October 22, 2005

From the Western Mail

HERE COMES THE BRIDE

by Rob Driscoll

She is the quintessential English actress, he the kooky film-making genius. Helena Bonham Carter and Tim Burton tell Rob Driscoll about their latest joint venture

SHE was once the period costume princess, but these days Helena Bonham Carter is the undisputed queen of animation voice-overs, thanks to her heard-but-not-seen roles in Wallace and Gromit: The Curse of the Were-Rabbit, and this week's new big-screen release Corpse Bride.

"It's the perfect solution, really," says the award-winning 39-year-old actress, who plays ever-so-posh Lady Campanula Tottington in the Wallace and Gromit opus, and the eponymous dead heroine of spooky half-term treat Corpse Bride. "I hate watching myself on screen, so it's been quite painless watching these two movies.

"In fact, I'm wondering whether my Corpse Bride character can do every other part for me from now on, and I'll just fill in the voice!"

Corpse Bride is the fourth film Bonham Carter has made in conjunction with director Tim Burton, since this unlikeliest of showbiz couples fell in love on the set of his 2001 remake Planet of the Apes, in which she played a monkey.

"With other people she can play humans," says Burton. "With me, it's completely non-human characters."

Well, that's not strictly true; most recently she played Mrs Bucket in Burton's box-office smash Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, made more or less around the same time as Corpse Bride.

But does she get special treatment from her partner on set? Bonham Carter shakes her head defiantly.

"Big Fish was the first thing we did together as a couple. In fact, I was pregnant with his child," she recalls. And on the first day's filming, he completely ignored me.

"Ewan (McGregor) got all Tim's small talk, and even all of his superlatives. All I got was, 'Let's move on, that'll do!' At the end of the day, I said. 'You can talk to me, you know!' And Tim said he didn't want people to think he was showing me favouritism.

"The next day, he was moving chairs for me, bringing me tea and coffee. But to be honest, when you start concentrating on the task in hand, you tend to forget you're working with your other half. It's not strange at all."

Burton even made his better half audition for the title role of Corpse Bride - and kept her waiting two weeks before his final decision.

"There was a strange silence from him for a while," smiles Bonham Carter. "But that's rather nice. You need to have some objectivity sometimes. I have to be right for something, otherwise it would be appalling if I just got a part because I'm sleeping with the director."

Burton has also been accused of "favouritism" when it comes to casting Johnny Depp so often in his films (five in all: Edward Scissorhands, Ed Wood, Sleepy Hollow, Charlie and the Chocolate Factory and now, Corpse Bride).

"People say I work with him just because I know him, but that's crazy," says Burton. "I'd never work with somebody just because they're my friend, or partner, like Helena.

"In fact it's harder with friends, because you want to ensure it's absolutely right. And with Helena, I probably did take a bit more time to make sure she was absolutely right for the role."

Burton and Bonham Carter bounce off each other's sentences with an affable blend of mischievous spontaneity and effortless eccentricity.

She may be the ultimate English rose, and the great grand-daughter of Liberal Prime Minister HH Asquith, while he might be the wunderkind Hollywood genius of all things dark and twisted, from downtown Burbank, California, but together they present an irresistible package.

Home for them today is north London - actually in two houses. The house next door to Bonham Carter's came up for sale when she and Burton got together, and the connecting room between the two homes is now their two-year-old son Billy's.

Back up on screen meanwhile, Corpse Bride, their latest dual opus, is classic Burton in the mould of A Nightmare Before Christmas; a deliciously perverse, twisted and (at first sight) gloomy Victorian-era tale of the un-living underworld, brought to life entirely by stop-motion animation, with (like Wallace and Gromit) as little computer-generated imagery or digital trickery as possible.

Burton regular Johnny Depp voices the leading male character of Victor, an eligible bachelor who is officially betrothed to Victoria.

But at their wedding rehearsal, Victor bungles his vows so badly that he is sent away to learn his lines correctly.

Humiliated, he wanders off into the dark forest, where he is able to recite his vows perfectly, even going so far as to gently place the wedding ring on the root of a tree.

But it isn't a root at all; terrifyingly, the strange and beautiful decaying corpse of a woman wearing the tattered remains of a wedding gown rises up from the ground - and it seems that Victor has unwittingly betrothed himself to the Corpse Bride (voiced by Bonham Carter).

It truly is a world apart from the bustles and petticoats of the genre that Bonham Carter embodied in the late '80s and '90s - especially her trio of EM Forster adaptations, namely Howards End, with Anthony Hopkins and Emma Thompson, A Room with A View, and Where Angels Fear To Tread.

But can she really enjoy watching herself as the Corpse Bride character who is, in essence, nothing more than a skeleton?

And won't a lot of children be scared witless - if only by the maggot which regularly crawls through her eye socket?

"I don't think it's that scary!" she protests.

"Or have I been living with Tim for too long?"

Burton quickly chips in. "We have a two-year-old and he's already seen When Dinosaurs Ruled the Earth and Dawn of the Dead," says the 47-year-old director.

"But I really find that a lot of what kids fear comes from their parents.

"They seem to have their own barometers of what they can take. I think a good animation should be scary to some degree. Look at the Disney classics which have left deep scars on the minds of many of us."

Bonham Carter swiftly agrees.

"Fairy tales have always got to have something a bit scary for children - as long as you make them laugh as well," she says. "I watched an interview with Roald Dahl, and he said kids love being frightened, as long as you make them laugh at the same time. Dahl was the darkest of writers.

"I asked my mum, who's a very clever psychotherapist, and she says that kids love stories about death; they need it, they need to have stories that deal with death and explain it, as a place to put their fears - and actually, Corpse Bride is a beautiful and very comforting, joyous portrayal of what might be beyond life."

As for watching herself on screen as Corpse Bride, Bonham Carter admits she can't really recognise herself.

"Apart from the eyebrows," she muses. "I have hyperactive, over-expressive eyebrows, so maybe that was a legacy.

"But Richard E Grant, a very dear friend of mine, said to me when he saw the film, 'She's so obviously you!' I wasn't sure how to take that!

"I relate to her as far as her maggot is concerned. We all have little voices inside us - they just might not be green, or maggots."

Not that surprisingly, there weren't that many differences for Bonham Carter in her method of working while providing her voice for the Wallace and Gromit movie, currently riding high in the box-office charts on both sides of the Atlantic.

"It's still the same kind of work - everyone knows by now, I'm sure, that you record your voice first, so you're kind of creating the score to which they then choreograph the movie," she explains.

"You're obviously there to please the animators - it's definitely a collaboration.

"The only thing I'd say about working with Nick Park and his team at Aardman is they tend to be a bit more anal. They're ever so sweet, as any animator is, and very polite - I think they're happier working with Plasticine dolls rather than people.

"They'll say 'That was marvellous,' and you know you'll have to do it 18 more times. But of course they're going to be anal, because they're miniaturists.

"They're creating a few seconds of film footage a day, so they can hear nuances which you'd never hear.

"But it's fun. I love doing animation voice-overs, because it doesn't matter what you look like, and you get to a play a wide range of parts that you'd never get to play in real life, in your own body."