Tim Burton to Receive Lumiere Award for Lifetime Achievement

Tim Burton

Photo-by-Vittorio-Zunino-Celotto_Getty-Images-for-RFF

Tim Burton, the visionary director of Batman, Bettlejuice, Ed Wood and Edward Sissorhands, will be honored with the 2022 Lumiere Award, a lifetime achievement prize, at this year’s Lumière Film Festival.

Burton will attend the Lumière festival in Lyon, France from Oct. 20 until Oct. 23 and will receive his gong on Friday, Oct. 21.

The American director joins such previous Lumière award winners as Jane Campion, Francis Ford Coppola, Martin Scorsese, Wong Kar-wai and Quentin Tarantino.

Unveiling Burton’s award on Wednesday, the Lumière festival called him “an artist who has given world cinema a universe of rare coherence with an unprecedented impact on popular culture.”

Burton’s particular mix of gothic horror and baroque comedy, combined with his inimitable visual style, informs his entire career as a director, from his 1984 breakout short Frankenwennie, through his string of early hits Pee-wee’s Big Adventure (1985), Bettlejuice (1988), Batman (1989) Edward Sissorhands (1990), Batman Returns (1992) and Ed Wood (1994, to children’s book adaptations Charlie and the Chocolate Factory (2005) and Alice in Wonderland (2010), to his latest, Disney’s 2019 live-action adaptation of Dumbo. Burton is in post-production on Wednesday, his first-ever TV series, for Netflix. The series, stars Jenna Ortegan as Wednesday Adams, the “normal” one in the horror household The Adams Family.

“Burton’s cinema reveals his fascination with the monster, the marginal, the thorn in the side of an America corseted by its normativity and its endless residential suburbs,” the festival noted. ” Skeletons, witches, goblins, ghosts, robots, anthropomorphic monkeys, catwomen and headless horsemen haunt the work of the filmmaker.”

The 2022 Lumière Film Festival runs Oct. 15-23.