Entertainment

Burton’s latest ‘Nightmare’ opens autumn movie slate

Tim Burton is either exceedingly tired or exceedingly cool — he’s sporting sunglasses during an indoor interview at a Midtown hotel. We’re guessing he’s just plain exhausted. The Goth director (inset) has lots going on this fall. For example:

He produced the animated “9”

“9” — not to be confused with “District 9” or November’s “Nine” — is a dark, animated movie opening Wednesday (9/09/09), directed by Shane Acker. It’s set in the future when machines have turned on mankind (when haven’t they?) and wiped out everyone on the planet. Before he dies, a scientist imbues nine rag dolls with life so that they can carry on civilization.

Burton signed on as producer after watching Acker’s short film (available on YouTube). “We’ve all seen post-apocalyptic imagery a million times in films. We’ve all seen that man versus machine. Yeah, we know. We get that. But it still surprised me, this one,” Burton says. “There’s an emotional quality to it. You have these nonhuman doll characters, but there’s a surprising amount of emotion involved with it.”

Acker’s design sensibility, dubbed “stitchpunk,” should remind audiences of Burton’s “The Nightmare Before Christmas” and “Corpse Bride.”

“That’s why I felt close to it,” Burton says. “And again, people accuse me of, the movies look good, but there’s no story. With this, the feel and the look and the texture of the characters is what it’s about. So there is something to be said where the look is part of the story and is part of the vibe.”

His art will be featured at MoMA, beginning Nov. 22

The retrospective showcases Burton’s paintings, drawings and production storyboards. “It makes me afraid in a way. I know how I get when I show a movie, and that’s very hard for me. But this is even weirder than that,” he says. “But it’s exciting. Their goal, which I appreciate, instead of categorizing things as film or art, they show that there is crossover. I remember when I was younger and saw Fellini films, then saw some of his drawings, I found that very exciting. People just don’t do one thing. They dabble in lots of things, and it’s all part of a bigger picture.”

His upcoming “Alice in Wonderland”

Burton is furiously working to finish the film, which stars Johnny Depp as the Mad Hatter. “I’ve got a lot to do. It’s all I can think about,” he says. “It comes out in March. If you saw where it is, you’d think it was March of 2012.”

Burton is also using more tech than he has before, including loads of CG effects. “You just look at the project and figure out the best way to achieve it. But it remains to be seen, because I don’t know,” he says. “It’s experimentation. I’m sure Disney doesn’t want to hear that it’s an experiment, but it kinda is.”

His favorite holiday is coming soon

Every day is Halloween around Burton’s house. It’s stuffed with props from his movies, including puppets from “Corpse Bride” and Oompa-Loompas from “Charlie and the Chocolate Factory.”

“People come over to the house, and they do get freaked out by all the props,” he says. “There was a Movieland Wax Museum out in California, and they went out of business, so I bought the Sammy Davis Jr. figure. I had it delivered to our house, and one of the kids who came over went screaming back to his parents that we had a dead black man on our sofa.”