There's a night-and-day difference between the soundstages of Tim Burton's Dark Shadows and his previous movie, Alice in Wonderland, and, no surprise, this is a film-maker far more comfortable in the darkness.
The digital ambitions of Alice in Wonderland required numbing weeks of work in a green-screen chamber, and by the end of it Burton was desperate to get back to his roots - building a cinematic house and then haunting it with his unique brand of cemetery cabaret.
For Dark Shadows, an eccentric vampire romance starring Johnny Depp, Michelle Pfeiffer and Eva Green, he's staged a minor one-man rebellion against CG imagery; the story has some digital effects, but where the script called for a Maine fishing town's waterfront, circa 1972, Burton persuaded Warner Bros. and the film's producers to build it on the back lot of England's storied Pinewood Studios instead of on a computer screen.
"It's so nice to come to work here - not everything is green," Burton said last summer as he roamed the gothic, crushed-velvet trappings of the mansion that is home to Depp's aristocratic bloodsucker, Barnabas Collins.
'It's a soap opera - or started as one - and that really means working with the actors. And the sets help everyone. And it's just more fun."
Dark Shadows is a curious creature and an ongoing mystery. A trailer recently premiered to mixed reactions; its winking tone possibly suggested the film is an elaborate spoof on the overwrought Twilight movies, but actually, like so many Burton projects, this one is a fractured valentine to the pop-culture obsessions of his youth.
In the film, Depp plays Collins, the 18th-century playboy of Maine's high society whose Lothario ways earn the wrath of Angelique Bouchard, a witch portrayed by Green. She transforms him into a vampire and dispatches him to an underground crypt where he is imprisoned until 1972. T
That's when an unlucky construction crew sets him free, and in a world of lava lamps, glam rock and Richard M. Nixon, he finds purpose in the new era. The ensemble cast features a number of Burton's regular players. In addition to Depp and Pfeiffer, there's the director's romantic partner, Helena Bonham Carter, Chloe Moretz and English horror legend Christopher Lee.
The set-up and characters are taken from the truly weird TV series also called Dark Shadows, an ABC soap opera that logged 1225 episodes before it went off the air in 1971. Created by Dan Curtis, the show starred Jonathan Frid as tortured Barnabas and brought ghosts and ghouls to the afternoon hours that usually belonged to handsome surgeons and conniving heiresses.
Unlike The Addams Family and The Munsters, this monster-mash of a show was a fringe taste, which is why it attracted the young outsiders who would be called goths today. Three of them were Burton, Depp and Pfeiffer, and they have nearly identical memories about racing home from school to catch the same strange transmission.
"It was a real thing for me, I had to watch it, and it was tough because you'd miss the beginning - it started at like 3pm, but that's when we got out of school," Depp said.
"And then it moved later because all the kids wrote in letters. When you met someone who knew the show and loved it, there was an instant connection."
That connection doesn't exist with young moviegoers today, however, and the producers of the new movie aren't going to encourage anyone to check out the originals because, well, it wasn't, technically speaking, a great show.
"I think," Burton said evenly, "you could say it was actually awful."
So what exactly was its appeal?
"It's a different animal," Burton said.
"If I go back and watch something like Star Trek, it's not that hard to analyse what the appeal was, and even if the show is dated you identify what it was that made it work. The Dark Shadows appeal was a little more abstract. What I loved about it was the fact that it was a melodramatic soap opera, and, well, that flies in the face of any modern studio's interests as far as moviemaking. But what we've gone for is a mixture, and that's always what I've been interested in; I think most of my movies are mixtures of light and dark and serious things and things that have humour in them."
On the set, during one scene last summer, Depp emerged from the shadows - in costume and full make-up - with a sort of gliding majesty. He couldn't hear Bonham Carter's playful whisper teasing him about a previous role as she watched from a nearby corner.
"Just look at him," she said with a wink.
"He only does parts if he can wear eyeliner. The Tourist? Should have had more makeup."
Depp has one of the most famous faces in Hollywood, but in many of his roles he hides it.
"I don't think about it that way, I just go to the role that feels right," the 48-year-old star said.
Between takes, he offered his hands to a visitor for inspection - each of his fingers was extended into talons with rubbery prosthetics, and one held the weight of an especially opulent ring.
"There's an elegance to this guy that's kind of fun; Barnabas is a good one," Depp said as, over his shoulder, Burton chatted with Bonham Carter next to a laboratory vat of vampire blood.
"And just look around - there's nothing like working with Tim."
The film-maker and star clearly adore each other - this is their seventh live-action collaboration. Sleepy Hollow producer Scott Rudin memorably quipped that Depp is "basically playing Tim Burton in all of his movies", which doesn't really hold to scrutiny - but the actor does know he faces a greater challenge each time he steps into Burton's universe to play yet another spooky soul.
"Have I been in this arena before? That's the thing you have to watch," said Depp, who joked that Edward Scissorhands, Sweeney Todd and Ichabod Crane would enjoy a tour of the Collins mansion.
The actor paints portraits of his characters as he dials into their minds and hearts, and to get their voices right he counts backward from 10 - he's himself at the top but the accent and affectations gather with each digit until he is a vampire at zero.
Co-star Jackie Earle Haley, who plays caretaker Willie Loomis, said whatever tricks Depp used, they were good ones.
"He was using those long fingers in one scene where he has to hypnotise me," the Watchmen star said.
"So I'm watching them and his eyes and listening to his voice and it kind of started to work a little bit. I was like, 'Wow, this guy could be the real thing'."
Dark Shadows is built around the comedic timing of Depp and the immersive world of Burton, the Edward Gorey of Hollywood.
Just as he's assembled many of his usual team in front of the camera, he's relying on previous collaborators behind the scenes, including costume designer Colleen Atwood and composer Danny Elfman. Production designer Rick Heinrichs, who won an Oscar for his work with Burton on Sleepy Hollow, may be in the running again with his Dark Shadows sets.
Burton's previous movie, Alice in Wonderland, made more than $1 billion worldwide, but the quirks of Dark Shadows has Hollywood wondering if this will be an overly eccentric misfire like his 1996 sci-fi spoof, Mars Attacks! (which, interestingly, was the last Burton film without Depp, Bonham Carter or both in the cast). Of course, many also doubted 2005's Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, which made roughly $475 million.
There have been dark shadows under Burton's eyes every day of 2012 and with good reason. In addition to the exhuming of Barnabas Collins, he's got two other films that reach theatres this year (he's the director of Frankenweenie and producer of Abraham Lincoln: Vampire Hunter) and long-range projects (such as the just-announced Alice in Wonderland Broadway musical) always nibble at his mind and schedule.
