Of all those box office high-earners, it's the films of Tim Burton that cause most headaches. 1989's Batman was the kind of enormous, expensive, franchised blockbuster producers and studios dream about, and yet to look closely is to a see as outlandish and dark a film as mainstream Hollywood had ever gifted us. They let him direct the sequel, and what do you know, Batman Returns is even more of a Burton film. Tim Burton is the only serious money director that can rightfully be called an auteur.

The latest in Faber's invaluable series of filmmakers on themselves is its most populist and problematic. Burton is A-List, and yet the most creative and idiosyncratic of money men. He is not a director for hire. As he explains, to bring him a picture is to want his way of looking: an exaggerated fantasy, Gothic imagery, uniquely disjointed storytelling.

Early on Burton admits to the one thing he's so often censured for - throwing narrative to the wolves. When it's pointed out by editor Mark Salisbury that his films are invariably named for their leads - Batman, Pee-Wee's Big Adventure, Ed Wood - he explains that they are all essentially character pieces. He confesses to only being interested in films with little direct narrative. The results can sometimes be extraordinary - the astonishing Edward Scissorhands, Pee-Wee - and others chaotic and unsatisfying (Batman). All very much Tim Burton Films.

The story that emerges in this book of collected interviews is of a young man with the most singular luck (even if the dollars have rather left him with the tremendous Ed Wood). Hired as an artist, his animations on The Fox and The Hound he describes as resembling "roadkill". But rather than fire him, Disney shifted him up as a design consultant on The Black Caldron. As he explains it, each day passed just drawing whatever came to his fevered mind, none of which translated to the film. And yet again, rather than dispose of this bizarre maverick, Disney actually gave him the money to shoot his own shorts, even if those films - Frankenweenie, the brilliant animation Vincent - have only come to light relatively recently.

A few other odds and sods followed (not least an all-Asian kung-fu version of Hansel and Gretel) until he was offered the chance to direct the movie version of the surreal kids TV entertainer Pee-Wee Herman (the disgraced Paul Rubens). The film was a surprisingly hit, announcing a real talent and Burton has never had to look for a project since.

The Tim Burton that we find here is an honest but unconsciously guarded man. As actor Johnny Depp points out in his foreword (and Burton underlines), he is renown for being an enthusiastic but rather poor interview, never finishing his sentences. Thus, despite a fine job on Salisbury's part, we learn relatively little. (There is the occasional gem: the studio seriously considered adopting Burton's jokingly suggested Scared Sheetless as an alternative title for Beetlejuice.)

This is a slim volume (barely 160 pages) and much of that taken with pictures. But what pictures. It is lavishly illustrated not simply with stills, but Burton's charming sketches right from those Disney days, up through each of his films, including the unproduced Trick or Treat. It's perhaps fitting that this should be the most successful part of a book about the most successful of visual film-makers. What it lacks in the intellectual rigour of the Scorsese or Kieslowski volumes, Burton on Burton leaves its audience pictorially sated. Rather like many a Tim Burton film.