How hard is it to sell genuine darkness? Is there pressure to make things more likeable?
HS: After The Dark Knight, I thought they wanted everything dark! No, I feel like it’s the same battle over and over again. It goes back to everything I’ve ever been involved with. Certainly on The Nightmare Before Christmas, Disney wouldn’t put their name on it. It was a Touchstone release. Walt Disney himself was in touch with the balance between, the yin and yang, the dark and the light. His first films, they all had large doses of the blackness in men and women’s souls, the dangers that are out there, and the tales the Brothers Grimm collected. For thousands of years, there has been someone warning the children ‘you’ll be eaten if you go in that cave.’ There’s danger here, danger there. Whoever was best at doing the warnings became the storytellers and raised the hairs on the back of the kids’ necks. It became entertainment. Not every film has to have that, but I don’t understand how it can be feared. What’s happened in modern times that people think we have to pretend we’re keepin
