When talking about his two upcoming vampire films—Dark Shadows and Abraham Lincoln: Vampire Hunter—the director let slip that he saw a bit of one of the insanely popular bloodsucker romances.
While talking with New York Magazine about how he's going to treat Dark Shadows' Barnabas Collins—"there's a character that happens to be a vampire ... I'm trying to find a certain tone, and we don't know if we'll get it until we start it"—Burton mentioned that he saw part of one of the Twilights. His short critique was savage in its gentility:
"I think some things are just a phenomenon and that's okay."
The fact that he wasn't involved in the drama enough to want to finish whichever Twilighthe was watching speaks volumes, as does the assertion that, essentially, some things are larger than mere judgments of quality.
Of course, one could say the same thing of Burton's Batman, which sits atop the list of the Most Hyped Films of All Time. The lather that Warner Brothers managed to whip the world into over that first Bat-film back in 1989 makes the Twihard phenomenon look like a pep rally. (Oh, you don't remember the Batmania? That summer you couldn't throw a rock and not hit someone with a Batman T-shirt, or a Batman skateboard, or a Batman tattoo, or a Batman symbol shaved into the back of his head. It was massive—and it was a pre-Internet massive. People were videotapingEntertainment Tonight to rewatch the glimpses of the first trailer and then passing it around like aPlayboy found in the woods.)
But we shouldn't assume that Burton is extending the same kindness to Twilight that his dramatically rickety Batman received upon its release, given his intimate understanding of how hard it is to wrestle with source material that is bigger than the movie you're making.
No, we shouldn't.
(via Vulture)
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