by Gill Pringle
“This is our fourth movie together. People only think three. But you know there’s four? You guys all know about the fourth one, yeah? [Batman Returns, Mars Attacks, Big Fish].
“I was doing a play in New York and was very excited that I heard that Tim was doing this movie, and he called and said, ‘Are you?’ And I said, ‘My God, I’m not. Right now, I’m doing Arthur Miller’s play The Price, with Mark Ruffalo, Jessica Hecht and Tony Shalhoub.’ And I wanted the play to continue. It was a limited run, but we got extended and his date overlapped.
“And then you know what movies are like. Movies have this built in thing where they push, they delay. All of a sudden, they go, “We did pre-production, but we’re not ready.” He called me, said, “Well this …” I was going to even try to get out of the play, honest to God. But I didn’t want to leave. Anyway, long story short, I was very, very excited to be part of Dumbo.
“I did the movie because of Tim… I watch him work and he’s an artist. He paints with the visuals that are available to him. So, you become part of his paintbox, become part of the colour that he’s using and the depth of field, and whether you’re in the way, way, way distance, or you’re in the up, up, up, close-up, where everything is put in the composition of it all. You just feel like you’re part of that. It’s like if you were with any artist, and he or she was using you as an element, an implement, a thing, but with all the humanity.
“When I met him for Batman Returns, when I walked into his office there was a big painting, leaning up against the wall. It was circus stripes, and it was like a ball on the bottom, and there was a little guy on it who looked very odd. And there was a caption: ‘My name is Jimmy, but they call me The Hideous Penguin Boy.’ That’s basically Tim.
“Dumbo was always one of those things for me from the time I was a little boy, it was very, very emotional, very, very heartfelt for me. I was totally taken by the 63-minute Disney movie, and I have three kids, so I got to expose them to this wonderful story of xenophobia, which is something that you want to teach your kids about because it exists in the world.
“Something’s different than you are, and you want to make fun of it, or you just don’t know how to deal with it. And so, you bully it, or you are mean to it. And then the whole thing of the mother being separated from her child… And unfortunately, that is something that has happened all over time in our world, but never more prevalent than it is at this moment with what’s going on in this insanity of refugees… So those themes are in there.
“I was the circus director in Big Fish. This is the completion of our circus trilogy. Because in Batman I had a circus troupe, and in Big Fish I was the head of the circus, also a werewolf. But this movie, yeah, it’s a cool thing to be in, in a way, because Tim is the ringmaster.
“Now, of course Michael [Keaton] is playing the bad guy, and I’m the good guy. Michael and I did Johnny Dangerously, Batman Returns, where he was the caped crusader, and I was the evil, whatever the hell I did. I was misunderstood, you know, there’s always a duality. We had a really great time being reunited, the three of us. It was good to be together again. And I think my costumes are better than his!
“There’s a duality to my character, Medici. I’m a good guy. I took care of Holt’s [Colin Farrell] children while he was in the war. My circus is like a family. I try to take care of everybody. It’s very Marxist. There’s a social kind of fabric that I’m trying to keep together.
“But I do have a flaw, which is a good thing for me to overcome at the end of the movie, but the idea is that I do go with the glitter. I do drink the Kool-Aid of capitalism, if you will, because I want better things for them, and in that, you’ve got to worry about who you trust. If you believe that everything is going to rise and my entire troop is going to be better off because somebody’s dangling a little bit of money in front of my face, Medici learns it the way we learn it in life. That that’s not always the case. You’re better off sticking with the community, and people working together and staying in a reasonable realistic area than it is to go for the glitter. And if we weren’t in a Disney press conference, I would say it winds up biting you in the ass. But I said it anyway.”
Dumbo is in cinemas now.
