If you’ve seen Margaret Keane’s paintings — the haunting portraits of children and animals with large, round eyes — you won’t be surprised to learn that eccentric Hollywood director Tim Burton not only collects them, but has commissioned the painter to create original work.
The two artists share a similar vision when it comes to the thousand-yard stare. Maybe it’s no coincidence that "Edward Scissorhands" is Keane’s favorite Burton film. The hero could be a Gothic cousin from Keane’s wide world of waifs. Some of Burton’s animated phantoms, too.
But the director’s bio-pic about Keane, who lived and painted in Hawaii for 27 years, will likely be a departure from that. The film that Burton calls "Big Eyes" has been shooting in Vancouver this summer and shifts to Hawaii next month to shoot scenes from Keane’s legal battle with her ex-husband over who really painted those distinctive and slightly disturbing creations.
Burton is expected to be here for the filming, which will include a wedding scene at a Waikiki hotel.
The 85-year-old Keane, who now lives in Napa, Calif., with her daughter and son-in-law, is awash in emotion when it comes to the film. The project has been in the works for a decade and survived two false starts with different actresses in the lead role.
"I am really in a state of shock," Keane said by phone. "I can hardly believe it is actually happening. I had begun to wonder if it would ever happen, especially in my lifetime."
Multiple Oscar nominee Amy Adams ("Man of Steel," "Trouble with the Curve") portrays Keane. Two-time Oscar winner Christoph Waltz ("Django Unchained," "Inglourious Basterds") was cast as Keane’s ex-husband, Walter Keane, who died in 2000.
The previous attempts to make a movie about the artist had an equally golden glow. Six years ago Oscar nominee Kate Hudson was set to play the lead, but the timing didn’t work out. Then, Oscar winner Reese Witherspoon got the role. Again, timing nixed the project.
"Everybody thought it was dead and then Tim Burton revived it," Keane said.
The artist met Burton about 15 years ago, and he has commissioned her to paint portraits of his partner, actress Helena Bonham Carter, and their son.
"He is very down to earth and very likeable, very kind," Keane said. "I really like him very much. You would never know he was a famous producer or director. He is very considerate, very humble, a very nice person."
THE BIG-EYED paintings became popular in the late 1950s and early ’60s. At the time, the public thought they were done by Keane’s second husband, Walter, who took credit for the work. After the couple split up in 1964, Margaret Keane moved from San Francisco to Hawaii.
She would say years later, in the fall of 1970, that she had been too shy to publicly denounce her ex-husband’s claim that he was the artist. She later challenged him to a paint-off in San Francisco’s Union Square, but when he didn’t show up, Margaret Keane told Life magazine, "He can’t paint eyes."
The artist was vindicated in 1986, when she sued Walter Keane and Gannett Co. Inc. for defamationin federal court in Honolulu. She took issue with Gannett’s USA Today, which credited her ex-husband with creating the paintings.
With her back to the jury in a hushed courtroom, Keane needed less than an hour to paint the face of a young boy. The figure stared out from the 11-by-14-inch canvas with the artist’s signature large, dark eyes. Her ex-husband declined to demonstrate his painting abilities and told federal Judge Samuel P. King that his shoulder was too sore.
Keane prevailed in court, and the "evidence" now hangs in her living room. She calls it "The Eyewitness."
The paintings were a pop culture fixture of the era. They were on walls in the United Nations in New York City and the Bolshoi Theater in Moscow. Red Skelton owned some. Chiang Kai-shek did, too.
There were big-eyed portraits of a diverse group, including Zsa Zsa Gabor, Adlai Stevenson and Liberace. Woody Allen even made fun of them in his 1973 movie "Sleeper."
"Big Eyes" will follow the 10 years that Walter Keane took credit for his wife’s work, Margaret Keane said.
The screenplay was written by Scott Alexander and Larry Karaszewski, who share a Golden Globe for the screenplay for "The People vs. Larry Flynt."
When they started the project a decade ago, the writers interviewed Keane extensively, and the artist said she likes what they have come up with. They call Keane nearly every day to update her on the film’s progress. But having your life immortalized in a movie has a definite otherworldly quality.
"It’s unreal," Keane said. "It’s like a dream or something."
In the beginning Keane had reservations about seeing her life turned into a movie, said Robert L. Brown, executive director of the artist’s Keane Eyes Gallery in San Francisco.
"She is a very private person and reserved," Brown said. "Over the years she has become comfortable with the fact that it was truthful, even though it might be embellished a bit with Hollywood details."
Burton, the writers, even Adams have all been to Keane’s home.
"She was very comfortable with the fact that Amy could portray her in a good light," Brown said of Keane. "These are people who are friends and fans, so they are not going to do her harm in this movie."
Burton’s attention to detail impressed Keane’s daughter, Jane Swigert, who traveled to Vancouver to watch production with her husband, along with Brown and his wife. Three of them — Brown’s wife declined — wound up as extras.
On set the 63-year-old Swigert watched a scene that depicted her as a 5-year-old child. It made her blink. All those years were bridged in an instant as Burton filmed painters selling their works in a park she used to visit with her mother.
"It was kind of a surreal experience for me because the little girl who plays me in the movie is just sitting there, and it was just like I remembered," Swigert said. "It just captured how I felt, exactly how I felt."
In a word: bored.
"My mom was always taking me to art shows and museums, and it was boring to me," Swigert said.
Not anymore. Swigert, who graduated from Kalani High School (Class of 1968), grew up to be a painter, at least for a while. She doesn’t have time anymore, preferring to throw her energies into Bible education and volunteer work.
Her mother, though, paints nearly every day. The elder Keane feels she’s doing some of her best work now, and her gallery, which opened shortly after she returned to California in 1991, does brisk business. Her oil paintings have sold for more than $100,000.
KEANE was painting the day Adams arrived for visit earlier this summer. The actress wanted to study the artist at work so she could re-create her in front of Burton’s camera.
She stayed for nearly five hours. The two women discovered they had things in common. As young girls each wanted to be a dancer. They loved art, too. And both painted.
"She wanted to watch me paint and see how I hold the brush because she will be doing a lot of painting in the film," Keane said. "I asked if she wanted to paint some of the picture I was doing, and she did."
Adams painted some of the leaves in the painting, which remains unfinished and might never be for sale.
Keane definitely approves of the young woman who will become her cinematic doppelgānger. And in this case she doesn’t mind someone getting a bit of the credit for one of her big-eyed portraits.
"I fell in love with her," Keane said. "I have watched a couple of her movies because I had never heard of her — I don’t go to movies — but I think she can play me really well."
