Tim Burton Came to China to Talk About His New Film, a "Teen Version of X-Men"

Miss Peregrine's Home for Peculiar Children is now counting on the China box office.

Tim Burton has a big name in China, built on a run of films with strange visuals and a warm center: Corpse Bride, Big Fish, Edward Scissorhands. He has been famous here for a long time, yet the only films of his with real commercial weight in China are the Alice in Wonderland movies — the first, which he directed in 2010, took 229 million yuan on the mainland; the 2016 sequel, which he produced, took 380 million.

This year brings the film he directed himself, Miss Peregrine's Home for Peculiar Children, opening December 2.

From its Chinese title alone, 《佩小姐的奇幻城堡》 — "Miss Pei's Fantastical Castle" — the film sounds like standard Burton strangeness. The English original is plainer, and says exactly what the film contains: Miss Peregrine's Home for Peculiar Children.

It is adapted from the fantasy adventure novel of the same name by the American writer Ransom Riggs. The plot: "After his grandfather dies, a boy named Jack stumbles on a letter written to the old man by a 'Miss Peregrine.' Following the clues in the letter, Jack finds a small island off the coast. There he discovers the strange house his grandfather used to describe in his stories, and the children living inside it — children with peculiar powers."

The film opened in the US in late September, where both the reviews and the ticket sales were poor. It holds a middling 7.0 on IMDb and 64% on Rotten Tomatoes. Box Office Mojo puts the budget at about $110 million; it has taken $80 million at home and $250 million worldwide so far.

To be fair, this is certainly not Burton's best work. It still looks good and tells an interesting story, full of the fresh, odd touches he is known for. But the characters and the plot may lack novelty and depth. It plays, in the end, more like a good-looking teen movie: a group of children with peculiar powers, and an orphanage built to take them in.

20th Century Fox, which spent heavily on the film, brought Tim Burton to China for a promotional event in Beijing on November 8, for media and fans. The Chinese release is still a month away, which makes the timing look early. But the promotion schedules for Hollywood films usually have to bend to the stars' own calendars.

The event ran less than half an hour. After introducing the film, Burton moved on that afternoon to a livestream on Douban. But the stream had been advertised only lightly beforehand, and people are probably not in the habit of watching live video in the Douban app anyway — when we clicked in, fewer than 2,000 people were watching. It kept buffering, too, and the screen filled up with comments: "lagging, lagging, lagging."

Miss Peregrine's Home for Peculiar Children is now counting on China to do a little better. Its effects are the selling point, and they may well draw a crowd. But it opens the same day as Your Name., the Japanese animated film that already has ferocious word of mouth. Worse, pirated high-definition copies have leaked online, which could eat into the box office.

Below are excerpts from the Q&A session at the event

(Q: audience question; T: Tim Burton)

Host: This film is adapted from Ransom Riggs's fantasy novel Miss Peregrine's Home for Peculiar Children. You turned the novel into a film and brought it to the big screen — why? What drew you to it?

T: I loved the structure of this book. The author, Ransom Riggs, collected a lot of photographs — really interesting photographs. I collect photographs myself, and they're beautiful. Look at a photo and you can see the story it reflects, and there is a mysterious feeling in them too — sometimes mystery, sometimes humor. So I loved the structure of this book. A novel is a visual experience, and we wanted to carry the spirit of those photographs onto the screen. That was very important.

Host: Let's talk about the lead, Miss Peregrine. In the novel she seems stricter than she is in the film, where she can be quite warm. This is your second time working with Eva Green — can you tell us about working with her again?

T: I love her. She's a very good actress. She can play a very funny side and a very extreme side — in this film she can turn into a bird, which is wonderful. What she's playing is a very fantastical version of a headmistress. I think a lot of children would want a headmistress like that. She's powerful, and that matters. In the novel this headmistress is hard to understand, but the way Eva plays her, she's beautiful and her heart is strong, which for this part is a very important quality.

Host: What makes Miss Peregrine unusual is that she resets time and builds a loop. Can you tell us more about that? Her world seems to repeat the same day over and over — if you had that power, which day would you choose?

T: Any day, I think.

Host: Why?

T: What she's really doing is protecting the children, keeping bad people from hurting them. So it's more an emotional thing, and actually very simple. It's like a bubble that keeps these children safe, so that bad people can't hurt them.

Host: You really don't know? If you had this power, isn't there even one day you'd repeat?

T: The day my child was born, because it's such a singular day and it moved me so much — I might choose that one.

Q: There are a lot of good characters in this film. Which is your favorite?

T: I like Jack, because I feel I was a bit like him when I was a kid — not always good at fitting in. My own childhood was a little like his. I also like the invisible boy. The one with all the bugs inside his body, I'm not so fond of. Each of these children has their own strangeness, but at bottom they're still children, and that's what I love about it.

Q: In the original novel the monsters drink the blood of the peculiar children, but in the film the monsters like to eat their eyes. Was there a particular reason for the change?

T: That's interesting, because it made me think about telling a child a strange, frightening story at bedtime — a monster, a monster that looks very odd, but wearing human clothes, because it's a human who turned into a monster. If you tell children a scary story like that before bed — about eating children's eyeballs and so on —

Host: So eating eyeballs may be the scariest thing of all for children.

T: But it's fun, too. Some children like hearing stories like that — a monster coming to the window and eating a child's eyeballs. It sounds frightening, but it's also interesting.

Q: Some people find your films a little frightening, sometimes like nightmares for children. What do you make of that criticism?

T: That's true, it really is. Early in my career it was basically adults who created these dark characters, these dark figures. But in this film I added some emotional elements, and I don't think it's a horror film. In fact a lot of children who watch it don't find it especially scary — not scary at all. Because they also see humor, emotion and other things in it. So even children tell me, after they've watched it, that they liked the film. This kind of fright is delivered through humor, not through fear.

Go back and look at the old fairy tales, the folk tales and myths — every country has them, and every culture has its own version. Frightening stories like this exist in every culture. Children can learn something from them and feel something through them, and in a very enjoyable way.

Q: The film is full of children, and they all have magical abilities — almost a fantasy version of X-Men. How do you see that?

T: They do have a kind of superpower, but it isn't like a superpower — each of them has something unique, something special, which is exactly why I love this film so much. Each of them has a distinctive quality that helps them protect one another. So I think of it as a smaller version of a superpower. I don't think of it as a superpower; it's more a special ability, and they use these special abilities the way superheroes do, to protect each other.

Q: We've just been talking about Big Fish and Edward Scissorhands, and now this film. Have you hit a creative block along the way, and how do you work through it?

T: Honestly, I never worry about that. Everyone hits a block like that, but we always have to keep feeling our way. If you can really feel your way through, you don't need to worry much about whether your creativity or your creative source is drying up. It's the same for other artists — they're doing creative work too, and everyone helps everyone else work through that block.

Q: The art direction — the eccentric, Gothic elements — is that a style you keep deliberately?

T: No, it isn't like that. You just do things by feel. Every day we have certain feelings: some very dramatic, sometimes funny and full of emotion, sometimes dark. So our feelings are very complicated every day, just like our personal feelings. And that shows up in the work.

Q: The amusement park scene is wonderful, but in the original novel that fight doesn't take place at an amusement park. Why the change in the film? Can you talk about the thinking behind it?

T: I like old-fashioned amusement parks, so we made some adjustments to the novel, mainly to the setting. The author was supportive about it, very cooperative. With this novel, when we were making the film, we wanted to bring its spirit and its feeling across as fully and truly as we could. But when you're making adjustments, it's wonderful if the author can give you that kind of support. As long as you keep the spirit of the novel, it should be fine.

Q: The film shows a lot of emotion, but the relationship between the main character and his father is never explored. What was the thinking there? The film doesn't answer that question.

T: I think the relationship I had with my grandmother is what comes out in the film as Jack's relationship with his grandfather. Some of the culture I grew up in comes out in it too. Sometimes children have trouble talking to their fathers, but they have a real connection with their grandparents — that was true for me. Sometimes the relationship with parents holds a lot of conflict, while the relationship with grandparents is supportive and very good. So that's the main model for this relationship. Jack feels he sometimes can't fit into real life, that he behaves oddly — and as children we all have that feeling at some point, the feeling of being especially unusual. A lot of children feel it. But they're all good people; it's just that when others meet someone a bit unusual, they sometimes treat them differently.

Q: You come across as a very distinctive person. Which character in this film do you feel closest to? Which one do you relate to most?

T: Jack, I think. The other children all have that sense of connection, that shared feeling — everyone has a distinctive trait, so they feel they're treated as special by other people. I didn't feel like a normal child when I was young either. But even unusual children feel normal to themselves; it's only in other people's eyes that they aren't.

Q: What message did you want this film to carry? What connects it to your earlier work, and what separates it?

T: Some of the themes are consistent, actually — I keep exploring the same theme. But in this film what we see is a whole family that is magical and peculiar. It's a very warm family, very distinctive, and at its root, deep down, they're beautiful, perfectly normal people. That's what I love about it, even though what shows on the surface is the unusual part.

Images: film stills and official photos from the press event.