January 15, 2004

From the Times, UK:

HELENA BONHAM CARTER - A NEW ROLE

by David Eimer

Helena Bonham Carter is embracing parenthood with director Tim Burton

EACH TIME Helena Bonham Carter has appeared in a Tim Burton film, her delicate features have been obscured. In Planet of the Apes (2001), she was invisible behind the mask she wore to play a sensitive chimp. In Big Fish (2003) she plays an aged witch and is almost unrecognisable as herself. Given that Bonham Carter lives with Burton — and gave birth to their son Billy in October — it’s a little strange.
“I know,” she says. “It is a problem. That’s what my mother says. I hope there’s no deep meaning but that’s the way he likes me, a witch or an ape.” She laughs, but it may be true: they met on the set of Apes. So, did Burton fall for her because he liked the way she looked in her chimp costume? “Possibly. It’s worrying really, because I’m not going to wear it at home.”

They live in adjoining houses in Holland Park, London. Today though, Bonham Carter is in a New York hotel. Baby Billy is just down the corridor and, judging by the way she smiles and jokes, she couldn’t be happier. Her dual role in Big Fish — she also appears as a mysterious piano teacher, with no disguising make-up but with her dark hair dyed blonde — sees her playing two of the bizarre characters whom Edward Bloom, played by Ewan McGregor and Albert Finney at different ages, encounters in his life and who people the fantastic stories that he relates to his sceptical journalist son.

For all its fairytale imagery and moments of whimsy, Big Fish is an unusually conventional film for Burton. The story, of a reconciliation between a father and son, is more straightforward than some of his previous movies, like the wonderful Ed Wood (1994) and Edward Scissorhands (1990), and it is more sentimental than you’d expect.

According to Bonham Carter, who read the script first and advised him to make it, that’s because Burton had his own problems with his late father: “His relationship with his father was somewhat unresolved, it was difficult. Frankly, most people do have complex relationships with their parents rather than simple ones. So he knew the territory and immediately connected with it.”

It’s not hard to see why his father, a professional baseball player turned parks inspector, might have been bemused by a son who dressed only in black and preferred watching old Vincent Price movies to playing sport in the bright California sunshine.

Unlike Burton, Bonham Carter gets on so well with her mother and father, a psychotherapist and former merchant banker respectively, that she moved out of the family house in North London only a few years ago.

“I lived at home for way too long. I know that Billy won’t be doing that,” she grins. “I think I rebelled a bit later, at 30. I started smoking and pierced my ears.” She admits though, that her parents would like to see her and Burton married. “It’s not terribly important to me, but I think it might be to my Dad. I said, ‘What’s so important about it?’ and he said, ‘I just like a wedding’.”

Bonham Carter never intended to be in Big Fish. “When I read it I didn’t picture myself in it, God’s honest truth. I’m as narcissistic as any actor but I didn’t see anyone for me to play, and if you’re with somebody it has to be appropriate, otherwise it’s just too conspicuous. When I was watching it I still thought, ‘Oh God, does it look like mercy casting when the girlfriend comes on?’”

It doesn’t, and her performance is another, modest, step away from her corset-bound image. She made her name appearing in Merchant Ivory productions such as A Room with a View and Howards End and went on to win a Best Actress Oscar nomination for her role as a manipulative, turn-of-the-century woman in the 1997 Henry James adaptation, The Wings of the Dove.

Then, in 1999, she startled everyone by popping up as the scruffy chain-smoking girlfriend of Ed Norton in the controversial and often underrated Fight Club.

But even before that, she didn’t accept being confined to period pieces. “I never perceived myself the way everybody else saw me,” says Bonham Carter in her precise, upper middle-class voice. “I think that’s the case with everyone. Most people who know me thought that I was playing myself in Fight Club. I’m closer to that character than all those other corset parts.”

Indeed, she’s famous for her eccentric dress sense — for our interview she wears a flouncy black skirt with a plunging pink top she picked up on the Portobello Road.

Being the director’s girlfriend meant making Big Fish was a different experience from other films. “It was funny because on the first day Tim didn’t really talk to me,” she says. “He talked to Ewan a lot and I thought, ‘Hello, do I get any small talk?’ I said to him at the end of the day, ‘Come on, you’ve got to give me some confidence here. I need some reassurance’. He said, ‘I didn’t want to be seen playing favourites’. I said, ‘I really don’t think Ewan would mind you preferring me to him’. So the next day it was the complete opposite. ‘Can I get you a chair? A drink?’”

Her pregnancy wasn’t planned but the 37-year-old, who previously went out with Kenneth Branagh for five years, knew that it was the right time. “I didn’t want to become a DIY mother, a single parent, and I definitely wanted Tim’s child. I thought it would be the ultimate creativity.”

It is because Burton is an artist that they decided to buy houses next door to each other: “They’re getting attached as we speak,” says Bonham Carter. “I’ve always needed my own space and Tim definitely needs his because he works from home. He’s always drawing and doing poems. And he’s constantly mobile. He paces everywhere and he couldn’t always be pacing in my space because it would drive me absolutely potty.”

Burton had no problem leaving his home in LA: “Tim always wanted to live in London. When we finally got it together, so to speak, he said within weeks, ‘Why don’t I try living in London?’ He feels like he belongs there and not in Burbank.”

Next, she’ll be heard but not seen again as the voice of Lady Tottington, Wallace’s girlfriend, in the first Wallace and Gromit movie, Wallace and Gromit: Curse of the Wererabbit: “I love them, I think they are genius. I mean Nick Park (the creator of the duo), not the characters. They’re Plasticine.”

But right now, Bonham Carter is more preoccupied with her son. “I’m in a bit of a daze because I’m breast-feeding. I put him on and he sucks away and I think, ‘Oh my head’s just vanished’,” she laughs, “but it will be back.”