--- title: Tim Burton: The Artistry Behind the Movies | TIME description: The visionary director of Edward Scissorhands and Batman talks to TIME's Richard Lacayo about a new exhibition of his artwork at MoMA canonical: https://time.com/video/iMnrY739/ og:title: Tim Burton: The Artistry Behind the Movies og:description: The visionary director of Edward Scissorhands and Batman talks to TIME's Richard Lacayo about a new exhibition of his artwork at MoMA og:url: https://time.com/video/iMnrY739/ og:image: https://cdn.jwplayer.com/v2/media/iMnrY739/poster.jpg?width=720 og:type: video.other twitter:card: summary_large_image twitter:title: Tim Burton: The Artistry Behind the Movies twitter:description: The visionary director of Edward Scissorhands and Batman talks to TIME's Richard Lacayo about a new exhibition of his artwork at MoMA twitter:image: https://cdn.jwplayer.com/v2/media/iMnrY739/poster.jpg?width=720 --- # Tim Burton: The Artistry Behind the Movies > Sponsored content. 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They are at time.com/newsletters and are separate from a paid subscription. ## Video: Tim Burton: The Artistry Behind the Movies [Watch (HLS stream): Tim Burton: The Artistry Behind the Movies](https://cdn.jwplayer.com/manifests/iMnrY739.m3u8) (4:15)  _Published 2009-11-23. The visionary director of Edward Scissorhands and Batman talks to TIME's Richard Lacayo about a new exhibition of his artwork at MoMA_ --- Jul 27, 2023 1:16 PM UTC --- ## More From This Series [All Videos](https://time.com/video/) [Big Eyes Official Trailer #1 \(2014\) - Tim Burton, Amy Adams Movie HD](/video/3UZuZl88/) ### Big Eyes Official Trailer #1 (2014) - Tim Burton, Amy Adams Movie HD [TIME's Favorite Movie Kisses](/video/bl2FyODa/) ### TIME's Favorite Movie Kisses [TIME's Favorite Chinese Movies](/video/bvnXzN7d/) ### TIME's Favorite Chinese Movies --- ## Transcript >> You're lucky in your life if you have, you know, a few amazing surreal moments, and you know, this is definitely a strange, amazing moment. >> Tim Burton is best known for his films like Betelgeuse, Batman, and Edward Scissorhands. But the Museum of Modern Art in New York is now devoting a big show, not only to his movies, but to his many drawings, paintings, and other artworks. I am Richard Lacayo, the art critic of TIME, and I got a chance to talk to Tim recently at the Museum. >> Now were you sort of a little like the boy in Vincent, your early cartoon, kind of like a loner, or a somewhat dark- viewed kid. >> Vincent Malloy is 7 years old. He is always polite and does what he is told. >> Yeah, I was a very shy slightly non- verbal child. Very interiorized and-- so yeah, I mean that part of my life is likely very important that is a private, internal, because that is where, honestly, everything comes from. But yeah, now that is a pretty autobiographical piece. >> What other kinds of sources were you looking at as a kid, when you were making your drawings? >> My first love was monster movies, and so a lot of that, you know, watching horror movies on TV, I would hang out, subscribe to famous monsters in film land, you know. I also felt very normal that way, like everybody, all the kids kind of like that stuff. So, you know, it seemed pretty natural. >> Let me ask you a little about these creatures right here because I noticed that these are three creatures from 2009, I don't recognize them from any of your films. >> The thing about the show for me, and what it had done, is they serve-- kind of show the mutating process of things, you know. Some things are just little sketches. They never make it anywhere. Some things are a seed of an idea that mutated to something else, sometimes in films, sometimes in whatever drawing, or whatever. >> I'm just surprised at how many things there are, like in these galleries that are basically three- dimensional sculpture pieces. >> Well, I just you know, the space, you know, I just love the space, and so I just took some pictures of stuff and you know, I just like the lobby. I just love that, and so something I always felt for me, when I went into a museum. I like stuff when it's kind of crazy-- you know, and so the idea was to just kind of make it a bit more fun and kind of fill the spaces a little bit more in keeping in the spirit of it. So it was fun to do. >> Now, you have a tendency to create monstrous characters who look like they are very often in some kind of distress themselves, as though their own monstrousness was sort of a defensive mechanism that is still not good enough to defend them against whatever is out there, and that sounds like real life to me. >> That is what a lot of the stuff is for me is the externalizations of feelings. So it's a cathartic way of getting things out without, you know, exploding or doing, you know, committing criminal acts and whatever you know. It's like-- it's a way of just letting those things out. It's a great form of therapy. >> When you made Edward Scissorhands, did that grow out of drawings that you were then doing over a period of years, or did you think I wanna do a story about a boy with scissor hands, and now I will try to draw it? >> No, no. I don't think that way at all. I mean that is exactly the opposite. It is more just a lot of that one came from just sketches, but also a feeling. It was a very specific feeling of growing up and mainly being a teenager, and that feeling of feeling a lot of feelings, but being perceived as something that you are not. It goes back to the kind of classics like Frankenstein, or most great monster movies, you know. And so those are the kind of characters that felt like me, and that is so that is where all of the other stuff comes from, those feelings of being damaged or stitched, or just compartmentalized and schizo-- you know, all those kind of feelings that sometimes, I am not saying everybody feels them, but I will speak for myself. ```json {"@context":"https://schema.org","@type":"VideoObject","name":"Tim Burton: The Artistry Behind the Movies","description":"The visionary director of Edward Scissorhands and Batman talks to TIME's Richard Lacayo about a new exhibition of his artwork at MoMA","thumbnailUrl":"https://cdn.jwplayer.com/v2/media/iMnrY739/poster.jpg?width=720","uploadDate":"2009-11-23T14:43:37.000Z","contentUrl":"https://cdn.jwplayer.com/manifests/iMnrY739.m3u8","embedUrl":"https://time.com/video/iMnrY739/","duration":"PT4M15S","potentialAction":{"@type":"SeekToAction","target":"https://time.com/video/iMnrY739/?jw_start={seek_to_second_number}","startOffset-input":"required name=seek_to_second_number"}} ```