Despite the phenomenal box-office take of Alice in Wonderland, it wasn’t exactly Tim Burton’s finest achievement. However, he’s hopefully back to form with Dark Shadows, an adaptation of a gothic soap opera. It’s naturally dark, so here’s hoping it lacks the faux-edginess of “Wonderland.”
Burton recently chatted with MTV – you can check out that full conversation here – about several different projects, including “Shadows." He admits that he's in the panicking stage, reveals that most of the film takes place in the early 1970s, and discusses how we can expect, of all things, a Grey Gardens vibe. Here's a snippet:
"It's got such a strange vibe. And it's not something that a lot of people necessarily know. You're trying to do a weird soap opera. I felt really lucky, because the cast is really good. People like Michelle [Pfeiffer] grew up watching it. Some of the cast knew about it. Some didn't, but they were all game for it — getting into the weird spirit of what "Dark Shadows" was. It has a weird sense of heightened melodrama. There was a generation of us who would run home from school to watch it. That's probably why we were such bad students. We should have been doing homework; we were watching "Dark Shadows" instead. It was hard to put into words the tone it was. It had a weird seriousness, but it was funny in a way that wasn't really funny. We just had to feel our way through it to find the tone. We didn't do any real rehearsals, because the cast all came in at different times. But there was an old photo of the [original] cast which I always remembered, so a couple days before shooting, we got the whole cast together to take a similar shot so everyone could see each other and get that vibe from doing a group photo. That helped set the tone more than anything ... the thing about "Dark Shadows" was it was a very hermetically sealed world. It's mainly the internal family melodrama. You get a little bit of the sense of the world, but it's like "Grey Gardens," where these people are in their own sort of world.
