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Tim Burton Explains Why 'Miss Peregrine's Home For Peculiar Children'...

posted 8 years ago by TMC-4
9 replies | jump to latest

Features A Predominantly White Cast

http://www.lipstickalley.com/showthread.php/1088166-Tim-Burton-Explains-Why-Miss-Peregrine-s-Home-For-Peculiar-Children-Features-A-Predominantly-White-Cast?s=4f6724dc9e998c7c55c9974a3f02aa26

For fans of Ransom Riggs' 2011 bestseller Miss Peregrine's Home for Peculiar Children, one of the things that made the news of its big-screen adaptation so intriguing was imagining which actors would make up the ensemble. The book features a large cast of characters, from the titular children to the many adults who throw them into peril, and the idea of seeing them portrayed on-screen thrilled readers of Riggs' book hoping to see a diverse group of actors take on the challenge. Yet in reality, the few dozen characters that make up the movie version of Miss Peregrine's are predominantly white, with Samuel L. Jackson's Barron the only notable exception. Sitting down at New York's McKittrick Hotel to discuss the film, director Tim Burton tells me why that's the case.

"Nowadays, people are talking about it more," he says regarding on-screen diversity. But "things either call for things, or they don’t. I remember back when I was a child watching The Brady Bunch and they started to get all politically correct, like, OK, let’s have an Asian child and a black — I used to get more offended by that than just — I grew up watching blaxploitation movies, right? And I said, that’s great. I didn’t go like, OK, there should be more white people in these movies."

Of the film's entire cast, Jackson appears to be the only non-white character, playing the villainous Barron, the leader of a group of creatures whose aims are to murder children with supernatural abilities. When I ask Jackson about the film's lack of diversity, he says that while he "noticed it," it didn't deter him from taking on his part.

"I had to go back in my head and go, how many black characters have been in Tim Burton movies?" Jackson says. "And I may have been the first, I don’t know, or the most prominent in that particular way, but it happens the way it happens. I don’t think it’s any fault of his or his method of storytelling, it’s just how it’s played out. Tim’s a really great guy."

Looking back at Burton's lengthy filmography — he has 36 directing credits under his belt — it does appear that Jackson is perhaps the first black actor to be cast in a leading role, as Billy Dee Williams' Harvey Dent in Batman and Michael Clarke Duncan's Colonel Attar in Planet of the Apes were both considered supporting parts. Jackson, it seems, is the only actor to have made a sizable dent in the casting of Burton's predominantly white films.

[–] HarveyManfredSinJohn 8 years ago

Interesting. I made a point about how all the 'Peculiar Children' were white on another site's forum, and someone told me, presumably as an answer, that it had something to do with time travel. But nothing indicates that there is a particularly good (i.e. narrative or stylistic) reason for this choice, and I'm not really convinced by Burton's argument: "I remember back when I was a child watching The Brady Bunch and they started to get all politically correct, like, OK, let’s have an Asian child and a black — I used to get more offended by that than just — I grew up watching blaxploitation movies, right? And I said, that’s great. I didn’t go like, OK, there should be more white people in these movies."

That sounds too similar to the crap I see from a lot of racists on various forums attacking a decision to change a character's race. They'll usually respond by saying something like "I didn't go, Black Panther should be white."

Which is kind of ironic since Burton, or at least his collaborators, to his credit was one of the first filmmakers to give a comic-book character a 'race lift', so to speak, when he cast Billy Dee Williams as Harvey Dent, a character traditionally portrayed as a white man in most other media, including the preexisting comic-books.

As for black characters in other Tim Burton films, it does seem there aren't many other major ones (one partially reasonable excuse is that quite a few of his films have been period pieces,, albeit fantastical period pieces, like Alice in Wonderland and Sweeney Todd), but perhaps the writers of the article are forgetting that the most ostensibly heroic character in the glorious Mars Attacks!, is played by football legend, Jim Brown. His 'Byron Williams' is one of the film's few headline cast survivors along with his equally heroic wife (Pam Grier) and children, all of whom are black.

And although it's a relatively minor part, I always liked the black cop in Edward Scissorhands, the only character, in the 'outside world', who had any true empathy for the demonization Edward experienced when he left his lonely tower. I suspect that the casting of a black actor in that part was a commentary on bigotry towards outsiders, and how an African-American might have more personal insight than others into such discrimination.

[–] HarveyManfredSinJohn 8 years ago

Three pages of commentary, and not one person mentions Mars Attacks!

I'm not going to bother signing on to a new site, but if you're a member of Lipstick Alley can you please remind the members that Burton has featured prominent black characters in his movies before, besides this one and Batman, because otherwise you're just allowing self-righteous race-warriors to talk crap when the reality is that Mars Attacks! featured black heroes.

[–] ZakkWyldeMyLittlePony 8 years ago

I personally like Ms. Peregrine's Home For Peculiar Children. If you think about it, it was Tim Burton's X-Men.

Black Sabbath, Led Zeppelin, and My Little Pony: Friendship Is Magic fan

[–] DightBrdf 8 years ago

What in the holy hell does this have to do with Batman?

[–] TMC-4 8 years ago

Did you see where it's in bold regarding Tim Burton casting Billy Dee Williams as Harvey Dent!?

[–] DightBrdf 8 years ago

I don't believe in Harvey Dent!

[–] Picnic10 8 years ago

I think it's likely to be an old fashioned wish to adhere to gothic tradition which is that people with pale, European-like, faces have always been associated with Dracula , Frankenstein , 19th century romantic fiction. And Burton frequently works with an old school cartoonish mind where he wouldn't go out of his way to break the visual tradition.

That said, The Addams Family was more exotic than Burton tends to go for. Dark Shadows melds gothicness with the 1960s/1970s, still with a WASP vibe.

I think Burton primarily makes films for suburban whites and the English. The idea is that their repression manifests itself in dangerous energy. I doubt Burton feels that other cultures would ever have enough of the envious, bloodless, outsider in them to be gothic. It's a lack of imagination maybe. He should try being a bit more Barry Sonnenfeld.

[–] 8 years ago

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[–] HarveyManfredSinJohn 8 years ago

It's a shame Burton never got his original casting choices for Beetlejuice and Robin (Sammy Davis Junior and Marlon Wayans respectively) through. In both instances, these characters would have been outsiders on the fringes of society, like so many Burton heroes/anti-heroes.

To be fair, although it's a shame that most if not all of Burton's outsider heroes have been white, they are usually defined in opposition to a very homogenous and Eurocentric society (i.e. WASPs). I see a lot of similarities between many of Burton's films and Barry Sonnenfeld's wonderfully subversive Addams Family Values, which like Batman Returns and Mars Attacks!, for instance, took gleeful pleasure in attacking and tearing down mainstream white American values and symbols.