by C.H. Chavez

Created on: April 14, 2009

Tim Burton: Director, Producer, and Screenwriter

"I've always been more comfortable making my decisions from the subconscious level, or more emotionally, because I find it is more truthful to me. Intellectually, I don't think like that because I get uncomfortable. I'm more wary of my intellectual mind, of becoming delusional if I think of it too much." This quote from Tim Burton illustrates his thoughts and actions in his career. As children, the use of imagination can help any individual get through any predicament. Developmental psychology "studies the way humans develop and change over time." (Kowalski, 2005, p. 459)

This allows psychologists and researchers to measure and define why people behave and react the way they do. People are influenced at a young age and those influences are carried on through adulthood. Tim Burton has declared that there are "[many] things you see as a child [that] remain with youyou spend a lot of your life trying to recapture the experience." (B. Andac)

Timothy William Burton was born in Burbank, California in 1958, "quite literally, a child of Hollywoodalbeit a child who was considered by those around him, and by himself, a misfit who spent his days feeding on a steady diet of horror and science fiction." (B. Andac) Tim Burton was born and raised in conformity everything in his hometown of Burbank seemed the same, the same conformity he mocks in the movie Edward Scissorhands. "Burton-a withdrawn and naturally sensitive boy-was very much a part of this world at an early and... impressionable age... He made his own adjustments to the era. An unusually perceptive child, as is often the case with creative children who observe from the sidelines, Tim was quick to see the facade of his suburban existence." (Hanke, 1999, p. 29)

Tim Burton spent most of his time drawing and making short movies that he used to replace the essays that his teachers assigned him. According to Ken Hanke in his biography about Tim Burton he states, "There seems to have been little or no real sense of family in the Burton household, at least from Tim's perspective. When asked about his father in a 1991 interview for the New York Times Magazine, he commented, I'm not close to him. It's been a source of confusion. I'm just something of a remote person in some ways. I've had an incredible desire to get out of the house from an early age.' His feelings about his mother are equally detached: I don't know. It sort of freaked me out several years ago, realizing I don't

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