Holy flaming cows, Batman! with Jonathan Gems - Part 3 (of 3)

Reminiscing about Mars Attacks, Beetlejuice 2, and having a friend in Tim Burton

The final part of my discussion with English playwright and screenwriter Jonathan Gems. If you haven’t read part two yet, you can find it here.

Bat’s enough.

There was an article from the Washington Post back in the day that claimed you were doing Batman 3 with Tim. Was there any truth to that?

That’s not true. I don’t know how these things get started.

It’s a shame Tim didn’t do another one. If you look at Tim’s films after that, and you compare something like Ed Wood to Batman, it’s like two different directors in a way.

I think Ed Wood is his masterpiece. It’s my favourite of his. It’s just a beautiful film. And they had the daggers out for that… they gave it no marketing and no publicity. Every year at the FilmEx Summit they announce all the new films to people in the industry, and I remember Mark Canton gave a speech and said it was the worst film ever made. He said it was crap and they shouldn’t waste their time with it [laughter].

That’s almost galling to hear because didn’t Canton have his execution stayed due to the success of Batman?

It’s amazing, isn’t it? And that’s what I’m talking about. Tim had too much independence, you see, and he was treated badly after that. If you’re the talent they hate you unless they can control you. It’s different with actors because they can control you up to a point, like they did with Julia Roberts and sort of teaching her a lesson. I think Ed Wood was a proper financial flop, and it was his best movie. But I knew something wasn’t right when that happened… something was up.

Are you saying you think the studio didn’t promote it on purpose?

To the studios Tim was getting too big for his boots, or getting a big head. But Tim wasn’t like that. He’s not that type of person. They didn’t want him having another hit. And they’re in the business to make money, and as you pointed out Tim’s movies do make money, so it just shows you that they were up to something behind the scenes.

In your mind what did the studio do to actively sink the film?

I think they didn’t release it in as many theaters, but I believe they engineered it as a flop. Another reason they skewered it was because it was in black and white. A lot of directors want to make films in black and white because it’s beautiful… but the studios didn’t want to encourage artists to make films they can’t sell.

Spielberg had to fight to get Schindler’s List in black & white. He said the studio guys said fine, release it in black & white, but shoot it in colour so they could at least sell the VHS tapes in colour. Can you believe that?

It’s hard to sell black and white films overseas, and so they’d be losing a lot by letting the film be black and white. With Ed Wood I think were trying to send a message to all the directors out there.

Even though I’ve enjoyed some of Tim’s other films more, I do think Ed Wood is probably a perfect picture. Martin Landau is so great in it.

It’s flawless. There isn’t a wrong note in the whole thing. Martin really was Bela, and it was a magical performance… and he won the Oscar for it. But really everyone was wonderful in it, even the smaller parts. The photography and the framing, and the music was just fantastic.

A truly alien idea.

Mars Attacks! originated from a series of trading cards, which says a lot about the imagination you share with Tim.

I got the cards as a birthday present for Tim, from a novelty shop down on Melrose Avenue. They looked like little oil paintings of Martians killing people, and I knew Tim would like them. There was another set called Dinosaurs Attack! And I got him both sets, and when he saw them he had the idea, why don’t we make a film out of these?

Did you think he was kidding or was it like, no this actually isn’t a bad idea?

I remember Tim saying it could be like a disaster film. So, we spent the next weekend watching movies, and The Towering Inferno was one of them. I remember a scene where Robert Wagner falls out of the window suddenly, and he was a big star at the time, and in the movie he falls to his death [laughter].

Doesn’t damn near everybody die in that movie?

Yes! Tim and I were just in hysterics laughing. So that gave me the idea of just killing all of them in Mars Attacks, and having the unknown people win and save the day. All the big movie stars would die horrible deaths [laughter].

Back then no one was making a habit of killing off all the top billing [laughing].

Everybody was a bit shocked by that at the time, but that’s what was fun about it.

Is it true you were fired from Mars Attacks early on because of the burning cows?

That’s true. At the time, I had to send all my drafts into the studio executives, and I think I did about fourteen drafts. They had these rules, like you can’t kill any animals… but I just liked the idea of the burning cows as an opening scene so much. The studio didn’t.

The studio said no way José?

With the fiery cows they stuck their heels in, and toward the end of the process I was really trying to think of something better than the cow opening. I actually went to Tim and told him I couldn’t think of anything better, and he had a few ideas that were good, but in the end he was fine with the cows and said just leave it in.

It’s so great, with that warm light coming over the horizon.

Originally, I had the cows trample a dog, and the studio said no way. So, they cut that out. They later on said you can’t have the burning cows at all, and I’m saying but it’s not real, it’s just a movie. But they said no, it’s animal cruelty… and they’d totally forgotten about the president’s Labrador [laughter].

I’m wondering if the studio didn’t want burning cows because they didn’t want to piss off McDonald’s again.

Again?

Remember the Batman Returns/Happy Meal parental backlash fiasco? Maybe they thought the burning cows was an unintentional middle finger to McDonald’s?

You know… you might actually have something there [laughter].

I mean, you said Tim’s movies were getting shafted for no apparent reason, and you ended up getting fired.

Yeah! I remember finding out I was fired while in a meeting with some studio executives. I think we were talking about Gulliver’s Travels with Ted Danson, which Fox wanted to do. And these guys come in and they said, “You know you’ve been fired?”

How the hell did they even know?

Fuck knows [laughter]. And they were all happy to tell me the news. And it was all over my face, I couldn’t hide my reaction. So, when I got home I called Tim and said, am I fired? And Tim said yeah, I couldn’t do anything, the studio insisted on it. But I cared about the movie, so I said to Tim that he should get Scott Alexander and Larry Karaszewski to rewrite it. So, they did a few drafts I think. But what they did, and I read the script, was a lot like Independence Day where the president saves the day.

That doesn’t sound much in keeping with the trading cards theme.

It would’ve been awful. Tim asked me to fix it, and I said well I’m not sure, how long do you need? Tim said he wanted me to do it in a week.

So, were you sort of re-hired?

Well Tim explained they had already given notices to everyone on the film… basically when you’re letting people go from a project you give them notice. So, we only had a week’s time to fix the movie, or it wasn’t going to happen. So there I was, at Tim’s house in Ojai again… and by day four I started to realize I can do this. I was standing in the kitchen with Tim and he said, “How’s it going?” and I said, I should have it done. And Tim was like, well you’ve got to have it done by tomorrow. And I’m going… but that’s only five days… a week is seven days [laughter]. So, I had a lot of coffee that night, and I stayed up all night to get it done, and Tim drove to the studio with it on the fifth day.

Back on Mars.

Were you waiting at Tim’s with bated breath or did you crash and burn after that?

I remember I slept pretty much the entire weekend, and I got up sometime on Monday and Tim and Lisa Marie were eating hamburgers in the kitchen, and they said they’d just heard from Warners that the movie was back on. They’d read the script over the weekend and decided not to pull the plug.

And they didn’t put the kibosh on the flaming cows after all. Chalk that one up as a win.

I’m sure Tim said something to them during that meeting. He was very clever in that way. He was born in Burbank, and he knew Hollywood people. He outwitted them all the time using reverse psychology on them… he’d say he really didn’t want something if he did in fact want it [laughter]. He’d maneuver it in such a way so they thought they had won, but in truth he had won. I mean that’s how he got so many of these extraordinary films made.

When you take a story like Ed Wood, a movie about a guy who makes bad movies, pitching that idea probably sounded almost asinine to the suits, but it’s hilarious if you’re a creative. The same with Mars Attacks.

Unfortunately, they tried to kill Mars Attacks the same exact way that they had done with Ed Wood. I remember Tim went to India with Lisa Marie around the time of the movie’s release, and I was trying to talk to the marketing department. This was less than a month before the film opened, and I hadn’t seen any posters or billboards, no trailers… nothing at all.

As the screenwriter do you have the power to say, hey, what in the hell’s going on here?

I spoke to the marketing guys and they were just saying things like, “Oh, but we’ve spent twelve million on the advertising…” Yeah, okay, the advertising that no one was seeing. But the cost of the movie has been exaggerated to maintain that whole idea that it was a flop, to maintain that perception of it. The production itself cost between sixty and seventy million, and I think the worldwide gross is reported as one hundred million. But it actually made over two hundred million outside of the U.S., so it was a hit, it wasn’t a flop. Now if you look on Wikipedia the numbers are totally inaccurate. 

Didn’t they test the movie beforehand?

They did. I went to three of the screenings and the reception was through the roof. I remember everyone was laughing, and the entire audience was stomping their feet… like drumming their feet on the ground, like a rock concert, it was hilarious.

I watched it a few nights ago, and had forgotten how funny it was. Martin Short as the White House Press Secretary had me in stitches.

We screened it to the kids from Berkeley, and they all loved it. I remember all the studio guys were in the lobby afterward standing around, this was Mark Canton, Bob Daly, and Terry Semel. I said to Terry, “What did you think of the movie?” Which is the wrong question, you never ask that. And he didn’t say anything. So, I said, “The audience seemed to like it.” And he waved his hand in this strange gesture, almost like cutting me off, and he said, “It played great.” And the guy next to him said the same thing, “It played great.” Like a carbon copy of Terry [laughter].

How bizarre.

Bizarre as anything gets. It was like they rehearsed it beforehand. Same gesture, same phrase. I tried to talk to Terry a bit more about the movie, but nobody would talk. Finally, Tim came out, because he was hiding in the projection booth, and they all jumped onto him. After the third screening, I remember I heard Terry and Bob and their entourage saying, “Well it’s very weird. It’s a very weird film.” And when it was released it was in a limited number of theaters, and I think it was gone in less than a month.

A pattern seems to be emerging that backs up your point… it looks like Tim’s films weren’t getting the proper support from within.

The marketing that they did do was completely wrong-headed. They marketed it for kids, and it wasn’t a kid’s movie. It’s a monster movie.

Supposedly a lot of parents thought Batman Returns was a kid’s movie. The marketing of McDonald’s apparently led some of the viewing audience astray [laughter]. Maybe that’s kind of what happened with Mars Attacks?

I was living in West Hollywood at the time, and I had a friend who was a neighbour of mine, Jacqui. Well Jacqui had been engaged to Gian-Carlo Coppola, and they had this lovely little daughter named Gia who was about nine years old at the time. And Francis Ford Coppola, her grandfather, he wanted the toys from the movie. He was asking Jacqui if I could get him some of the Martians because he was a toy collector. Anyway, I remember the movie was playing on Hollywood Boulevard, and all three of us went to see the film. This little girl, Gia, she was normally quite chatty and full of energy… but coming back from the film she was deadly quiet. And her mum was saying, “What’s wrong?” and Gia really wouldn’t speak.

Uh-oh [laughing].

The very next morning I get an angry phone call from my girlfriend, who was friends with Jacqui, and she’s saying, “How dare you! Gia’s traumatized… she can’t sleep. How could you even think of taking her to see that movie?” But she was right, of course… I just hadn’t thought of it.

I remember seeing E.T. in the early 80s, and it scared me because E.T. sort of wailed hideously when he talked. I love it now, it’s such a sweet film, but when you’re young it’s funny how certain things scare you.

I just hadn’t even realized how scary it might’ve been to kids. I remember seeing The Lost World by Irwin Allen when I was about her age, and when the dinosaurs came onscreen I was terrified [laughter]. So, I can only imagine what the Martians would do to children. But I apologized to Gia, and to her mom, and I felt very bad about it.

Its good for us to be scared sometimes. Puts hair on your chest.

Well, apparently the movie traumatized a whole generation of kids [laughter].

Superman Lives.

Staying in the realm of aliens, Tim was supposed to direct Superman Lives in the late Nineties. Were you involved in that project in any way?

I didn’t work on Superman Lives, but what happened there was far worse than what happened with Ed Wood or Mars Attacks. Tim worked so hard on that. He spent a year of his life working on the movie. He drew the whole thing out, storyboarded it, made all these wonderful costumes, and the casting was mostly sorted.

Nicolas Cage was an unconventional choice for Superman, wasn’t he?

An interesting choice, and I suspect they were doing with him what they did with Batman, that maybe he was slightly off… like Michael Keaton’s Batman had been.

I don’t get to share this often, but I remember watching MTV Live in early 1998. Michael Keaton was there promoting a movie called Desperate Measures, and he was playing mini-golf with the host, Carson Daly, who asked if Michael was going to play Batman in the new Superman. And Michael repeated the question, and then finally said, “Not exactly.” And I always took that to mean that he was going to be Bruce Wayne.

I never read the script, but it’s quite possible [laughter]. And that makes sense, it sounds like something Tim would do. But Warner Brothers never gave Tim a reason why they cancelled it. In fact, Warners will say to this day that it’s just been postponed, not cancelled.

Postponed for twenty-five years?

Yes, and it’s just being postponed for another twenty-five years [rolls eyes].

If you consider everything that lead up to the collapse of the Superman project, it does start to look like some effort to get Tim out the door. Like some Faustian entity’s machinations behind the scenes.

There’s so much going on with studio politics and so much competition that you just never see. The executives who were doing Superman might’ve been outmaneuvered by their rivals inside Warners. If they can get rid of Superman, then they get their movie made, and they move up… there’s a tremendous amount of internal division and friction happening.

It’s a wonder that any films get made with that crap going on constantly.

The stakes are just so big. The weird thing is that the next thing Tim did was Sleepy Hollow. And Tim had a price, as a director he has a price, you know. I don’t remember what that price was, but I know Tim had to cut it by a lot after he’d been messed around with on Superman. And so, after Superman was taken away, everyone was still giving him the cold shoulder.

I liked Sleepy Hollow, but it’s not really a Tim Burton film… because it’s not “his” story.

That’s right, it’s not his story. But he had to do it. I think he felt if he didn’t do it then there would be no more films for him. And Tim did the best he could with it, I think. But yes, it’s not a Tim Burton film really because this wasn’t something he worked with the writers on… the script existed.

It does appear Tim was backed into a corner because after that he did Planet of the Apes, Alice in Wonderland, and another handful of movies which weren’t his stories.

To make an artist like Tim conform… it’s just not good for the soul. And it’s a shame because he was doing the best he could with what was given to him. And there’s no alternative. It’s not like Tim could go to Canada and start making films… it’s Hollywood or nothing, right?

You mentioned writing a script for Tim that never got made. Would you ever work with him again?

I don’t know if I’ll work with him, but I love him. That particular project was slated, and Warners was going to make it, but Tim decided to do Edward Scissorhands. Tim told me he wanted to do it, but he was going to put it on the backburner. But Tim owns the project, and so it may still happen.

So, when you say you won’t work together again it’s not out of bad blood or hard feelings?

No, not at all. The reason I probably won’t work with him is because I got sick in 1998, and I left the States. After a couple of years of being ill, our friendship kind of petered out because we weren’t hanging out.

The cancer racket.

What happened when you got sick?

I was very ill and in bed all the time. I was given three to five years to live by two doctors in L.A., so I thought I’d better go back to England and get my papers in order, and see my mum and dad. The doctors in England told me the same thing.

Well you clearly kicked the ass of that diagnosis.

There was no cure for it at the time, and I got really interested in medicine. I just found that ninety percent of Western medicine is fraught with corruption… it’s money-making garbage. There are cures for cancer, you know. You don’t have to die from cancer.

It seems like everyone is getting cancer now. I remember in the Eighties, and even in the Nineties to some degree, it was rare for people to have cancer.

These two brilliant Australian guys won a Nobel Prize in 2005… Barry Marshall and J. Robin Warren. These guys discovered the cause of acid reflux, which is from a certain bacteria called Helicobacter pylorum. These guys were amazing, they did the experiments on themselves, and they proved that duodenal ulcers and stomach ulcers are caused by this particular bacteria, which you can cure in a few weeks with antibiotics.

This is the first I’ve heard of that.

It was in the news, and you’d think straight away that the doctors would throw away all these alkaline tablets that don’t work… but the pharmaceutical companies doubled down on advertising for antacids and antacid tablets instead. Even today if you have acid reflux, they’ll give you an antacid tablet.

But that doesn’t fix the problem.

That’s right. My father was on omeprazole for like ten years, and I found out about it because he had developed cancer of the esophagus. They were going to literally remove his throat. He had to sign a form to have his esophagus removed, and he would’ve been fed through a tube for the rest of his life. I put a stop to the surgery, and the oncologists were very angry with me, but I got Dad off those tablets… and even he didn’t want to believe me at first because he believed the doctors. And they told him he’d have six months to live if he didn’t have the operation. Six months later we were in the hospital for a follow-up, and Dad was cancer free.

Wow. That’s incredible. Were the doctors baffled?

I spoke to the doctors and said, what is causing the cancer? But they weren’t interested in that. They didn’t care what the cause was, they were only interested in treatments. And I said if you eliminate the cause, you eliminate the cancer.

Both my parents died of cancer before the age of sixty. I know some patients respond to chemotherapy and radiation, and I know it saves lives… but it didn’t save theirs.

Oh dear. Let me tell you, I’m so sorry to hear that.

Thank you, but don’t be sorry. I was fortunate to have them in my life for a long time. But yeah… cancer can still kiss my ass [laughing].

I did a project with Oliver Stone called The Cancer Conspiracy. He sent me twenty books that were all about the different aspects of the cancer industry. One book was a kind of catalogue about all the cancer clinics in the world, and it had the success rates listed. There was a clinic in Shanghai that had over fifty percent success in curing lung cancer. But suddenly that project went south, and Oliver stopped development on it.

That’s not sus at all, is it? Part of me can’t help but think there’s a system in place now that keeps people sick. And we all seem to have a sense of it… like there’s more money in keeping people sick. But what can you do?

The truth about the cure for cancer is out there. One of them is out there, but I don’t know how you get it… they call if GcMAF. And the man who discovered that wanted to know why certain people who smoked cigarettes don’t get lung cancer, and some people do.

Just like Christopher Reeve’s wife, Dana. She didn’t smoke, and she died of lung cancer.

Tim Burton’s dad Bill got lung cancer and he never smoked a day in his life, but Tim’s mom smoked and she never got cancer. So, you don’t have to be terribly clever to see that some people have a thing that protects them and some people don’t.

Cancer is framed as something that isn’t curable, it’s framed as preventable.

That’s why the focus is on treatments, and not elimination. If you don’t have this protein, GcMAF, which everyone should be able to produce in their body, that’s how you get some cancers. Because the protein identifies cancer cells as enemy cells. Then the immune system can go and clean them up. But the body does nothing about these cancer cells because they aren’t identified as such if something happens that inhibits your production of GcMAF, so your body doesn’t recognize cancer cells as antagonistic.

Rockefeller’s legacy.

After Mom died, my siblings and I did a bit of delving into the history of the pharmaceutical industry. But prior to her death we’d had no real interest in it, nor any real inclination to even care about something like that.

It goes all the way back to John Rockefeller. He really influenced modern medicine because he was the first American to really see the potential of Chemistry in the designing of drugs. I read a story about him where he was trying to get rid of all the waste and the carcinogens that came from the refining of oil because he couldn’t get the individual States to agree to putting the stuff in landfills. And you couldn’t put it into the water supply, so he had the bright idea to turn these petrochemicals into products… that he could sell.

Rockefeller was sort of like… king of the robber barons, wasn’t he?

Yeah, exactly. And if a few people get cancer by releasing the waste that goes into everything from shampoo to cleaning products, so what? Who cares, right? Before John Rockefeller you had natural medicines, homeopathy, osteopathy and all these different ways of treatment. But he used his money and bought all the medical schools and they started studying only his kind of medicine, and everything else was “alternative” and frowned upon.

I don’t know enough about Rockefeller, but it might be a tough sell to believe he was dumping hundreds of millions into the education system purely out of the goodness of his heart.

And if you don’t believe that, look no further than the fact that the American Cancer Society was started by Rockefeller himself, with the current CEO’s making millions as their annual salary. And yet, after over one hundred years of the Cancer Society’s existence, we still have no cures.

It’s easy to dismiss conspiracy theories, but after watching my parents suffer that really shook my trust in the healthcare industry. I don’t want to tell other people what to do and think, but outside of ibuprofen or vitamins I’m pretty much anti-pill at this point.

You know, even aspirin was highly toxic in its infancy. A lot of deaths during The Spanish Flu were really caused by aspirin, but they had to come up with a cover story because they can’t let aspirin disappear.

I hadn’t heard that before.

They were doing autopsies on people and finding their lungs weren’t damaged, but it was chaotic back then because so many people were dying. And Bayer was doing what the pharmaceutical companies always do, they were doubling down on their advertising in the year that Spanish Flu was at its peak. The daily dosages were way too high, I think something like two or three times the amount that’s safe to use today.

The cancer statistics in particular are genuinely frightening.

I worry for myself, I worry for you, I worry for my friends who may get cancer and might not be able to fix it.

You can be hanging out with a group of ten people, ten of your friends, and you can point to four of them and know they’re going to get cancer.

It’s actually think it’s like one in two now. Or one out of three people will get some form of cancer in their life. That’s the statistic. And you mentioned earlier about cancer being rare even when you were young, and that’s right… it used to be heart attacks, strokes, pneumonia that killed people.

But it’s also environmental conditions of the modern world, too.

That’s right… it’s the food we eat, the water we drink. When I became sick in the late Nineties, I experimented with Chinese medicine and Ayurveda, and was amazed by how much we’ve buried, and what’s been hidden. We’re so trained to just go to the doctor now, and you’re not allowed to do anything else… you know the doctor will tell you how long you have to live. They told me I had five years to live, and that was twenty-five years ago [laughter].

I don’t know if it’s the way things are spun, but lately it seems like there’s been this mass turning off of common sense, a sort of dumbing-down. I’m guilty of it, too. There’s been times where I felt like a lemming after the fact, like I’d been had.

I think people are slowly turning away more and more from Western medicine. People can see with their own eyes that it’s failing them. But we often only learn from things like pain, and mistakes, and from tragedies. And again, I’m so sorry to hear about your parents, it’s terrible that you had to witness how the medical system failed them.

I’m a totally different person… that’s how life-altering it was. There’s the old me, and then there’s this version of me. And I don’t wish that kind of transformation on anybody.

That’s a hell of an experience, really. But it forces you to grow… and I don’t know if there’s an end to it while we’re alive.

You know what? The Sun is starting to come up here. [It’s 6am in New Zealand].

Oh shit, yeah, you’d better get to bed.

I’ve actually got to be at work in three hours, but to hell with the dawn!

Yeah, we’ve got some good stuff going here [laughter].

Aloha, Betelgeuse.

I want to touch on a few more things real quick. Tim Burton seems to be returning to his roots a bit because Beetlejuice 2 will be out in 2024. What do you think about that?

I wrote a sequel for that, Beetlejuice Goes Hawaiian, which was going to be a beach movie, like Gidget [laughter]. I just thought it would be funny to have the Deetzes there on vacation. At the time, Tim had to make a decision after Edward Scissorhands… he had to either do Beetlejuice or Batman Returns. I remember the producer, Denise Di Novi, she wanted to do Beetlejuice Goes Hawaiian, because she liked the script.

How come they didn’t make it?

I think the focus shifted to the script to Batman Returns, which wasn’t terribly good at that time. Denise really tried to persuade Tim to do Beetlejuice 2, and we could’ve done it then. All the actors wanted to do it. I remember Winona Ryder was keen, and Glen Shaddix was ready to go… and the studio wanted it, but Tim decided on doing Batman again. So that was it. And you couldn’t make that version of Beetlejuice now because everyone’s older.

The title of it, Beetlejuice Goes Hawaiian, almost belies every expectation.

I had lots of funny stuff in it, but also wild, phantasmagoric, really trippy stuff. I don’t know how it would play now.

It would play great [makes hand motion mimicking Terry Semel].

Yes [laughter], it played great [repeats hand motion]. The more I think about it, I think you could maybe still do it with different characters, as a movie on its own, but it wouldn’t be the same. I did write a bunch of other scripts for Tim, but they didn’t get made. It was disappointing living in L.A. at the time and none of these movies getting made, aside from Mars Attacks.

If you write something that doesn’t get made, you still get paid, but I can imagine the frustration must be immense when it never comes to fruition?

It can be really depressing. Because when you write a film, you make it. It’s all in your head, and it’s done, you’ve created it. The actual filmmaking process with a director and a cast is really the final version of the script. It’s the final draft of the script, in a way. So, to do all that is like having sex without an orgasm.

Eck… the old blue balls.

It’s just awful [laughter]. That was another reason that I wasn’t too unhappy when I got sick, and that’s weird to admit, but when I was a playwright pretty much everything I wrote was produced. You write it, and then you perform it, and it’s done.

I suppose in that sense you progress more as an artist?

Oh yes, you learn a lot from each of those experiences, unless you’re just sticking to formulaic shit. There was a time in the past when screenwriters would write a film, and it would get made, then they’d write another, and it would get made… so you’d learn that craft by doing it and having that moviemaking experience. But it’s not really like that anymore.

There’s not many filmmakers left that churn out a movie every two years or three years like clockwork. Martin Scorsese or Ridley Scott, maybe?

I think Woody Allen is able to do that too, but he’s one of the few. He can write it, make it, put it out, and then move on to the next thing having learned from what he did before.

Au revoir, Hollywood.

What if your phone rang tomorrow and you were faced with being right back in the Hollywood mess?

I have thought about that [laughter]. There’s a couple of projects which I’ve mentioned that Tim Burton’s got, and I’ve often wondered if the phone did ring, what would I say? I’m not sure… it might be a difficult decision because in a way I’m not sure if I could. But I wouldn’t want to disappoint Tim, because I still love him.

Would you ever turn your screenplays into books?

I find you can do a lot more with novels. And I am writing novels now. But I did love being in the movies at the time. I loved the actors, and the crew… I just loved the whole thing. And it’s really, really fun when you have someone great like Tim involved. It’s like going on a holiday, and everyone is playing together, and it’s wonderful. Everyone brings something to the table, and the collaboration of it all is just great. There’s a tremendous high that comes from it, and so you can see why people don’t want to quit doing it.

Have those experiences given you a new outlook on your own movies as you’ve gotten older?

When you make the film, you’re never happy with it. I don’t think I watched Mars Attacks for twenty years. I saw it maybe a year ago and I was delighted, and I thought that it was funny. I definitely didn’t watch Batman for a long time, because I thought it was bad. But I had the wrong perspective, and Batman’s got flaws, but I think it’s actually really good.

Forgive me for saying, but maybe you should reach out to Tim Burton again.

We could’ve done so much more. Tim and I worked together so well together. We could’ve done another two or three, at least.

Maaaybe you should reach out to Tim again [laughing].

You know, we got a good laugh out of what we were doing. And we loved screwing with Hollywood. It was just our sense of humour [laughter].

Humour me with one last curve-ball. Who’s your favourite Batman?
Oh, Michael Keaton. I saw the first film last night again, and I was really admiring what Michael was doing. I need to watch Batman Returns again just to watch his performance. But I thought he did a wonderful job in the first movie.

In the first film Keaton seems exhausted and tormented, but in Batman Returns there’s a slight change in him… as if a certain weight had come off of his shoulders.

I remember Michael saying he was a bit frustrated with the first film to some degree, and he wanted to do some things in the second film that would flesh Bruce Wayne out some more. And I hate to say it, but that goes back to the idea that I presented to Tim… he’s got to be tortured and psychotic. That’s the key.

When it comes to Batman and Bruce Wayne, the other movies haven’t quite hit the mark for me. I don’t know if that’s because of Keaton’s performance, or a combination of the writing along with Tim’s vision.

I think maybe they don’t understand what makes the character work onscreen. I remember Tim, and Lisa Marie and I we all went to see Batman Forever. The one that had Robin in it. There were several shots of Batman’s bum…

And the suit had nipples on it.

And the suit had nipples [laughter]. After we left the cinema Tim said, “Batman Forever? They should call it Batman Forget It.”

I’m surprised you guys sat through the whole thing [laughing].

It wasn’t easy [laughter]. I never saw the George Clooney one, but I did like the recent one with Robert Pattinson. I was expecting to hate it, but there was some good taste in there.

Batman Forever veered too far into campy territory for me, but Val was alright as Batman.

You know, Val was a funny guy. I used to be friends with him. Joanne Whalley, who was his wife, was a friend of mine. She was in one of my plays in London, and she lived near me. That’s how I met Oliver Stone, because he was doing The Doors with Val.

Did you work on The Doors?

Well Val asked me to help him do an audition tape for the part of Jim Morrison. So, I wrote a scene, and we filmed it, and Val sent the tape to Oliver, and he liked it. But Val was a bit nervous when Oliver called him in to audition, and he asked me to go with him. I think he did three auditions for the part, and finally Oliver gave him the role.

If you haven’t seen it, Val’s great in “Kiss Kiss, Bang Bang." He played a private investigator named “Gay Perry.” Totally hilarious.

Val is one of those types of Americans that I could never understand. I remember there was one time he was renting a flat in London, near where I lived. He was dating Joanne, and he wanted to know where the nearest gym was. I was a member of a gym nearby and I said, well I’ll show you where it is, let’s go. And I think it was a ten-minute walk away, and Val said let’s get a cab. And I said, but it’s only ten minutes away, but he insisted on a cab. Then after he saw the gym and registered he said, let’s get a cab back. He didn’t want to walk.

Maybe he was afraid of people yelling, “Hey, Iceman!”

Well it wasn’t like people would hound him for his autograph… London wasn’t like that. He was the laziest person. He would just sit on the couch and watch TV all the time. If there was a piece of paper on the floor he wouldn’t pick it up. But he knew he had to do the muscle, so he’d go to the gym, and he hated doing it. He’d only do the absolute minimum that he had to do, and if he really wanted something he’d put in the work and he’d work hard, but nothing else mattered. So, he was a slob in that sense [laughter].

I love it. Sounds like he had a Peter Pan complex.

That’s exactly it. It’s like he never outgrew his university years. He was an over-aged frat boy.

Well, holy hell, we’ve really run the gamut, haven’t we?

Yes, okay… off to bed with you now [laughter].

This has been so wonderful. I really appreciate all that you’ve shared, Jonathan.

You’re very welcome, Brandon. I can’t tell you how much I’ve enjoyed this. Take care, keep in touch, peace out.

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