Christoph Waltz On ‘Big Eyes,’ Tim Burton [EXCLUSIVE VIDEO]

Christoph Waltz plays the late art fraud Walter Keane in Tim Burton‘s biopic Big Eyes, which stars Amy Adams as the true artistic talent Margaret Keane.

Christoph Waltz On ‘Big Eyes’

Playing Walter Keane, Waltz had the challenge of taking on the persona of a man whose sheer desire to be a successful artist coupled with his intense charisma allowed him to dupe the world and keep his skilled wife silent and hard at work for years. Waltz, who was recently honored with a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame, admitted that capturing Keane’s complexity was challenging.

“The complexity is really what is the challenge here. No person in the world has just one characteristic quality. We all have everything more or less. It just comes to the surface in different forms of appearance to different proportions. Walter was exuberant, I think,” Waltz explained in an exclusive interview with uInterview. “He just followed his inkling, his inspiration and had no trepidations about doing that, which is very much a child of his age – the late 50s early 60s. Actually, he was a little bit ahead of his time.”

Many of Waltz’s scenes with Adams were emotional in nature, including one particularly jarring alcohol-fueled tirade that effectively ended the marriage between their characters. According to Waltz, scenes like that paled in difficultly to those in which it was most important to get the subtler, more nuanced aspects of his character right.

“Sometimes you think the big emotional outbreaks are the most challenging. Sometimes that’s not the case,” Waltz reflected. “Sometimes, it’s a fine, tiny little detail that needs to be just right for the story. You don’t get it, you can’t capture it; it escapes you. There were a few of those.”

Waltz, who had the honor of meeting Margaret Keane and picking out one of her paintings to keep, also had the benefit of working with the notoriously talented Burton.

“Tim is an immensely generous director. He opens the door wide and asks you to join. He doesn’t order you around,” Waltz revealed. “There is never a loud word spoken. It‘s all dedicated to the work and the understanding of the story we are telling. So I always enjoy tremendously to live up to the occasion, to try to keep pace with great vision.

Big Eyes is currently in wide release.