Henry Selick would like to remove two words from the title of his directorial debut, 1993’s Tim Burton‘s The Nightmare Before Christmas. In a lively new interview with AV Club, he chafed at the “unfair” process that left someone else’s name all over his first movie.
“It wasn’t called Tim Burton’s Nightmare until three weeks before the film came out,” Selick said. “And I would have been fine with that, if that’s what I signed up for.”
Selick directed The Nightmare Before Christmas from a script by Caroline Thomson that was based on Burton’s characters and story. But Walt Disney Studios, through their label Touchstone Pictures, wanted to take advantage of Burton’s star-power. He was just coming off two wildly-successful Batman movies as well as Edward Scissorhands, and his name surely helped with the initial marketing push.
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But as Selick pointed out, when it came time to make The Nightmare Before Christmas, Burton wasn’t even on set: “Tim was in LA making two features while I directed that film, and I mean, Tim is a genius — or he certainly was in his most creative years. I always thought his story was perfect, and he designed the main characters. But it was really me and my team of people who brought that to life.”
And according to Selick, there’s yet another collaborator who tends to take full credit. “Now, of course, if you ask Danny Elfman, well, that’s his movie,” Selick said with a laugh. “When we finished the film, it was so funny because he came up to me and shook my hand. ‘Henry, you’ve done a wonderful job illustrating my songs!’ And he was serious, and I loved it!
“Fine,” he continued. “But my thing was I’m going to hang in there long enough to where people actually say, ‘Oh, that guy Henry, he does stuff.’”
Selick is making the rounds promoting his new Netflix animated adventure Wendell & Wild. In October he spoke to Consequence about his animation process, working with Jordan Peele and Keegan-Michael Key, and the extra treat he gives trick-or-treators dressed like one of his characters.
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