For this week's edition of The Close-Up, the Film Society of Lincoln Center's weekly podcast series, we visited our extensive archives to spotlight Tim Burton, whose latest film, Big Eyes, hit theaters on Christmas.

In 2005, Burton visited the Walter Reade Theater for an extended conversation and Q&A with then Film Society Program Director Richard Peña prior to the release of his animated fantasy Corpse Bride. Burton talked extensively about his work in animation on that film as well as his 1993 classic The Nightmare Before Christmas, delving into technique and what he describes as the “magic of animation” as well as his opinion on stop motion vs. straight drawn animation, collaborating with Johnny Depp and Helena Bonham Carter, and how he struggled with being told he “drew incorrectly” as a child.

“I look at children's drawings. All children draw amazingly and they get beaten out of them,” says Burton. “At at the farmers market, I almost had a hallucination and figured out I was going to draw the way I wanted to.”

The crux of the conversation with Peña and members of the audience revolved around his animation work, specifically Corpse Bride. For that film, which is set in a fictional Victorian-era village and features the voices of Depp and Bonham Carter, Burton said he strived to allow the emotional component to shine. “We had the challenge of making puppets look emotional, but a lot of it had to do with the cast… Voices are important in an animated film, but in this case, they really came through and added an emotional quality.”

The filmmaker's latest live-action film, Big Eyes, stars Amy Adams and Christoph Waltz. The biographical drama centers on the painter Margaret Keane (Adams), who received phenomenal success in the 1950s but received no recognition. Her husband, Walter Keane (Waltz), claimed to be the artist and subsequently became a national celebrity, hitting the talk-show circuit regularly after he pioneered mass production of inexpensive prints of big-eyed kids. Margaret generated the paintings from their basement with his signature added to the bottom, but the ruse ended their marriage. Margaret subsequently set out to make it known that she created the paintings, leading to a nasty court battle.