Sweeney Todd: The Demon Barber of Fleet Street is not yet wrapped, so alongside “greatest moments” from other Tim Burton-directed and/or –produced work, the Film Society of Lincoln Center concluded its recent evening event with three scenes from that Broadway-to-screen “old-fashioned melodrama.” Informal stage talk with Program Director Richard Peña prefacing and following the selections, the director styled the impressive dialogue-and-song three as “Sweeney Todd Comes Home,” “Sweeney Todd Gets Pissed Off,” “Sweeney Todd Gets Down to Business.”

To judge by jazz-venue Frederick P. Rose Hall audience applause, and much laughter during the evening, Edward Scissorhands (1990) and The Nightmare Before Christmas (1993) figure among the most fondly embraced. Its title frequently preceded by producer Burton’s name in the possessive but directed by Henry Selick, the latter painstaking two-year stop-motion animated feature adapted an earlier original fairy story conceived by Burton while he was a Disney animator-in-training with neither money nor influence.

More critically questioned was the fortuitous first of the director’s six collaborations with Johnny Depp, counting Sweeney. With Ed Wood (1994) second, Scissorhands remains “the film I feel closest to,” perhaps in that its jaundiced view of a pastel suburbia bears comparison to that of the career-launching (and equally thin at the end) Warners début, Pee-wee’s Big Adventure (1985).

Although the actor is currently the sexiest pirate on filmdom’s earth, the director was not familiar with him back then but suspects he was “probably not happy with the prospect of an eighth or ninth season of ‘21 Jump Street’” as undercover Tom Hanson. “Inside like me,” Depp impressed as “not always looking at himself -- I’m not even sure he’s seen any of the movies we’ve made,” and having a base for a character that could develop spontaneously on the set, in line with Burton’s decreasing reliance on storyboards.

Not precisely “Here, put on these scissors and go act,” mind you, but the sense is there, in the self-deprecating tone throughout, an implied refusal to take things so seriously as others might. In black relieved only by horizontal white stripes on the socks, Burton was relaxed in admitting success as valued but not divorced from plain luck. Period-crafted, sweet and cherished Ed Wood was “the biggest bomb, like an Ed Wood film, it killed black and white, . . . a bad idea, but to launch a satellite with an ad for Last Action Hero is a good one. Plan 9 From Outer Space as though it were Star Wars, there’s a thin line between success and failure.” In any case, that angora-fan filmmaker is remembered, his flying saucers mirrored in gum-card-inspired Mars Attacks! (1996), whereas others better qualified as the all-time worst are forgotten or never known.

 His own drawing not spectacular, after a TV childhood of cartoons and horror films and a California Arts Institute fellowship, Burton apprenticed at Disney, where others’ tremendous talents were underutilized and he learned to doze at his desk as if working, pencil poised in hand, and “fudged my time card, I’m sorry.” After first success with animated black-and-white six-minute Vincent (1982) -- not Van Gogh but childhood idol Price, the creator who would later die before affixing human hands on Edward -- and an Asian-cast fairy tale, came Frankenweenie (1984), half-an-hour of live-action parody that was not released because deemed too frightening for youngsters.

Fears and racial darkness, however, lie not deeply buried in the originals of folk/fairy tales, in Disney as well, e.g., the pink elephant drunk dream of Dumbo, the forest fire and mother’s death in Bambi, and Alice in Wonderland, and in grown-up tales from Burton, who praised Roald Dahl’s humor and “not speaking down to kids,” his mordant books among “the few, maybe, I read.” The hero of Batman (1989), his favorite television comic-strip character, is dwarfed by Nicholson’s emotionally and facially distorted Joker, by dizzying heights and sets that are bizarre toys. Though he avoided prompting for a musical version -- “Oh, Jesus! Batman on Ice!” -- and disdains lucrative game, doll and fast-food McDonalds tie-ins, he did direct and produce the nasty-spirited follow-up Batman Returns (1992), sexy bullwhip Catwoman, abandoned sewer-raised Penguin and all.

Throwback noir-ish, the spectacular sets of these two big-budgeters are less overkill CGI than Beetle Juice (1988) -- “some of the worst you’ve even seen” -- more good-natured than they but hardly for the kiddies, either. Computer effects are not really his thing, according to Burton, but can be a tool like any other: “don’t over-rely, [for] the fun of moviemaking, the pleasure, is to be on the set with your actors,” developing your vehicle together. Singling out Ray Harryhausen’s Jason and the Argonauts animation, Pixar and anime, he continued that “all are useful, don’t do just one way; include the old-fashioned art form [that is] stop-motion, which has a special feel to it.”

Responding to Peña’s leads about some films of his, Burton was occasionally flip, or simply did not care to be reminded or to expand. Planet of the Apes (2001), for example, was done because, “movies, TV show, cartoon; I was just lured by talking apes.”

“American myth, [though] historical accuracy is not high on my list,” Sleepy Hollow (1999) “reminds me of Hallowe’en, the look of old Hammer films,” and for which Depp unsuccessfully petitioned to wear an outsized nose but was instead allowed to “play the action hero like a thirteen-year-old girl.” Oscar-nominated Corpse Bride aka Tim Burton’s Corpse Bride (2005), for which Depp was “terrified to sing” -- he didn’t -- was done at the same time as another Dahl adaptation, Charlie and the Chocolate Factory (2005), in which the Michael Jackson face makeup was topped by a pageboy bob “hairdo based on Vogue’s Anna Wintour.”

By “family” in filmmaking, Burton explained that he meant directors getting along with cinematographers and other crew, all jointly fleshing out the work on the run: “people like me just wave your hands” -- he illustrated -- “like pilgrims or Indians.” Parts of the whole, the total package, include for him both costume and sets, adjuncts to the rounding out of character, and also music, above all rhythm, in drawing/animation and in cinema per se.

 (Photo from Sweeney Todd: The Demon Barber of Fleet Street.. © 2007 Paramount Pictures. All Rights Reserved.)