered sketches and artwork and storyboards that inhabit corners of his room, remnants and cast-offs from Corpse Bride and Edward Scissorhands and The Nightmare Before Christmas and Sleepy Hollow all seem perfectly at home here. It is half a mile up the road from the pair of adjoining mews houses he shares with his partner, Helena Bonham Carter and their two young children. The director bought this suitably spirited work space not long after he moved to London a decade ago. "People definitely believe they hear strange things here at night," Burton suggests, "but it's a good vibe." In the mullioned light of large leaded windows, which look out on a rambling walled garden that seems to come from another age altogether, you could half believe some wisp of them hangs there still. "Rackham apparently used to have all his fairy models hung from these spars," Burton tells me, nodding toward the exposed beams above his head. In the upstairs studio room of the house, one restless and teeming imagination has been seamlessly replaced by another. T im Burton's gothic office in Belsize Park in north London belonged a century ago to Arthur Rackham, the celebrated illustrator of Peter Pan and Alice in Wonderland and The Fairy Tales of the Brothers Grimm.
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