October 15, 2005

From scotsman.com

LOVE YOU TO DEATH

"JUST THINK: AFTER BEING AN APE, HE saw through to the real me," exclaims Helena Bonham Carter, recalling how love blossomed with director Tim Burton after he cast her as a chimpanzee in his flawed "re-imagining" of Planet of the Apes (2001).

Today, the couple, still unmarried, live in adjoining houses in North London with their two-year-old son, Billy - an arrangement the British press, says Bonham Carter dismissively, sometimes portrays as "weird" and "yet more evidence of a strange dysfunction" between the pair.

In fact, it sounds like a perfectly sane solution for two creative people who want to be together but also want their own space - and have enough money to pay for it. "We're very, very lucky," agrees the diminutive actress. "But Billy will just have to buy his own house when he grows up," she adds, chuckling. We are at the Venice Film Festival, where Bonham Carter and Burton are publicising the beautifully rendered stop-motion feature, Corpse Bride, a film in the mould of 1993's A Nightmare Before Christmas, only with fewer songs.

Drawing on Russian fairy tales and Jewish mythology, it casts Bonham Carter as the voice of a murdered bride who rises from the grave when a groom, Victor (Johnny Depp), mistakenly places a wedding ring on her finger, believing it to be a twig. Determined to get hitched, the rotting lovely pursues Victor above and below ground, threatening his marriage to his warm-blooded fiancée, Victoria (Emily Watson). This being a Burton film, the heart moves in mysterious ways, and even the dead have their attractions. Where Planet of the Apes flirted with the possibility of inter-species romance, Corpse Bride emits a faint whiff of Edgar Allen Poe-like necrophiliac desire.

Aided by co-director Mike Johnson, Burton lets loose his Gothic obsession, painting the underworld as a funkier, cooler, livelier place than the drab and repressed land of the living. The filmmaker denies that his subversive symbolism celebrates death; he is simply taking the fear out of it, he insists. Recalling growing up close to Mexico in Burbank, California, Burton says the film's singing and dancing skeletons have their roots in the Day of the Dead, which he always saw as a more positive way of dealing with death.

"The culture I was raised in, death was always looked upon as dark and forbidden and not discussed. But I just felt like that other way was so much more appropriate. It's much more a celebration of life and a more positive way of dealing with death than as this sort of unspoken, scary thing." So his fascination with this stuff isn't morbid or depressing? "Not at all. I find it quite uplifting. I don't consider [Corpse Bride] a downer at all."

The film is typical of Burton in that it involves the collision of two different worlds that can be viewed as metaphors for the imagination and the rational mind. Hearing Bonham Carter describe their domestic set- up, it sounds intriguingly as if this recurring theme has been carried over into their real lives, although this time their respective imaginations appear to run rampant in both spaces. Taking me on a mental Hello!-style guided tour of their home, she says their houses are now joined by a connecting room. Turning right takes you into her world - "feminine and cutesy, a bit Beatrix Potter and a bit twee, but nice and happy" - while turning left leads to Burton's realm.

"He likes to think it's James Bond land, but he's the only one who does," she giggles. "He's got these strange fibreglass lights that look like aliens and they're about seven foot tall. There's one blue one, one green one, one white one, one red one, and they stand around the place. Then we've got paraphernalia from the films. We've got Wang, who's the Korean ventriloquist's dummy from Big Fish. He sits on the corner armchair. He's sort of Billy's older brother. And then we've got a few Oompa Loompas [from Charlie and the Chocolate Factory] around the place, including a suicidal one with blood coming out. This is all on Tim's side. I've got an Oompa Loompa head cast on my piano. You know how people have Beethoven? We've got an Oompa Loompa ..." And the press say that you are weird, I say. "I know. They've got it so wrong!"