With an unconventional filmmaker like Tim Burton, who has a specific vision and a known signature style, he’s been known to butt heads with movie studios. He’d suffer pushback after being given carte blanche on Batman Returns after parents found the film too disturbing and he didn’t get to return for a third film. His famous jettisoned film Superman Lives is one that’s still a sensitive issue for him. However, Tim Burton has gotten the chance to return to one of his earlier works as he revisits the strange world of Beetlejuice. And this revisit is one that revitalized him after feeling lost.
The Hollywood Reporter says the director was in high spirits at the Venice Film Festival, where the sequel Beetlejuice Beetlejuice is set to make its world premiere. Burton spoke on how the film was a return to his roots. He explains, “Over the past few years I got a little bit disillusioned with the movie industry, [I sort] of lost myself. For me I realised the only way to be a success is that I have to love doing it. For this one, I just enjoyed and loved making it.” He spoke about being improvisational with the making of the film, which is atypical of big Hollywood productions. Burton continued, “We did everything quickly. The things that usually take months we did quickly. We’d go buy a doll from a toy store and rip it up and put rods on it and do some stuff. That was the spirit, and it doesn’t always happen in films. It has it an energy and a personal nature to it that everybody contributed to.”
Burton would even encourage the actors to be improvisational. “Even the ending wasn’t written. We were playing with everything,” he confessed. And his excitement about returning to the fun of practical effects was something he’s been enthused about since the movie was filming, “It’s not going to win any Academy Awards for special effects, but it doesn’t matter.” The Edwards Scissorhands director would even admit that he approached this movie without even going back and revisiting the original. A curious move, considering Burton had long delayed making a sequel as he says he “never quite understood why it had been a success.”
Burton also cites working with Jenna Ortega on Wednesday as inspiration to find a narrative behind this movie, “And meeting [Wednesday star] Jenna [Ortega] obviously was such an important thing for me. Working with her and just thinking about the Lydia character and what happened to her 35 years later, and thinking about my own life, about what happened to get kids or relationships. It just became a very simple, emotional movie. It’s like a weird family movie, you know? It was never [about making] a big sequel for money or anything like that. I just wanted to make this for very personal reasons.”