Following a few years of fantasy with Alice In Wonderland, Dark Shadows and their ilk, Tim Burton is returning to something like Ed Wood territory with his artist biopic Big Eyes. Amy Adams and Christoph Waltz are starring as the couple responsible for the truly hideous and inexplicably popular artworks the title refers to. And if you're wondering what we're talking about, you can glimpse said masterpieces in the just-released new stills below.
Big Eyes chronicles the story of Walter and Margaret Keane who became known in the '50s and '60s for crafting one of the first mass-marketed art sensations: their ocularly enhanced horrors were sold in petrol stations and small stores around the US. In a sexist twist reflecting the age, it was Walter alone who became famous for the pictures, parlaying the fiction that he created them into TV talkshow stardom. But it was Margaret who did the work, and claimed her share of the profits when she and Walter divorced. To prove her ownership in court, the judge ordered a paint-off between the pair.
Ed Wood writers Larry Karaszewski and Scott Alexander have long been trying to get the film off the ground, with previously developing incarnations seeing Thomas Haden Church and Kate Hudson, and Reese Witherspoon and Ryan Reynolds briefly attached. In its final form with Adams and Waltz, it also co-stars Danny Huston, Jason Schwartzman and Terence Stamp, as, respectively, a gossip journalist, a gallery owner and a snobby art critic.
Big Eyes is out in the States on Christmas Day, but we don't have a release date in the UK so far.