Tim wanted some though, so the morning of, we frantically painted about four dozen abstract paintings on canvas and just put them up wet and it actually worked fine.” Laughing, he adds, “With abstract art, you can do that. “Tim showed up and there weren’t actually any abstract paintings. “We prepared this big art park and had about 500 paintings ,” Heinrichs says of the Sunday art-park scene during which Margaret meets Walter, who is stationed at a neighboring stall, early in the film. “That was a case of Tim coming and saying, ‘No, I want smaller.’ So that was a very specific set compression and the sense of it being in a box.”ĭespite the meticulousness with which Heinrichs went about re-creating Keane’s surroundings for the screen, the Oscar-winning production designer admits that there was one moment when sheer panic descended on the Tim Burton set. “It’s the story of an oddball artist kind of working in isolation and manipulated and kept in a box and kept apart from the world,” Heinrichs says, a point that he and Burton underscored by making Margaret’s studios, especially the one in Walter’s home, exaggeratedly confined to the point where they had to create false walls so that they could be let out for crew members while filming. Heinrichs notes that Margaret’s real-life story had uncanny parallels to previous Tim Burton movies. She is still kind of confined to her studio, but the place also expresses some more of her optimism, with the bright color, and weirdly, that mid-century-modern flight of fancy that kind of expresses Walter’s somewhat unhinged personality.” “Then when she moved in with Walter into his house in Berkeley, that was more of a brooding, dark, male interior, reflects how domineering he was in their relationship.” By the time they had moved into the mid-century-modern house, and Margaret had begun to show some resentment toward Walter’s scheme, “there’s a little bit more of a parity between the power that is established there. “We Margaret’s personality with the kind of colors we would use in her suburban house and her first apartment in San Francisco-soft and pastel that show optimism,” Heinrichs says of the period before Margaret’s husband exerted complete control over her. While the paintings tell their own story of Margaret’s artistic evolution, Heinrichs also telegraphed the artist’s emotional state through her surroundings and claustrophobic studio spaces. This was not just about trying to create mise-en-scène, but to create a chronology to everything.” Occasionally we would see paintings stacked up against the wall, and we’d try to figure out which paintings they were. We’d be looking to see what was on the wall- often hung her paintings on the wall. “Every time we got a photograph, we would be looking at the furniture, to see which house it was. “These very casual family images,” he tells us. Instead, Heinrichs focused his energy on re-creating a believable 1950s San Francisco in Vancouver (where much of the film was shot) and Margaret’s environment in that fraudulent chapter of her life, drawing inspiration from historical evidence, magazine spreads, and private photos provided by Margaret and her daughter Jane. Since expressiveness, style, and surreality are already so overt in Keane’s artwork, Heinrichs and Burton did not have to go to additional lengths to establish that theme. “It is still about going to the source material of the script and finding the elements that we want to make expressive or stylize or make somewhat more surreal.” Burton’s latest film, Big Eyes, chronicles how the late con artist Walter Keane took credit for his wife Margaret Keane’s iconic paintings, which depict children with hauntingly over-size eyes. “Whenever I work with Tim, it’s not about sticking to a style,” says Heinrichs, who has worked with Burton on more than eight projects-including Edward Scissorhands, Planet of the Apes, and Sleepy Hollow, for which he won an Oscar. But as Big Eyes production designer and longtime Burton collaborator Rick Heinrichs tells it, that is not how Tim’s filmmaking process works. Tim Burton films have such a specific, unifying theme and visual style-the tales of misfits told through a prism of dark humor and surreal imagery-that it is easy to imagine members of the filmmaker’s creative coterie working carefully to frame each film in precise Tim Burton fashion.
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