Director Tim Burton (Edward Scissorhands, Beetlejuice) was honored at the Lumière Festival in Lyon this week, where he received the Prix Lumière and participated in a master class. Throughout the week, Burton reflected on his career, which he began as an animator at Disney. Since then, Burton has directed some of the biggest films of the ’80s, ’90s, and ’00s, including Batman (1989), Batman Returns (1992), Ed Wood (1994), and Sweeney Todd (2007). Burton also directed a string of live-action hits for Disney, such as Alice in Wonderland (2010) and Dumbo (2019). But Burton indicated that he was done working inside the Disney machine.

During a press conference at the festival, Burton said “My history is that I started out there. I was hired and fired like several times throughout my career there. The thing about Dumbo, is that’s why I think my days with Disney are done, I realized that I was Dumbo, that I was working in this horrible big circus and I needed to escape. That movie is quite autobiographical at a certain level.” Burton also said he had zero interest in joining a mega-franchise like Star Wars or Marvel, “It’s gotten to be very homogenized, very consolidated. There’s less room for different types of things, … I can only deal with one universe, l can’t deal with a multi-universe.”