Tim Burton Didn’t Make ‘Beetlejuice 2’ to ‘Do a Big Sequel for Money’: ‘I Didn’t Even Watch the First Movie to Prepare’
variety.comVenice Film Festival press conference for “Beetlejuice Beetlejuice” that he didn’t set out to make the sequel “for money” — in fact, he didn’t even rewatch the original before he started filming the sequel.
Speaking on making a sequel 35 years after his 1988 cult original, Burton said, “And I didn’t even watch it before I did it!” “I wasn’t out to do a big sequel for money or anything like that, I wanted to make this for very personal reasons,” Burton continued. “Like I said, I didn’t watch the first movie to prepare for this.
I remembered the spirit of it and I remembered everybody here.” Burton was on the press conference panel alongside returning stars Michael Keaton, Catherine O’Hara and Winona Ryder as well as newcomers Jenna Ortega, Monica Bellucci, Justin Theroux and Willem Dafoe.
Echoing sentiments recently expressed in an interview with Variety, Burton said that he had, in recent years, become “disillusioned with the movie industry” and had realized that, if he was going to make another film, he had to “do it from the heart” and really want to do it. “As you grow older, sometimes your life takes a bit of a turn and I sort of lost myself a bit,” he said. “So, for me, this movie was a reenergizing, a kind of getting back to the things I love doing, the way I love doing it and with people I love doing it with.” Although the Beetlejuice sequel has been something in discussion for more than three decades, Burton said that the project was “reenergized” by making his hit Netflix series “Wednesday” (which was where he first started working with Ortega). “’Wednesday,’ we were trying to shoot as a TV thing but on a movie schedule, which was kind of fun in a weird way, so I was thinking about that beforehand.
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