Tim Burton says his Batman now looks like “a lighthearted romp”
Burton says he starts "laughing and crying" when asked about modern Batman movies, after years of being told his 1989 film was "too dark"
Aux News Tim Burton
If you haven’t watched Tim Burton’s 1989 Batman in a minute, it’s worth remembering that it’s a remarkably weird movie: Structurally, it’s built, at least in its first act, as an investigative thriller, with Gotham journalists investigating some weirdo named Bruce Wayne. You see a guy get electrocuted into a smoking husk in the early going. It ends with Michael Keaton’s Batman quite comfortably murdering Jack Nicholson’s Joker. It’s not, say, Batman Returns dark, but still: Pretty grim!
Even so: Burton laughed this week, when asked about how his movie stacks up to later installments in the franchise, calling it “a lighthearted romp” in comparison. Burton was speaking at a masterclass at France’s Lumière Festival today, discussing how the superhero boom he helped ignite has changed over the years. “When I first did Batman, I’d never heard of the word ‘franchise,” Burton told the crowd. “After that, it became something else.”
Burton says he gets asked, from time to time, about new Batman movies, presumably meaning films like Christopher Nolan’s Dark Knight trilogy, or Matt Reeves’ recent The Batman:
The thing that is funny about it now is, people go “What do you think of the new Batman?” and I start laughing and crying because I go back to a time capsule, where pretty much every day the studios were saying, “It’s too dark, it’s too dark.” Now it looks like a lighthearted romp.
Per Deadline, Burton—whose latest project is Netflix’s Wednesday TV show, which he serves as an executive producer on—also talked about some of the disappointments of his career, including “a musical version of the slasher movie House Of Wax with Michael Jackson.” Burton, to the crowd: “They said ‘no’. Can you believe that?” Meanwhile, of the modern movie business: “I’ve been around for a long time. Studios used to be run by people who had made movies, or at least had some connection to it, but then it was taken over by business and lawyers so people who don’t really understand or have a feel for film.”
72 Comments
a cokehead’s lighthearted romp, maybe
I doubt that actor Kevin Spacey’s accuser, who was a 14-year-old boy at the time of the alleged sexual assault, was even taken seriously. [Does Michael Jackson’s boy sleepovers come to mind?] It seems such unfortunate males rarely are.Even today, male victims of sexual harassment, abuse and/or assault are still more hesitant or unlikely than female victims to report their offenders. Males refuse to open up nor ask for help due to their fear of being perceived by peers, etcetera, as weak or non-masculine.
When I was growing up during the 1970s and ‘80s, male sex-crime plaintiffs would have been considered very un-masculine and really not what a ‘real man’ would be claiming. It’s as though boys are somehow perceived as basically being little men, and men of course can take care of themselves.
It could be the same mindset that might help explain why the book Childhood Disrupted: How Your Biography Becomes Your Biology, and How You Can Heal only included one male among its six interviewed adult subjects, there presumably being such a small pool of ACE-traumatized men willing to formally tell his own story of childhood abuse.
It might be yet more evidence of a continuing subtle societal take-it-like-a-man mentality, one in which so many men will choose to abstain from ‘complaining’ about their torturous youth, as that is what ‘real men’ do.
Sir, this is a Wendy’s.
Wendy’s sent him over here. Send him over to Burger King so we can close up for the night and go home?
Wtf are you going on about?!
Robin? Is that you?
I doubt that actor Kevin Spacey’s accuser, who was a 14-year-old boy at the time of the alleged sexual assault, was even taken seriously. It seems such unfortunate males rarely are.Even today, male victims of sexual harassment, abuse and/or assault are still more hesitant or unlikely than female victims to report their offenders. Males refuse to open up nor ask for help due to their fear of being perceived by peers, etcetera, as weak or non-masculine.
When I was growing up during the 1970s and ‘80s, male sex-crime plaintiffs would have been considered very un-masculine and really not what a ‘real man’ would be claiming. It’s as though boys are somehow perceived as basically being little men, and men of course can take care of themselves.
It could be the same mindset that might help explain why the book Childhood Disrupted: How Your Biography Becomes Your Biology, and How You Can Heal only included one male among its six interviewed adult subjects, there presumably being such a small pool of ACE-traumatized men willing to formally tell his own story of childhood abuse.
It might be yet more evidence of a continuing subtle societal take-it-like-a-man mentality, one in which so many men will choose to abstain from ‘complaining’ about their torturous youth, as that is what ‘real men’ do.
I’ll ask again: wtf are you going on about?!
Sir, go back to Wendy’s.
Can Russian troll-bots even consume human food?
Fair point, but a bit off-topic and a fairly tenuous link to the subject at hand
Nicholson is my favorite live-action Joker because he had both the humor of a clown and the menace of a murderer (and I recall he just fell off a building rather than being murdered by Batman). Ledger gave a great performance, but he’s not really that funny (Phoenix also gave a great performance, but it’s hardly the same character at all and he’s to a large extent defined by his failure to be funny).
I’d say Batman killed the Joker at the end of that film. He could’ve let him go, but instead decided to anchor his leg to that gargoyle. And either that gargoyle stays put and yanks the Joker back, slamming him into the side of the cathedral, or it somehow comes loose and causes him to plummet to his death.But anyway, I agree, Nicholson’s take was pitch-perfect.
Batman just didn’t want Joker to get away. It’s not his fault the building was falling to pieces!
I think the first line in the final confrontation in Batman saying “I’m going to kill you.”I actually think Ledger has some darkly comic moments, but the tone is just completely different. I think there’s room for both, although I was a little disappointed by the new Batman’s decision to go even further in the direction of the Nolan films and make it even more plodding and self-serious.
You’re not necessarily wrong about Reeves’ The Batman, but one thing I loved about it which neither Burton’s nor Nolan’s versions ever did was that it allowed Batman to actually be a hero. Rather than just beating the big Rogues Gallery villain at the end, he electrocutes himself, he wades into rapidly rising flood waters to rescue innocents… he puts his life on the line to save regular people, and ushers them to safety. The very end to me was more about his transformation away from being the dark and brooding avenger to being more of the kind of hero he should be.
That’s interesting. I didn’t look at it that way, but by then we were 2 and a half hours in and I was ready to go home.
It was exhausting. Not Zack Snyder exhausting but it was a lot of work to get through. And like you, I was ready for it to end. Nolan’s Batman movies, regardless of quality, were not a chore for me to watch.
Michael Keaton saved Vicky Vale and Selina Kyle, tried to rescue the “Ice Princess,” and saved Gotham from deadly gas and penguin rockets. Christian Bale rescued Rachel (repeatedly), Gordon, Gordon’s son, hostages made to look like gunmen, worked with Gordon to prevent Scarecrow’s fear toxin to infect all of Gotham, Selina Kyle, and also saved Gotham from nuclear annihilation. Did you forget, or do you consider helping people climb out of shin deep water more heroic than all of that?
Obviously I didn’t forget, but obviously you understand on a basic level there are different feels to those sets of deeds, when one set has Batman saving implied citizens you never really see, or saves them one at a time, and the other shows him plunging into danger and saving whole crowds of on-screen civilians. Yes, I feel those were different sorts of scenes, thematically and cinematographically.
Sure, there’s a difference in what you describe, but not so much the movies. There were plenty of “whole crowds of on-screen civilians,” especially in The Dark Knight Rises where we see a football stadium, children in a bus, and the stock exchange. Cops, too, ACAB, but he saved non-civilians. They were all in danger, and we see more of their faces than we do any of those who he helped out of the still shin deep water in The Batman, something he could have done as Bruce Wayne. Seems more helpful than heroic. This is also moving the goalposts from being a “hero” to hair splitting about abstract interpretation of on-screen depiction.
You keep saying “shin deep water” but the whole place was flooding and all of those people were about to drown; not sure why you think that helps your argument. And I’m also not sure why you’re trying to use scenes that had crowds of people where Batman wasn’t present to refute me, because that has nothing to do with my point.
What part of nuclear bomb do you not understand? And again, still heroic, regardless of your preferred “hero” aesthetics.And I call it shin deep water because it’s literally shin deep water.It looked worse when it was pouring in, but Batman took his sweet time wading, and none of those people were in immediate danger. The worst off of them were waist deep at best. They needed help climbing out, not help from imminent death. There were also others there helping, and Batman only pulled two people out, then they followed him with his flare. After a montage, they show him carrying one person to a stretcher. The implication was that he was helping fire fighters, National Guard, and others all night, but … that wasn’t on-screen? If you think your implied heroism is better than the Burton or Nolan implied heroism, that’s your right, but your arguments are still junk.
Again, I really don’t see what you’re trying to accomplish in bickering with me over my personal read on a scene. I feel that there’s a difference tonally between a scene in which Batman is flying a nuke out to sea and one in which there are more intimate, small-scale stakes in which he’s performing a duty as a hero to people face to face. I never said the other Batmen never saved anyone or that no one’s lives were in danger the other times. Only that there’s something unique to me in a scene in which he’s physically dragging people out of a flooding deathtrap, and standing with them waiting for help at the end.Your determination to demean and insult me for having a different read on something than you do is excessively weird, but not unexpected on this site these days.
I’m not trying to accomplish anything but conversation. I’m not attacking you personally, just how your claims don’t really hold weight, and that there were plenty of instances of small stakes heroism in the non-Reeves films. I thought your issue was a lack of “saving whole crowds of on-screen civilians,” but now you’re saying there weren’t enough one on one heroics?And it’s not that we have a different read, you have a wrong read. You like what The Batman did better than the other films, that’s not the issue, it’s just how you chose to express that appreciation at the expense of the other films, which is inaccurate. You said it allowed Batman to be heroic and the other films didn’t, then you said this Batman rescued more civilians, and now you’re saying it’s not enough one on one rescues. It sounds like you just like a helpful disaster Batman more than a larger than life superhero. And that’s fine. Just, you know, say that.
Right. “Just a conversation” in which you use phrases like “what part don’t you understand” and ask if I forgot obvious details and accuse me of moving goalposts right off the bat using the very most needle-thin nitpicky interpretations of my wording that you could muster, all without any similar goading from me. Do you initiate conversations in real life this aggressively? Something tells me you don’t.As to the substance, so to speak, of your arguments, I find nothing compelling about them at all. You can call my interpretations “wrong” all you like, but that doesn’t make them so. That pretend objectivity is amateur-hour internet shit I’ve probably seen literally a thousand other people do online, and I’m not buying it.
That scene in The Batman carries a different kind of energy, a different kind of weight of heroism, to me than the others you’ve mentioned (which are also excellent in different ways!), and not even a lifetime of misspent e-rage is going to get me to re-examine that. Maybe if you’d come at me talking like a grown-up. If you can do that, maybe I’ll engage with you again. Otherwise, no thanks. And I’ll go right on giving my view on the films to other people who can converse like adults.
Riiiiiiight, no goading of your own, all while patting yourself on the back for how much better a person than me you are. Fact remains, you used poor wording to express your point, then you backpedaled and said you meant something else and insisted you were right all along. This isn’t me having rage, this is me pointing out your shortcomings. If you want to pretend this is about something else, go ahead and keep sucking your own dick, everyone loves that kind of person.
Oh yeah, there it is. Clearly you’re just having a conversation here!Never used poor wording, never backpedaled. Everything I said was consistent. You’d see that if you cleaned the flecks of spittle off your monitor from all the foaming at the mouth.I really don’t see why anybody would ever take a single opinion of yours seriously when you clearly can’t converse like a grown adult, so I think I’ll continue not to, and go right on with my life and my opinions. Thanks for your input though, it contributed so much to this “conversation”.
That’s interesting, I thought The Batman was pretty silly compared to the Nolan trilogy or anything Snyder was trying to do.
Guy murdered his parents, hard to let that slide.
He also had the menace of a clown ,and the humour of a murderer! It works either way!
You people seem to be implying that clowns aren’t murderers.
WTF is the humor of a murderer?
Nicholson’s my favorite too for the same reasons. Going all-in on the clown gimmick is just as effective at confounding normal citizens as it is the tools in his repertoire against the dark knight. Give me the gags, and hand buzzers, and a really spine-tingling laugh that tells me you’ve gone mad! Joker is as loud as Batman is stoic, and that’s part of the dichotomy.
Phoenix’s Joker didn’t have much of these things, but he did have the laugh (and I loved their take on it). As for his failure as a comic, it raises the question on how ‘funny’ the Joker is even supposed to be. I see this villain as only amusing himself, and that’s what makes his sense of humor so sick. Maybe the Joker sequel will put a finer point on this, because Arthur was more sad than sick in the first one.
I loved both Jokers, but I liked Phoenix’s and the fact his Joker truly didn’t give a shit if he lived or died.Dent, showing Joker a coin. You live. (flips it over) You die.Joker: “Now we’re talkin’”
I was never crazy about Nicholson’s Joker, which is barely removed from most other Nicholson performances, just with a gross sheen of “really has it in for women, for some reason”. (and in any case, I don’t think he does anything nearly as funny as the pencil gag.)
But Burton’s totally right here, by today’s standards Batman is toyetic and slapsticky, with the occasional bit of mean spirit to bring it up to a PG-13. Returns made an often confounding virtue out of stepping all that up – toyetic around things that no one would possibly want.
“Toyetic” is the Schumacher movies.
Sure, also. The Burton and Schumacher movies are a lot more similar to each other than either are to any Batman movie from the last 20 years, which also backs up Burton’s point.
I give Ledger’s Joker this, he didn’t have an origin scene. He comes out of nowhere. He’s just an avatar of chaos.
All the performances have their merit, but Ledger’s Joker was the only one who had no clearly defined backstory or desire. He didn’t want to be famous/adored and he didn’t seem to care much about running Gotham. The uncenteredness made him uniquely unnerving, along with the bedraggled makeup and hair. Nicholson was fun to watch because he has that sly suaveness. I thought Phoenix’s Joker was OK, though it was a bit incel-like and I’d seen him do a better version of that character in The Master, which is more unnerving and original.
The Batman Beyond animated series once said that the Joker’s whole life revolved around trying to get Batman to laugh at one of his “jokes.” (I think the comics touched on them but I wasn’t super interested in DC comics). A lot of Batman media misses this obsession they have with each other.
Agreed, I am of the age where Nicholson IS the Joker. There is a kind of path of all the live action Jokers. Cesar Romero’s was all clown with a dash of menace, Nicholson kept the clown aspect but was more menacing, almost in a mob boss kind of way, Ledger was just full blown psychopath through and through, and Phoenix was just, well “off” it was almost more mental illness than actual menace.
It was considered pretty dark at the time, but it was the first Batman since Adam West and most people weren’t comic readers, so they really didn’t know anything other than Campy Batman and anything would be dark compared to that. There had been various Super Friends cartoons, but they were considered strictly kids stuff and West was often involved with them, so they were lumped in with 60’s Batman.
That’s a good point, I was 11 and Batman was always a cartoon or Adam West. I never read the comics.
He’s kind of right
Wow, what an in-depth analysis. Did you write this doctoral thesis yourself? Or did you just copy this low-effort bullshit straight from Reddit while sitting on the toilet?.
Weird thing to get offended over
He’s the Worst…
You flatter me so.
Not offended, just bored. Was that all the dim flickering candle inside your skull could manage, or were you just that excited about seeing your very own words on a screen?Have you tried using a Speak and Spell? Same effect, except you’ll get to hear them too.
Haha everything you type I’m reading in the voice of Gilbert Gottfried and it doesn’t disappoint
You’re either too young or too dumb to realize how much of a compliment that is, but regardless, everything about you has been disappointing. I’m sure your actual dad feels the same way.
I truly don’t understand why you feel the need to be such a dick
It’s okay. I’m sure there are lots of things you don’t understand.
Batman 1989’s Gotham City is still pretty dark even by today’s standards — it really had the sense of danger and menace. And it started the trend of showing Gotham almost always at night.
The thing that’s been lost to time with Batman 89 is that young filmmakers are now never handed the keys to such well known IP and allowed to do something weird and personal with it. Reeves had to map out exactly where he wanted to go — Batman meets Se7en — and he wasn’t allowed to deviate from that pitch. Later Batman iterations are “darker” in a much more focus tested way, where a lot of effort is made to keep things on brand and in line with fan expectations, which means they aren’t as edgy as Burton’s take.
It’s interesting though because in many ways Batman is the first example of the modern studio-manufactured franchise blockbuster. Jaws and Star Wars were surprises and a lot of the hits of the 80s were a little bit from left field, but Batman was designed first and foremost to be a huge hit and sell toys and T-shirts and
Great summation on why movies used to be good but now they are mostly horrible. Idiotic studio heads are incapable of making good art.
I think Spider-Man 3 was the beginning of the end of that era. And it was fully killed off when Rian Johnson’s “vision” pissed off Disney so much they kicked another young director off the sequel.
That’s what I said too. I always considered Batman Returns the ‘darkest’ of these, but it’s been dethroned now, and pretty stunning that The Batman isn’t rated R.
Burton’s first go is the only Batman movie worth my time.
Oh shut up, Andy.
For those of us who were a) very young, b) not comic book followers, Burton’s take on Batman seemed almost revolutionary. It was the exact opposite of what you thought a superhero movie was supposed to look and feel like. The juxtaposition of gothic, noir, and superhero elements was also culturally influential. You could see a shift in music, visuals, and overall “dark” pretensions in a lot of media after it came out. Of course the idea that Burton’s take was the first time Batman went dark and gritty is categorically untrue, but for a lot of the culture, including 11-year-old me, that movie was quite the eye-opening thing.
Burton was a real pathway to goth for older millenials. It was a gradual ramp up from Pee Wee, to Beetlejuice, to Batman, to Edward Scissorhands. And most of his stuff had a Saturday morning TV analogue. Somehow there was never an Edward Scissorhands cartoon, and I can’t believe it never happened.
There’s a great deal of silliness that people knew were silly even when Batman 89 came out. Compared to the Adam West series, of course it’s darker than that, but they had a scene where Joker was vandalizing paintings at the museum. In the spectrum where Batman does not eat nachos is 1 and serial killer Batman is 10, the Burton films are like a 4.
I’ve been around for a long time. Studios used to be run by people who had made movies, or at least had some connection to it, but then it was taken over by business and lawyers so people who don’t really understand or have a feel for film.Isn’t the exact same thing Martin Scorsese was saying last week?
Yes, but people just get so mad whenever he says anything.
around 2000 he did a Matrix style ad, made me think a lot about “WHAT IF” he redid Batman. At this point Sleepy Hallow would be a better idea, but man, Jack Palance’s weird acting is iconic, and Prince music along with Jack Nicolson getting away with everything to the point of having his friend get his own action figure…. I think it’s jut right.
I wonder what Jack Nichols thought of it?
If I stumble across reliable multiverse travel, I’m not running off from our dumpster of a timeline (probably) or doing anything profound. That would be stupid and depressing.
I WILL go to the universes with the Batman movies that had John Lithgow and Brad Dourif as the Joker. And the ones with Joe Dante and John Carpenter Batman movies.
It sucks that the timing for this didn’t line up, because I always felt that Jim Carrey would have made a perfect Joker during his heyday (as opposed to The Riddler… blech).He had the correct body type, the weird plasticity of movement, a good amount of agility, the deranged smile/laugh, solid comedic timing — I mean it was all there, as least the way I envisioned the character when I was reading the comics as a kid/teen.
I’d want to check out the universe where George Miller’s Justice League movie wasn’t cancelled at the last minute.