The Epoch Times recently sat down with the famed yet eccentric filmmaker Tim Burton to discuss the new film 9. The animated feature film is directed by the young and talented Shane Acker, who was nominated for an Academy Award for the film short with the same title. Burton switched roles this time, taking on the project as a producer after screening the critically acclaimed short.
“When I first saw the short, I really liked it … and I felt very close to Shane’s design sensibility and the kind of characters [presented], and so the short felt like a piece of a larger picture.
“It just felt pretty natural to me, and I just felt that after going through making animated films and trying to get films going, that I could offer [Shane] an environment and some support to where he could just focus on making his film.”
Burton says he took a more empathetic approach as a producer, thinking about the process from the perspective of a director.
“What do I want when I make a movie, what is helpful to me … so we both, Timur [Bekmambetov, co-producer] and I, tried to offer Shane that sort of support. You know I suggested the screenwriter whom I work with, and so I knew that’d be a good mix of people like Danny [Elfman, the film’s composer] and wherever I could give anything.”
Burton went on to praise Acker for his revolutionary filmmaking style, and also his level of humility and flexibility.
“As an animator you get very tunnel-visioned. Shane has had this in his mind for so long that it is sometimes good to step back and look at the big picture. So that’s what we tried to do … suggestions, script, characters, actors, that kind of thing. Shane is enough of an artist that he is not feeling insecure about his own thing … So there was no ‘this is my idea, your idea.' It was all for the benefit of the project.”
“The thing that intrigued me about [9] was, you see a lot of personal films, you rarely see the slightly personalized animated films … and that’s what I liked about it. And we’ve all seen post-apocalyptic imagery a million times. But again, I was surprised at how the kind of poetry to this and the sort of quietness and the kind of things between the lines to this that I really enjoyed—the style of animation, the performances going for a more naturalistic [feel]. It just felt like it was in new category in terms of animation.”
The film 9 is set in a post-apocalyptic world, where humans have been killed off by computerized machines, and the only remnant of humanity is reflected through “stitch-punks,” beings that bear a portion of the human soul.
The stitch-punks are voiced by an all-star cast consisting of Christopher Plummer, Martin Landau, John C. Reilly, Crispin Glover, Jennifer Connelly, Elijah Wood, and the cartoon voices of Alan Oppenheimer and Fred Tatasciore.
9 opens nationally on Wednesday, Sept. 9, fittingly marking the date 9/9/09.
