Original subtitles

This is Tim Burton, and this is a special audio track of Edward Scissorhands.

Well, always with main titles I like to try to help set the tone

of whatever the piece is going to be tonally.

When you're doing a film that's like a fairy tale

or something that's not really real, you want to help set the tone visually.

Titles are always a good way to help that

and also set the tone musically, as well.

This is all Danny Elfman's music.

In a fantasy, his music has always been really important

because he really helps set the emotional tone of things

in terms of when you're mixing things

that are supposed to be dramatic,

visual, somewhat not real.

He kind of helps make it feel more real.

The first project I worked with Danny on was Pee-wee's Big Adventure.

That was sort of both our first real studio feature film

so we feel like we've started at the same time

and, you know, gone through the same kind of experiences.

Again, he's always good at capturing that weird tone that we try to go for.

When I met Johnny

I knew right away that he was the one.

I had a feeling about it. I didn't know his work very well.

I'd never seen 21 Jump Street.

I'd seen pictures of him.

Then Denise and I, the producer, met him

and knew right away just from meeting him that he had that sort of quality.

You could just see it in his eyes.

That was an important aspect to the character

in terms of not having to say anything

and just being able to project something simply, much like a silent movie actor.

I think he also understood that dynamic of misperception

because he was seen as a teen idol but I don't think that's the way he felt inside emotionally.

So he got that idea of misperception, I think, that was so part of this character.

The story developed for me probably when I was a teenager.

I liked to draw since I was younger.

Often images would come up

and they'd stay with you and you'd keep drawing them.

This was a character that I sketched a while back

and thought about a lot

and I think represented those years

as a teenager when you were feeling quite intense

and misperceived and all those pretty classic things.

And growing up in Burbank, as well, heightened those feelings for me.

So this is very representative of a lot of feelings and perceptions

of that time and that place.

So it was a story that I had in my mind for a long time.

Of course, to represent Burbank we had to go all the way to Florida.

We found a location east of Tampa and spent several months there.

It was quite easy to get into the vibe and rhythm of this type of life.

Dianne Wiest. She was one of the first people, I think, that responded to the script.

I remember she was really very supportive of it and the feelings in it.

She was a real emotional inspiration to it, and really...

I remember when she read it, I got the feeling that she really was into it and believed it.

She really came through in her performance.

She really gives it a strong emotional weight that I was very happy about.

Casting this was fun because you had the opportunity for such great characters.

And again, I always respond to people,

especially in a project like this which is not really "real", who make it real.

And all of these actors were just so great

at making these sort of extreme characters real.

Maybe it was, again, because we were...

actually in this environment for over four months, so that probably helped.

We shot in a real neighbourhood,

although we of course added some of the foliage and plant life

that you see here and later on.

But it was very close to this.

We did a little paint job on each house but it's pretty much as is.

When I first started drawing the character they were just more sharp instruments.

The emotional thrust of it was a character who couldn't touch,

a character who had emotions, who wanted to feel things,

but because of the sharpness of his fingers couldn't actually touch somebody.

So it's sort of a classic fairy-tale-like theme.

It turned into scissors because of the kinda...

Well, you know. You sort of use what's in your environment.

Scissors and other suburban-type instruments

that sort of became the visual end to it.

This we built on the I think only slight hill there is in all of Florida -

the highest elevation, which I think is about 20 feet.

It's always nice to be able to have the opportunity to build the sets,

just because I think it really helps everybody - I mean, the actors, myself, everybody -

in terms of making it feel like it's real and you're actually there.

Well...

This... is Martha Stewart's house.

Martha Stewart, when she's old and crazy, this will be her house.

I worked with a great designer, Bo Welch, who I've worked with a few times.

These things are always sort of organic.

I mean, we come up with a concept

and then through him and other illustrators, myself, you know, and model makers,

we just kind of end up with what it is here.

You know, it was a really good design team.

People who, as you can see, know how to do, like, sort of not-straight angles artfully,

which is quite nice.

This is on the Fox set. We shot both in Florida

and on the Fox studio lot for this interior mansion stuff.

The first film I ever did was a short film called Vincent.

I was just... I remember sending it to him

in little booklet form, and he wrote me back.

It was such an amazing thing

because he was the first person of that type and that sort of stature

that was very supportive of me.

Somebody that I had idolised so much and then to meet them and be so nice,

it was first off an amazing experience, and then for this part,

which was such a meaningful part,

it gave it that much more gravity to me when he did it.

Because it's those kind of roles which are small but really special,

when you have somebody like him it just makes it so much better.

I worked with Stan Winston and his people

on the look of Edward and the scissors and they did a great job.

I mean, because I had, like, really simplistic sketches.

They were just really good at taking those and bringing it into the third dimension.

They sort of understood things on a textural level that was just really great.

And we were able to give Johnny scissors early on

so he could go home and wear them all day and see what it was like to be this character

which was probably one of the most helpful things to him.

Dianne got the tone of it beautifully.

It's very hard I think sometimes to get a mixture of things

that are funny and still have emotional weight to them at the same time.

She was very good at that.

We gave him these hands a while before shooting.

I think actually it became closer to life than...

I think some of those scars on his face were actually real by the time we started shooting.

It becomes very apparent very quickly

what happens to you when you have hands like that.

A lot of the characters in this are either fantasy

or represented on some people that I knew.

Sometimes a combination.

I think the Peg character is more of a fantasy.

I think she was much more sort of a type that...

I sort of wished for in that environment, more.

The other characters are a little bit closer to reality.

Yeah, she's more of a fantasy...

Avon lady/guardian angel... fantasy.

Well, this is my husband Bill. He's a bowling champion.

Do you know what bowling is?

Bowling?

I don't think that's a question that anybody truly understands - bowling.

That's a scary shot.

I actually wore a tuxedo like that, only it was yellow.

I tried to get that Sears photograph look.

I thought they did a pretty good job with that.

Sears photography.

Very inviting.

His outfit's made of a combination of things.

I think...

we used latex, we used leather, we used Naugahyde,

we used my old sofa in my first apartment.

We used a lot of different things.

There's some black tape there, which I think we needed more of as we went along.

Yeah.

So Johnny also had an air-conditioned suit underneath that

which I think made his body temperature even hotter.

I think it was quite difficult for him

because shooting in Florida was quite hot and humid

and being covered head to toe pretty much all the time with makeup and this

and not being able to use his hands... it was pretty intense.

Playing a role like this, you see what it's like to get dressed without using your hands.

So you learn something new every time on a film.

In this neighbourhood, we basically had to take over the neighbourhood

and basically rent out 50 of the houses in the neighbourhood.

I think the people that rented out, they went to a nearby...

I don't know if it was a Super 8 motel

or something like that nearby.

We had some of the locals as extras until they saw what it was like

and realised that they'd rather go back to a high-paying job

in something a little easier, like a restaurant job,

because it was pretty harsh.

The atmosphere was quite hot and quite long hours

so I think the glamour of show business wore off pretty quick.

I was so happy to work with Alan Arkin too because he was such a great actor.

I realised as I was working with him

that he's done so many great things, each time as a different character.

I forgot which movies he had been in

because he was such a good character in each one.

He would just become those characters.

He became this character, which was quite scary to be,

because he's, like, direct from Burbank.

We had to paint everybody's house back to the original colours,

although I think that there was a move by some of the residents

to keep them this colour.

Initially they didn't like it but after a few months

some of them, I think, liked it.

I think ultimately we ended up having to paint them back and take out the topiaries.

I was never quite sure how Avon responded to the film.

I always thought it was a positive portrayal, but, uh...

I didn't have Johnny shave his eyebrows off.

We had appliances put on over his eyes to sort of...

People are a little weird about shaving.

They'll shave their heads, they'll shave their bodies, but their eyebrows...

It's a little scary. So we had a little bit of appliances and a few scar appliances as well.

Plus some real ones.

This was fun to see the neighbourhood transform

when we started putting in these sculptures.

It really did change the character of the neighbourhood

and it was pretty amazing.

My parents live now in the Lake Tahoe area.

Up until very recently they lived in Burbank.

Alan Arkin, I thought, really got this suburban detachment

in a way that was really quite strong and quite scary.

I remember in my own neighbourhood this dynamic where you'd never see anybody

unless there was some sort of weird thing going on in the neighbourhood

or a minor car accident or some sort of drama,

and then everybody would come out

and it would sort of become like a big block party or lawn party.

It's always interesting, the kind of weird dynamic

which gets people into such a sort of social mood.

I realised this film could be a result of watching a lot of those K-tel ads

with all these weird products growing up.

Looking at this,

I didn't realise that the inspiration could be the pocket fisherman.

These kinda ads... I see these shots and they kind of remind me of those commercials.

It was fun to actually be able to have this stuff built to life-scale too, and working.

It always gives it a much more energetic and alive feeling

when you can do this on a set

as opposed to doing it all after the fact or in postproduction.

Even all the way up till the end of his life he was such an amazing person.

So elegant and such an amazing mind and just so positive.

I remember him from the very beginning when I met him to the end

as just being extremely interested in things,

extremely generous

with himself and his feelings.

Again, I think, he really... not only for me but for Johnny,

he really embellished his performance

just by the nature of the person playing this part, so it was really great.

Lots of scary scenes in this movie.

All these actors were great, too, because, you know, they took...

Obviously, look at the way they're dressed.

They'd take these characters which look quite extreme

but they were all such great actresses, they could give it a reality that was really good.

And we got to use Hawaiian music.

This guy is Stuart Lancaster.

He's the star of Faster, Pussycat! Kill! Kill! which is a great movie.

He used to be one of Russ Meyer's actors in all of his films.

Unfortunately I think Johnny did this about 20 times, so he had 20 takes of...

There were two things in this movie that made Johnny throw up.

I think this was one, and then a running scene later on.

I think only two. I'm only aware of two.

I started drawing when I was younger

and I always found it was a way to explore different ideas.

Sometimes if an image stayed with me for a while in drawing

I would start to analyse it and think about it

and maybe develop it further.

This was the second time I worked with Winona.

I treated it differently. In Beetlejuice, she was playing a darker character

and I thought because she's got that quality to her

that it would be fun to see her play

more of a normal suburban type, which she's not.

It was fun to see her play a character like that.

I always drew. I like monster movies and I think I drew from that.

But I never considered the things I liked to draw dark,

because most things, especially if they stayed with me,

had a more emotional subtext to them

so therefore I never saw them as really dark.

They always seemed more positive in a way.

Even monster movies I never saw as dark.

I always had a somewhat twisted perception of that sort of thing.

Yeah, bunk beds are sort of...

They just somehow...

Even though they're not really suburban, they seem such a suburban phenomenon.

Shooting in Florida, there were times, especially on this scene,

where it was so thick with these black bugs you couldn't shoot. It was, uh...

It looked like the grainiest film in the world

because it was thick with these black bugs.

Florida was quite a harsh environment to shoot a film, strangely enough.

All the clouds - most of them, 99% of them - were real.

The thing is, the weather in Florida moves so fast.

Every take is like almost a different day completely

because the clouds move in and out in seconds.

So it's not the greatest place to shoot if you're trying to match skies and things.

I always like these dinner table scenes. They seem very real to me

in terms of trying to get the sound and the sort of starkness and the...

One of the thematic things for me

was the sort of growing up in a certain kind of suburbia

where you were never quite aware of how people were really feeling.

There was not a real sense of... on the outward side,

of emotional... subtext, I think.

So you never quite...

Things were always very surface-orientated, at least in my recollection of it.

You never really got a sense of anything behind things.

It was always very surface-quality.

I remember thinking, watching Frankenstein and the angry villagers,

that it reminded me of certain things in the neighbourhood

in the sense of never really getting

a sense of individuality, or sort of...

again, an emotional context to things.

It always felt like the villagers in Frankenstein.

I don't know if it's because of the media, but everybody's got to the point now

where they take these causes without really feeling them

or really knowing about things - it's, uh...

There seem to be more lists and people grading people, you know?

And magazines that score things and grade things and categorise things.

It sort of makes everybody think that way. I don't know how positive that is.

The cameraman I worked with, Stefan Czapsky, is great.

He did a couple of other films that I worked on.

He did Ed Wood and Batman Returns and he's great to work with.

Again, he's able to really capture a nice fairy-tale quality

that we were trying to get.

For some reason we ended up using a lot of wide lenses.

I don't know, to capture the starkness and wonderment of suburbia.

I got to work with the great John Davidson.

One thing about doing a movie, you always get to meet kind of great, weird people

that you wouldn't ordinarily meet.

It's one of the more surreal, great aspects of filmmaking.

I did this to prove that I too could do bad daytime television.

It really makes you want to see this show, doesn't it?

I thought Winona's blonde wig

would sort of make her into a dark Hayley-Mills-type character.

One of the last of the great outdoor malls.

But in Florida there still seems to be a few of them.

I decided to use Tom Jones' music in this because...

Again, I remember growing up that I never got the sense that anybody listened to music

but everybody liked Tom Jones.

It was amazing, because it was almost like the music of the neighbourhood, so to speak.

But it did show they that did have good taste because he's great.

He's a great guy and a great musician

with an amazing voice.

I guess if they were gonna like one thing, they picked something pretty good.

I also have to hand it to all the actors for wearing these clothes.

It was probably the hardest thing to do on this movie.

It was a little scary. You were never quite sure what somebody was gonna show up in.

I always enjoyed the dinner-time conversations too.

We went for real reality with these.

More Sears photography.

We had a conversation pit built in.

Just how the Burbank police would have done it.

Anthony Michael Hall did a good job on this too.

He's played all sorts of different types of roles

but this...

I thought he captured that sort of Eddie-Haskell-on-steroids quality

like guys you remember from high school.

These were the only type of events that would bring people out into their yards, usually.

That scene was for people that don't think my films have any psychological value

or foundation to them.

It's a very deep movie.

We're definitely in the age where media

and the way people can change very quickly on an issue

or adopt an issue without really feeling it

and it seems to get more and more that way.

Both these actors have a great silent-movie quality.

They're able to say something with their eyes without having to speak,

and that's without lines and acting through bad hairstyles and everything.

It's always great to see people bring this kind of material to life.

Suburban logic.

Christmas in suburbia was always strange too

because there was always this sense of decoration and intensity

without any real feeling

or about any real tradition.

It was an odd phenomenon.

Except for, of course, the yearly tradition of assembling the Christmas tree.

That was, I guess, a tradition.

This is one of my favourite shots.

Being on the roof in suburbia

is a very exhilarating, beautiful, private moment.

It's one of the strange few places of peace in that type of environment.

Of course, ice in Florida is not the easiest thing to get, or extremely cold temperatures.

So we shot this in a combination of the actual location, Florida,

and then also in a meat freezer, I think, in Long Beach.

We used actual snow, we used plastic chips and a glittery texture,

a few different things to try to get the wet quality as well as the sparkle.

We shot a couple of scenes,

a scene where Edward is in the hospital,

on the first day of shooting that we didn't use.

Part of it was because we didn't need it and part of it was

because his makeup changed,

even though we had done testing beforehand.

The first couple of days of shooting,

it took a while to get the rhythm and the actual look of him

so his look was actually different that first day of shooting

to the rest of the filming.

That in combination with the fact that we didn't need it anyway.

The actors were so good, we might have improvised a little.

We kept pretty close to the script but the actors were really good at sort of...

Because it was a fantasy, we wanted to make sure everything sounded real

even if it was heightened.

I think everybody was sensitive throughout

to finding the right tone, maybe changing a word or two here or there

just to make it feel more real.

But the story pretty much stayed as it was.

We kept to the script.

Somehow, just, like, in suburbia everybody seems to get a little crazier

around Christmas. I don't know...

There was always a weirder sense of energy

that didn't seem to have so much to do with the actual holiday

but was just a weird, kind of strange, guilt-like energy.

Yeah, I think people feel pressured by their families

and it brings all the skeletons from the closets more out in the open.

You're never quite sure where Bill has been, what he's doing.

That's what I loved about that character.

He's got a very strange private life, I think,

that even his family doesn't know about.

I've worked with dogs and horses and I'm convinced horses don't like show business

but dogs do. Dogs seem to really...

They're the only animal I've worked with that seemed to really enjoy show business.

All other animals don't.

I think Johnny or Caroline...

Sombody... Everybody used their own inspiration for their character

and maybe it was Caroline or Johnny, one of them,

used the inspiration of a dog that they had had.

That was very much an aspect to his character as well.

A sort of simple, unconditional quality.

This moment was sort of what the movie was based on, in a way.

It was very powerful shooting this, I remember,

just given Vincent's age and all,

and what this scene was about was quite strong for everybody.

Yeah, I went to school with guys like this.

That's who I thought of. We definitely had a model to capture everybody

so you could feel whether they were getting it.

I think Anthony Michael Hall really got a certain type of person quite well.

I went to public school, Burbank public school.

I always love this phenomenon of sitting in your garage.

It's like you're sitting in your own TV set looking out at the world.

Somehow the door is the shape of it.

I remember people loving to sit in their garage and look out.

I think this was the other thing that made Johnny sick.

He did this like six times,

this dead-on run from... all the way to the end

and I think at the end of the sixth time he never came back!

He was in the bushes throwing up, I think.

The angry villagers.

We decided against giving them torches.

It was nice to be able to kind of keep it, you know, the way that we wanted to.

Often when you do a movie for a studio they want you to give it a happy ending.

You know? And that's what's great about a lot of old fairy tales.

They sort of end on a different note.

That's sort of what this is about.

I'm glad we didn't have to look at any research

and change it to a happy ending or anything

and that it could have this sort of more bittersweet ending to it.

So I was always grateful that I didn't have to go through that struggle with this.

I was lucky on this project because I think the studio got the original intent of it.

Other times I've had experiences where, you know...

When I did that short film Vincent

where the kid basically has the impression of not living at the end

though it's in his mind,

they wanted me to have him get up

and have it be a happy ending, which was the exact opposite point of it.

I was lucky on this that they got the original point of it

and the longing aspect of it and the bittersweet quality to it in the end.

That was a fight that I didn't have to fight, which was nice.

The last shot of the movie I remember as being quite beautiful to shoot.

It's a shot that... Some shots look so good, they look like miniatures in a way,

and this one looks like a miniature but to see it there live,

this full-scale mansion with snow pouring out of the windows,

was really amazing and I remember feeling at that moment...

You know when you're getting an image that's really strong and beautiful.

It's great.

So, that's it. Thank you.