The American director Tim Burton, will be awarded the Golden Lion for Lifetime Achievement at the 64th Venice International Film Festival (29th August - 8th September 2007). The Golden Lion pays homage again to one of the most courageous, visionary and innovative American filmmakers who have been able to move and fascinate the widest and broadest audience, and to be always suspended between art and industry. Mr. Burton’s Golden Lion was proposed by Festival Director, Marco Müller, and approved by the Board of Directors of Fondazione La Biennale di Venezia, chaired by Davide Croff. The previous recipient of the honor was David Lynch in 2006.
The award will be presented to the director on Wednesday 5th September, during a special “Tim Burton Day” (with a series of surprise offerings) at the next Venice Film Festival set to take place in the Sala Grande of the Palazzo del Cinema.
Tim Burton had chosen the Venice Film Festival to present his two animated masterpieces, The Nightmare Before Christmas (given its international premiere at the 1994 Festival) and Corpse Bride (given its world premiere at the 2005 Festival).
Across twelve full-length feature films in 23 years, Tim Burton has demonstrated astounding versatility without ever sacrificing the thematic and stylistic unity of his work. Burton’s movies veer from enchantment to melancholy, often within the same frame, and his fantasy-scapes can mix Gothic horror and oddball comedy. Though he works in and around Hollywood, his films often fall outside the contemporary paradigm of American cinema. Through the box-office successes and artistic achievements of Batman, Ed Wood, Sleepy Hollow, Burton’s consistently outstanding work has been defined by a unique, personal stamp that marks him as one of contemporary cinema’s true visionaries. He is currently in production on his big screen adaptation of Stephen Sondheim’s award-winning musical thriller Sweeney Todd, a co-production of Warner Bros. Pictures and DreamWorks Pictures, starring Johnny Depp, Helena Bonham-Carter, Alan Rickman, Timothy Spall, Sacha Baron Cohen and Christopher Lee.
The Venice Film Festival director, Marco Müller, declared: “Tim Burton is a cinematic genius, the most imaginative child of the new age of cinema. He has a unique talent of being able to imbue his fantasies with emotional depth. He can build the most visionary dreamscapes (that reach to the eternal child within us), without ever forgetting his sense of aesthetic integrity and his natural sympathy for the alienated outsider. More insolently pop than most of the contemporary new directors, and less eager for approval than most of the older ones, there is not a bankable Hollywood director with a flintier sense of cinema than him.”
Venice, 21st March 2007
