Tim Burton talks about his fear of AI

LONDON (AP) — Tim Burton’s imagination has produced ghosts and ghouls, Martians, monsters and misfits — all on display in an exhibition opening in London just in time for Halloween.

But you know what really scares him? Artificial intelligence.

Burton said on October 23 that seeing a website that had used AI to combine his drawings with Disney characters “really bothered me.”

“It wasn’t an intellectual thought – it was just an internal, deep-seated feeling,” Burton told reporters during a preview of “The World of Tim Burton” exhibition at London’s Design Museum. “I looked at those things and thought, ‘Some of these are pretty good.’ … [But] it gave me a strange creepy feeling inside.”

Burton said he thinks AI is unstoppable because “once you can do it, people will do it.” But he scoffed when asked if he would use the technology in this work.

“To take over the world?” he laughed.

The exhibition shows that Burton is an analog artist, who began experimenting with paint and crayons as a child in the 1960s in his suburban California home.

“I wasn’t a very verbal person to begin with,” Burton said. “Drawing was a way to express myself.”

Decades later, after films like ‘Edward Scissorhands’, ‘Batman’, ‘The Nightmare Before Christmas’ and ‘Beetlejuice’, his ideas are still starting to draw. The exhibition includes 600 items from film studio collections and Burton’s personal archive, following those ideas as they develop from sketches to collaborations with set, production and costume designers on their way to the big screen.

London is the exhibition’s final stop on a ten-year tour of fourteen cities in eleven countries. It has been reconfigured and expanded with 90 new objects for its run in the British capital, where Burton lived for a quarter of a century.

The show includes early drawings and oddities, including a contest-winning “crush nest” sign by a teenage Burton designed for Burbank garbage trucks. There’s also a reconstruction of Burton’s studio, down to the trays of paint and the ‘Curse of Frankenstein’ mug full of pencils.

In addition to hundreds of drawings, there are props, puppets, set designs and iconic costumes, including Johnny Depp’s “Edward Scissorhands” claws and the black latex Catwoman costume worn by Michelle Pfeiffer in “Batman Returns.”

“We had very generous access to Tim’s archive in London, filled with thousands of drawings, stop-motion storyboards, sketches, character notes and poems,” said exhibition curator Maria McLintock. “And how to synthesize such a broad and meandering career within one exhibition was a fun challenge – but certainly a challenge.”

Seeing it wasn’t a very pleasant experience for Burton, who said he couldn’t look at the exhibits properly.

“It’s like seeing your dirty laundry hanging on the wall,” he said. “It’s pretty amazing. It’s a bit overwhelming.”

Burton, whose highly anticipated horror-comedy sequel “Beetlejuice Beetlejuice” premiered at the Venice Film Festival in August, is currently filming the second series of Netflix’s Addams Family-themed series “Wednesday.”

Today he is a major Hollywood director whose American Gothic style has spawned an adjective: ‘Burtoneqsue’. But he still feels like an outsider.

“Once you feel that way, it never leaves you,” he said.

“Every movie I made was a struggle,” he added, noting that early films like 1985’s “Pee-wee’s Big Adventure” and 1988’s “Beetlejuice” received some negative reviews. “It seems like it was a pleasant, pleasant and easy journey, but every journey leaves its emotional scars.”

McLintock said Burton “is a deeply emotional filmmaker.”

“I think that’s what drew me to his films as a kid,” she said. “He really celebrates the misunderstood outcast, the benevolent monster. So it was a very strange but fun experience to spend so much time in his brain and his creative process.

“His films are often called dark,” she added. “I don’t agree with that. And if they are dark, there is some kind of hope in the darkness. In his films you always want to hang out in the dark.”