Alfred Gough and Miles Millar didn't think that the legendary director Tim Burton would show as much interest in their pitch for Wednesday as he ultimately did.

In an interview published in Empire's print magazine, the creative duo said that they conceived Wednesday as having "the tone of a Tim Burton movie" in the sense of being creepy and gothic while maintaining a sense of humor. While the duo expected a rejection when they pitched the series to Burton, they figured it was still worth a try. "If you don’t ask, the answer's no," Gough explained. "We sent him the first script and three days later his agent called and said, 'Tim loves it.'" For his part, Burton said he was more open to working on television after the COVID-19 pandemic brought film production to a halt. "It was a weird period of time," he said. "I'd never really had a burning desire to do television. Then it came to me, and it was interesting."

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Tim Burton's Belated Addams Family Project

This isn't the first time Burton has been attached to an Addams Family project. He was considered to direct the 1991 feature film but passed on it to work on Batman Returns. Barry Sonnenfeld ended up helming the movie and its 1993 sequel Addams Family Values. Another Addams project was announced in 2010, this time a stop-motion feature with Burton attached as a co-writer and co-producer with the possibility of directing, but it was eventually canceled. Eventually, a successful CGI-animated Addams Family movie, directed by Conrad Vernon and Greg Tiernan, arrived in 2019, followed by a 2021 sequel.

Burton previously discussed his adoration for The Addams Family, dating back to Charles Addams' original one-panel comics. "I always had trouble with comic books because I never knew which box to read," he explained. "I was frustrated by them. Charles Addams was very simple and direct and said it in one picture. I really liked his take on things." He added that Gough and Millar's script for Wednesday "just spoke to me about how I felt in school and how you feel about your parents, how you feel as a person. It gave the Addams Family a different kind of reality. It was an interesting combination."

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Once Burton was onboard, Gough and Millar began to envision Wednesday as one of his movies, just expanded into an eight-hour format. "He was interested in where it was going, the mystery of the show," Gough said. "He had a lot of questions about the previous television work we’d done, like how we were able to achieve it. He really loved that you had time to be with Wednesday and explore the character and you didn’t have to, you know, wrap things up in an hour and 45 minutes."

Wednesday premieres on Netflix on Wednesday, Nov. 23.

Source: Empire