This is us watching: Ed Wood, in which Tim Burton and Johnny Depp admire madness

In this series Articles every week I talk about which films and TV series amazed me. And now it’s “Ed Wood’s” turn.

By 1994, Tim Burton had made five films and was already a bona fide star: Beetlejuice, Edward Scissorhands and his work on Batman showed him to be a brilliant visionary. It also became obvious that the director is attracted to outsiders, losers. Just like Ed Wood was.

Back in the 80s, a couple of years after the death of Ed Wood, he was labeled “the worst director in the history of Hollywood.” This is hardly an exaggeration. Wood made bad genre films with virtually no budgets and no concern for quality. The director could shoot 20 scenes in a day, being content with one take, rewriting the scripts right before turning on the camera, but at the same time he considered himself a great artist. Ed Wood wrote about his paintings as if he were filming "Citizen Kane». Tim Burton was attracted by this passion for cinema, bordering on madness, and a complete lack of understanding of his own status.

It is not surprising that Johnny Depp agreed to play the main character instantly. Such a crazy, but at the same time real-life hero, and even with the direction of his friend Tim Burton, is a gift of fate.

There is so much tragedy in the figure of Ed Wood that the comedy about him turned out to be sad in many ways. Wood dreamed of working in films, but suffered from two things: a lack of talent and a learning disability. Johnny Depp emphasizes both the hero’s problems and his complete lack of understanding of their existence. Especially when Wood, with sparkling eyes, admires his own crazy ideas. The line between funny madness and drama about mental instability is blurred, so Depp is forced to always be both an unrecognized genius and a mediocrity, and he succeeds. This is a brilliant performance, one of the strongest in the actor’s career.

The union of Ed Wood and his friend Bela Lugosi also looks brilliant. Lugosi was a superstar in the 30s, his performance Dracula roles - one of the best in history. When you meet Wood, he is an old drug addict, endlessly nostalgic for his past glory. Wood did not have a great past, he does not have a great present, but he has faith in an incredible future. But no matter how hard he tries, he cannot infect Lugosi with her. Their common present is horror and complete disappointment.

It is interesting that Tim Burton did not tell a detailed biography of Wood. He concentrated on individual episodes that demonstrate an eccentric with endless vital energy, which pushes him to new achievements - even if they are doomed to failure. What comes out is not patronizing ridicule (they say, I’m a fashionable director, mocking a mediocrity from the past), but pure admiration, if not for an artist, but for a person.