I go in to audition and Wes Anderson was sitting in there. He’s twenty-seven. I remember instantly seeing he had Converse sandals, which I had never seen before, and started talking about those. It was 1997. In 1996, Pinkerton came out. The Weezer record. That was a huge record when it came out. Pinkerton was it for me. So I started talking to Wes about Pinkerton for twenty minutes. It took my mind totally off the audition and then he said, “Shall we read it?” and I think I might have said, “Let’s not. This was so good, it was so nice meeting you, let’s just leave it at that.”
He said, “No, let’s read.” Anyway we read it, and because it was my first audition, I didn’t know if it was good or bad. Then we started to improvise and then he said, “Why don’t you stick around for a little bit, I’m going to read some other people.” Then he actually had me come in and be Bill Murray and audition people to play Bill Murray’s kids.
I went home, my mom asked, “How’d it go?”
I was like, “I think it was good. I spent a few hours there.”
“A few hours? That’s good.”
Then I guess it got narrowed down to me and a few other people. Because I was unknown, I had to do a screen test. I did a screen test and I got the part. It all happened pretty quickly. They were saying, “Yeah, you’re going to be in this movie with Bill Murray.”
It just felt like a dream. I started my senior year of high school thinking I was going to finish my record, which I did. But I did not expect to be in Houston with Bill Murray at the start of the school year.
MICHAEL KEATON—ACTOR, COMEDIAN, PRODUCER, DIRECTOR
David Geffen came to me and said, “I want you to meet this guy named Tim Burton.” Tim had done this thing called Frankenweenie that people really took notice of, and they said this guy’s got something. He’s a comer.
He created something else. I forget. Oh, he did Pee-wee’s Big Adventure.
I met him about this movie he was working on, and I didn’t really understand what he was talking about. I didn’t understand his concept. He was trying to explain a character he had thought of, and he had this script that a guy gave him called Beetlejuice, but he couldn’t really describe the guy.
It was a fine meeting and I told David, “You know, I don’t know how to do this and I don’t know what it is. He was a really nice guy, but I don’t know how to do it.” They said, “No, no, no. Just hang in there.”
They talked me into meeting again. Still didn’t get it. He had the conceit of the thing, but it wasn’t even a guy. It was a concept of something. After two or three meetings or something, I said, “I really like this guy. He’s really imaginative, but I don’t know.”
Then he said something that took hold. It was something like, “He probably lives in all times. He’s from no time. He’s from every time. He’s lived in all time periods or something.” I don’t know why that stuck with me. I thought, “Maybe I should think about this.” I said to him, “Okay, you know what, let me at least go home and think about it.”
I had this idea. I called the wardrobe department, I forget what studio, and I said, “Hey, would you do me a favor? Can I get clothes from every time period, all kinds of different things?” I got a rack of them.
I’m home by myself, and I’m thinking about this, and I start to do this walk and this voice and I thought, “You know what? I’d like to have teeth.” You can’t tell, but the teeth were not only fucked-up. They were a tiny bit larger. I want to put these things in that were a tiny bit larger. Because there was something about him being goofy that made it even more dangerous. If you run into some guy who’s nuts and then he’s kind of goofy too, that’s getting really scary. I wanted him to be kind of dangerous but funny, and I thought, “You know what? I’m just going to pull everything out here.”
I walk around my house and I said, “I’m going to create a walk.” I look at these different pieces and put that little hat on that said GUIDE on it. I thought, oh, this is kind of out there. Guide to what?
Then I talked to Tim and I said, “I want hair.” He should be like, every day, he gets up and sticks his hand in a socket and just goes “tzzzzzzt.” That’s how he works. I said, “Let’s make hair that sticks out.” Tim must have said something that made me get this idea of mold. So this great makeup artist and I started to put together mold. I said, “I want mold down my neck.” I had never done it all together until the first day of shooting. I didn’t know if it was going to work.
I showed up on the set, and this is really interesting. The crew saw me, and I have no idea why, because they didn’t know what I was going to do. I wasn’t even sure what I was going to do and if I could make it work. They started going, “Juice. Juice. Juice. Juice.” It was this really funny thing.
I just fully committed. I said, “This is going to die or this is going to work,” and Tim’s so great because when he saw it, he went, “Yes.” And then he explained to me, “Your head’s going to shrink. It’s going to spin around.” I said, “Okay, now I get what this guy’s doing. I get it.” I mean, I started really getting it, and that’s when I went, “Oh, man, this is out there.”
It rocked, and it was so fun. There was nothing that’s ever been like it. There’s just nothing comparable.
A little bit of time goes by after Beetlejuice, and Tim comes to me and says, “I want to talk to you about something.” This was gutsy on his part. He said, “I’m doing Batman. Would you read the script? I don’t want to talk about it too much, but just read it. I want to talk to you after.”
I’m reading it, and I didn’t have a concept of what Batman was. Tim said, “Read this one,” which was the Frank Miller thing, Dark Knight Returns. I went, “Whoa, this is interesting. The look and the colors.” But I thought, “This ain’t going to work.”
I read it and I said, “Let’s go have coffee.” I said, “You want me to just talk to you about what I think?” I think this is going to be over in ten, fifteen minutes, because he’s going to say, “Well, I don’t know about that.” But everything I said, his head was nodding.
I said, “This guy’s ridiculously depressed. He’s a vigilante. He’s got these issues. It’s so obvious. And nobody’s going to make that movie.”
He says, “That’s what I want to do. That’s exactly what I want to do.”
I thought, “Oh, really? Oh. Whoa.” So we started doing it and he just had such a clear take on it.
That movie really changed everything. If you look at the colors and the look of those kinds of big movies now. It was like an opera.
MEL BROOKS—COMEDIAN, WRITER, DIRECTOR, PRODUCER, ACTOR, MUSICIAN
I’m ready to do Blazing Saddles, and there’s too much hubris and too much arrogance in me then, really. I admit it. Not now. Now I’m humble.
I asked John Wayne to play The Waco Kid, and he read it. He loved The Producers, so he said sure, I’m glad to read it. He read it, and he gave it to me back, and he said, “I can’t do this. My fans wouldn’t allow it, but I swear to God, Mel, I’ll be the first one on line to see it. It’s hysterical.”