From the museum to the cemetery, according to Tim Burton, there is only one step. “I love these places silent, full of mystery, encouraging discovery and introspection, straddling life and death”, confided the filmmaker, at the beginning of October 2023, during the inauguration of an exhibition to his glory, at the Cinema Museum in Turin. The Piedmontese city extended its arms, so to speak, to the author ofEdward Scissorhands (1990): with its shroud, its sarcophagi and its automobile wrecks, Turin wonderfully combines the mortuary and the museum. Like the Mole Antonelliana, the monumental building housing the Cinema Museum, which looks like a pagoda or pyramid. “This place is one of the most fascinating to have ever shown my work”enthuses, at 65, the director.
Designed in 2008 for the MoMA in New York, the course adapts to the thousand and one cities it visits, with varying degrees of success. The Turin dome turns out to be particularly appropriate, as its museum has been used since it opened in 1953 to celebrate the two sides of cinema, art and entertainment. Its vast spaces, ideal for spectacular scenographies, bring to life the sketches, sculptures, photos and other archives of the eccentric Californian, until April 7.
After Halloween and Christmas, costume visits are planned for Carnival, while a local chocolate shop, Novi, treats visitors to cocoa-filled homages to Willy Wonka, one of the Burtonian characters most enjoyed by the general public. “We only had six months to set up the exhibition, but the record attendance proves that in Piedmont we know how to work quickly and well”welcomes the president of the Museum, Enzo Ghigo, whose love of cycling would make Pee Wee, another Burtonian icon, swoon.
“Technology is destroying humanity”
It is a barely later creature, Beetlejuice, that the director is preparing to resurrect, thirty-five years after the first part. “ Beetlejuice2 will not, strictly speaking, be a “sequel”explains Tim Burton. What has happened to these characters all this time? This is what the film will dig into. » Exhilarated by the success of his series Wednesday for Netflix, the Californian no longer harbors any illusions about the dream factory. “You know, when I started at Disney, in the 1980s, I was the last designer to occupy the offices: executives took our place, one by onehe rewinds. Since then, the struggles between artists and salespeople have never stopped… As they grow, the studios become more standardized. For my part, I focus on the project that I want to complete. If I worried about the rest, I wouldn’t work anymore. »
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