A Quote by Tim Burton

I remember early in my career with Disney, which was a very strange time in the company - there were a couple of executives who were very supportive of me and kind of let me do my own thing.
You wouldn't think it would but my parents were really balanced about that. When it came time for me to be out of the house and out on my own they were very supportive.
The strange thing about my life is that I came to America at about the time when racial attitudes were changing. This was a big help to me. Also, the people who were most cruel to me when I first came to America were black Americans. They made absolute fun of the way I talked, the way I dressed. I couldn't dance. The people who were most kind and loving to me were white people. So what can one make of that? Perhaps it was a coincidence that all the people who found me strange were black and all the people who didn't were white.
Well, of course it was a very trying time for me, and fortunately I had a lot of people who were supportive. A lot of people who were writing and calling and saying they were praying for me. Some people sent me Scripture, and that helped.
The Ramones were a great bunch of guys. They were very quiet, very shy. They were a little in awe of the filmmaking process, probably because we started at 7 a.m. I do remember the very first day of shooting, I met them and did the scene in the bedroom where Joey sings to me, and they were all scattered around my bedroom in my little fantasy scene. That was the first scene we shot of the movie. That scene is kind of a strange way to start a movie. "Okay, get undressed, and these weird guys in leather jackets and ripped jeans are going to sing to you."
When I was making films [early in my career] there were very, very few female directors, and there were certainly no women on set, which made taking one's clothes off all the more difficult.
Randy Wittman told me not to shoot 3-pointers. That got me very uncomfortable. There were certain labels tagged on me very early in my career, spots on the floor where I felt uncomfortable.
With 'Pete's Dragon,' Disney was very excited about the movie I wanted to make; they were very supportive of it, and it was a smooth process. I was really surprised by that.
When I came to Berkeley, I met all these Nobel laureates and I got to know that they were regular people. They were very smart and very motivated and worked very hard, but they were still humans, whereas before they were kind of mythical creatures to me.
My parents, God bless 'em, were very supportive of me and my decision to pursue acting. Their dream for me and my sister was that we graduate from college. And as soon as I fulfilled that, they were extremely supportive of what I wanted to do next. I will always be grateful to them for that, because I wouldn't be where I am today without their help and encouragement.
My children came out as individuals in their own right. They were not my products. They had their own characters and were very strong-minded. I gave them a lot of freedom when they were still very young. The one thing they got from me is morals. They would never betray anyone. They are really good people.
[At DuPont,] I was very fortunate that I worked under men who were very much interested in making discoveries and inventions. They were very much interested in what they were doing, and they left me alone. And I was able to experiment on my own, and I found this very stimulating. It appealed to the creative person in me.
I think in the early part of my career, the roles were so disparate that it never gave anybody an opportunity to understand my essence and what I would be good at doing, as opposed to what I would not be good at doing, so these little moments of beautiful things that were happening to me were consistent, but very few and very far between.
My parents were very unusual. They were pro-women and independence and they wanted me to have my own career. And because of my lineage, every door was opened for me.
I had very supportive parents that made the way for me, even at a time when there were very few women - no women, really; maybe two or three women - and very few, fewer than that, African-American women heading in this direction, so there were very few people to look up to. You just had to have faith.
I think that might have been an element in it, and people have asked me that very thing. Remember, Disney is the majority shareholder, but it is not an operating division of Disney.
I think being raised by a single mother put me on the outside, and I would watch my mothers married friends and think, Why does she put him down in public? or, Why is he so rude to her? It seemed to me that there were very few marriages where the couple were genuinely in a supportive, loving partnership.
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