Mexico City, (EFE) .- American director Tim Burton emerged from the dense fog that hugged one of the chapels of the Civil Pantheon of Dolores, the largest in Mexico, to offer a master class to dozens of followers who came from the whole country to see, in the middle of a rainy afternoon, one of the best exponents of the Gothic terror of this century.
“Welcome to my new house,” said the filmmaker with the shoes soaked from the same land that protects in its depths the remains of Mexican artists such as Diego Rivera, José Clemente Orozco or David Alfaro Siqueiros, in the mythical roundabout of illustrious people.
While in the background the voice of actor Johnny Depp was heard with the theme ‘Pretty Woman’, one of the songs of the musical Sweeney Todd (2008), the director confessed his pleasure to walk through the cemeteries either day or night.
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“I always found the cemeteries as peaceful and creative places, they are places where ideas could go to think. At the same time they are exciting, tranquilizers and spiritual. In addition, they have had a lot of strength in my creative life,” said the filmmaker, who as a young man had the habit of around the cemetery of Valhalla Memorial Park in Burbank (California), his place of birth.
With 31 awards and 80 nominations for its international film trajectory, a list that still does not include any Oscar, Burton is also described as a silent being that during his childhood found in the figure of the “monster” a way of understanding his own sentimentality.
“I identified with the monsters because they are usually the most emotional creatures in the movies (…) the angry villagers in Frankenstein were faceless people, while the monsters are more emotional and misunderstood,” said the author of grotesque characters with real problems such as ‘Beetlejuice’ or ‘Edward Scissorhands’.
In this master class in one of the parts of the Chapultepec forest of Mexico City, the 66 -year -old artist, who found his place in the classic horror cinema of producer Robert Corman and the legendary villain, actor Vincent Price, said that the drawing fell in love from the first moment because he could express himself for the first time.
“As a child I loved drawing, and I think that all children like. In my case, I kept doing it, even if I didn’t do very well, I simply helped me to express myself. I discovered that drawing was, to a large extent, a way that helped me to think about ideas and express myself, because, as a child, I didn’t speak much,” he said.
Burton not only continued to draw but his art found place in Disney – a space he said “would not return” – and in the most important museums in the world, and from Mexico, as he did in 2017 with the exhibition ‘The world of Tim Burton’, in the Franz Mayer Museum. Now with ‘The Labyrinth’, a sample that will open to the public on June 26 in the Mexican capital.
On this next assembly, he mentioned that it is “different” because it represents the path of its creative process, from the drawing and in everything that it can be transformed, as “the fragments of the mind” that suddenly become a character.
With a sample of more than 200 original works and replicas of material used in its feature films, ‘the labyrinth’ arrives in Mexico, a country that defines as “charming” and, at the same time, different for its connection so open with death, a description that could fit in almost any character of the ‘Burtonian’ universe.
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