It's quiet in London's Air Studios - almost too quiet. I'm sitting in an empty mission control room, by a complex-looking mixing board filled with dozens of buttons. Tim Burton enters the room, his dark, baggy shirt matching his raven-coloured scarecrow hair. It's late February and he's nervous - his latest film Dark Shadows, set to open in cinemas in 2 1/2 months, is still not finished.
'We're really backed up,' he sighs. 'We haven't scored yet. We're still working on effects. You can't tell by me today, but I should be working.'
When we meet, Burton - who is not keen on Hollywood's penchant for releasing teaser footage early - has yet to even produce a trailer. In fact, the blown-up film still sitting on a wooden easel behind me is about all there is to go on. That and the knowledge that Burton and regular star Johnny Depp are once again plumbing the pop-culture archives, this time revamping the 1960s US gothic soap opera that ran for five years and 1,225 episodes.
'That's the interesting thing about the tone of the original Dark Shadows,' he says. 'It's not meant to be funny, it's serious. But that's what made it funny to me. It's a weird dynamic. And so, just me as a person anyway, I like mixing melodrama, humour and dark and light elements all together. This project seemed to have those possibilities.' Certainly, it's a blueprint he managed for the 1988 supernatural comedy Beetlejuice, and some of his other, better films - from fairy tale Edward Scissorhands to alien invasion tale Mars Attacks! and biopic Ed Wood.
Admittedly, the past decade has seen a regression in his work - lavish adaptations of children's classics, from Roald Dahl's Charlie and the Chocolate Factory (2005) to Lewis Carroll's Alice in Wonderland (2010), not to mention his animated CG feature Corpse Bride (2005) - presumably reflective of the fact that Burton became a father of two (Billy, eight; Nell, four) with his actress partner, Helena Bonham Carter. Even his gory take on Stephen Sondheim's musical Sweeney Todd: The Demon Barber of Fleet Street (2007) felt sanitised. With Depp's Dark Shadows character Barnabas Collins a 200-year-old vampire, this time Burton could be accused of pandering to the tween crowd, aping the trend that has spawned popular film franchises such as Twilight and TV show True Blood. He shakes his head.
'I really never considered this a vampire movie,' he says. 'It's just more of a supernatural soap opera. It's just Barnabas happens to be a vampire. That was the thing about the original Dark Shadows - it was the precursor to all that stuff. All those things owe a bit of inspiration to Dark Shadows.'