Johnny Depp as Edward, in the film Edward Scissorhands.
Johnny Depp as Edward, in the film Edward Scissorhands.
It was almost a musical, featured a Backstreet Boy and nearly starred Tom Cruise: 26 years after its release – as star Johnny Depp is named the most overpaid actor of 2016 – we revisit the making of Tim Burton's 1990 classic Edward Scissorhands.
Edward Scissorhands was based on the scriptwriter's dog
Director Tim Burton had hardly seen any of Johnny Depp's previous work (he was known at the time for his role in TV series 21 Jump Street), but cast him because he was impressed with Depp's "ability to act with his eyes".
Although Burton had drawn a character with sharp implements for hands years before the film and based it on his experiences feeling out of place while growing up in suburban California, Scissorhands came to life after the director met with scriptwriter Caroline Thompson, who had been nurturing a Frankenstein-style story.
Thompson told The Huffington Post that she based the character on a dog she had "who was so ridiculously present that if she had had the physiological ability I swear she could have talked. And if you examine Edward, that's what he's like. He's this dog that's like, 'What do you need? Here I am. He's basically a nonverbal character. He's a beautiful, wild-eyed dog. Johnny nailed my dog."
2. He had a very minimalist script
Johnny Depp may have broken away from the teen heart-throb mould he had created in his TV career, but he did so with only 169 words as Edward Scissorhands.
3. The film set took over an entire cul-de-sac
Burton didn't want to film in his native Burbank, because he felt it had changed too much to provide the warped suburbia seen in the film. After weeks of scouting similar settlements around America, the crew settled on a real neighbourhood in Lutz, a town east of Tampa in Florida.
Bo Welch, the film's production designer, told The Huffington Post how they rented 20 houses in a cul-de-sac by paying the people who lived in them and putting them up in a variety of accommodations: from Disneyland to a Super-8 Motel. Some locals took on work as extras, but many quit after they realised the long hours expected of them in the hot Florida weather.
The houses were painted in faded pastel colours, to represent the aspirations of suburban living, and some were given fake fronts with smaller windows to give a greater sense of paranoia. The vast majority of houses were painted back afterwards, but some liked their Scissorhands makeovers. Although all inhabitants eventually gave up their houses for the shoot, there was one man - who lived in the middle house - who only allowed the crew to use his at the last minute. The crew were expecting to have to film around the house.
4. Tom Cruise, Michael Jackson and Jim Carrey all went for the title role
The role came to define Depp as the King of Kooky, but chances are we wouldn't still be talking about Edward Scissorhands had it been cast with one of this esoteric bunch of possibles. Burton met with Cruise on several occasions at Fox's insistence. "He was interesting," the director recalled, "but I think it worked out for the best. A lot of questions came up" - one which concerned Scissorhands' lack of virility.
The King of Pop wanted to play Scissorhands, as did William Hurt and Robert Downey Jr, but the former was ignored and the latter two unsuccessful. Tom Hanks turned down the role to take on Bonfire of the Vanities instead. Jim Carrey was considered but lacked dramatic experience at that point in his career - nobody wanted a more comedic Edward than Depp offered.
5. Johnny Depp always had a Scissorhands back-up plan
Depp was 27 at the time, and just embarking on a credible film career. In an interview published weeks after Scissorhands' release, he seemed humble and unsure of his career trajectory: "I may be around for 20 or 30 years, or 20 or 30 minutes," he said. "Who knows?"
But Depp really loved the role and really loved acting alongside his fiancee Winona Ryder, who played Edward's teenage love interest Kim. He told the New York Times that he had kept the costume - just in case: "I still have the leather suit, and the hands. At least I have something to fall back on. If things don't work out, in a couple of years I may be doing birthday parties at McDonald's - as Edward. You know, 200 bucks a party." Going on his recent turkeys, some might say it wouldn't have been a bad alternative.
It was Vincent Price's last film
Horror movie veteran Price appears briefly as Scissorhands' creator, but it is sweetly fitting that the role would be the actor's last, and his final scene would be his character's death: as a frustrated, isolated teenager, Burton found solace in Price's films. So much so, that he sent Price Vincent, the award-winning animated short he made eight years earlier about a seven-year-old who has delusions of being Vincent Price.
Burton sent Price the film, and he appreciated it. He told the LA Times: "I can't tell you what (Price) meant to me growing up. This sounds dramatic but he helped me live... When you're a child and a teenager it's not unusual to go through a melodramatic phase. But by watching (Price's) films, there was a catharsis for me. You're not just watching a low-budget Edgar Allan Poe movie, there's something else there that's not on the screen. I channeled my melodrama into that, as opposed to suicide probably."
7. The topiary wasn't living
As well as painting the houses, the crew also had to install a lot of shrubs for Edward to sculpt into his creations in the film. The finished works, however, weren't real, but the creation of the art department. Welch said: "We designed them in the art department. We said, 'Okay, how about one is a dinosaur and one is a turtle and whatever?' They tended to be fantastical animals.
We designed them and then had them manufactured. They're light-weight steel armatures wrapped with chicken wire and stuffed with artificial greens. They were light enough to move around."
8. Nick Carter made a cameo
The Backstreet Boy singer wasn't credited for his blink-and-you-miss-it cameo as a boy playing on the Slip 'n Slide as Edward and Peg ride through suburbia. Nor can you see his face. But never underestimate the zeal of a Backstreet Boys fan, nor the power of the internet:
Stuart Lancaster, known for his roles in Faster Pussycat! Kill! Kill! and Mudhoney, also briefly appears in the role of "retired man".
9. It took four hours to transform Johnny Depp into Edward Scissorhands
Depp's gothy look may seem derivative of that adopted by Scissorhands, but turning into the latter was a considerably arduous process. For four months Depp spent two hours a day in make-up, to have his eyebrows covered and scars applied (in the DVD commentary, Burton jokes that some of the scars were real "because there was an adjustment period for the actor wearing scissors on his hand") to his ghostly face.
It took another 45 minutes to sew Depp into his black latex bodysuit (parts of which came from Burton's old sofa), which, along with the scissor hands, was created with the help of Pumpkinhead's Oscar-winning special effects expert Stan Winston. Then a hairdresser took a final hour to create Edward's tousled mane.
10. It was was originally a musical
Burton originally wanted to make the film musical, claiming that it "seemed big and operatic to me". He dropped the idea, but went on to prove quite the master of musical films with Sweeney Todd. He originally asked The Cure's Robert Smith to score the film, but Smith was too busy working on the band's eighth album, Disintegration.
Instead, Burton worked with his career-long collaborator Danny Elfman on the score, but added three Tom Jones songs to the soundtrack: a nod to the pallid musical palette of his upbringing, where nobody listened to music, but everyone liked the efforts of the Welsh crooner.
