Were you inspired by any earlier artists? Yes, though the set for Christmastown was more Dr Seuss inspired, much softer, rounder, a fluffy look. We tried to put a lot of Gorey-type textures on our sets. Then there were illustrators who were Tim’s inspirations, including Edward Gorey and Charles Addams. It was a low-budget film but it had a lot of high-contrast imagery, a fairy-tale quality. I drew on some of my favourite films, including The Night of the Hunter, the only Hollywood feature Charles Laughton directed. What kind of visual influences went into the design of Nightmare before Christmas apart from Tim Burton’s original drawings? Did you draw on the gothic tradition for ways of expressing nightmarishness? For example, a 9-minute film I made in 1981, Seepage, depicts stop-motion animated life-size figures by a pool who experience a collision between their world and an imaginary world they speak of. But most of my other personal work, including several short films, is about the collision of worlds. It’s pure coincidence – in fact, the idea of different holiday worlds came from Tim. You have the same contrast of worlds in one of your earlier films, Slow Bob in the Lower Dimensions. Nightmare centres on three different worlds: those of Halloweentown, Christmastown and the ‘real world’. But the bottom line was that Tim Burton’s name before the title was going to bring in more people than mine would. It’s more like he wrote a children’s book and gave it to us and we went from there. He came up five times over two years, and spent no more than eight or ten days here in total. I don’t want to take away from Tim, but he was not here in San Francisco when we made it. ![]() Every shot of the movie is something I looked at through a camera and composed. I did most sequences like the battle, or any action sequences – Tim always gives live action to a second-unit director. ![]() But I would wager that in The Nightmare before Christmas most of the lines you laugh at are mine. It’s why we hit it off at Disney – we were not having fun drawing cute foxes and little animals. We can collaborate because we often think of the same solution to a problem. It was my job in a way to make it look like a ‘Tim Burton film’, which is not so different from my own films. He wasn’t involved in a hands-on way, but his hand is in it. It’s as though he laid the egg, but I sat on it and hatched it, so it came out looking a bit like both of us. What do you think is distinctively yours about the film? ![]() The film has been marketed as Tim Burton’s The Nightmare before Christmas, but you’re the director. Director Henry Selick on ‘The Nightmare before Christmas’
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