Beetlejuice has amassed a lot of fan love and cultural importance in the nearly 40 years since its 1988 release; with Beetlejuice Beetlejuice now about to open, director Tim Burton has bridged the gap from “When are you doing Beetlejuice 2?” to “What took you so long?” Speaking to a group of journalists, including io9, the veteran director said he had to wait until the time was right in his own life to properly embrace the sequel he wanted to make.
“[Questions about a sequel] have been asked from the very beginning,” he said. “But nothing clicked and truly, it couldn’t have happened until now. It was only recently where I just … put all the noise away and [realized], ‘Okay, I love the Lydia character.’ That was the character that I connected with … this teenager. I remember [wondering], ‘Well, what happened to this person 35 years later?’ You know, it’s a bit like [documentary film] 35 Up. You know what weird thing—you go from cool teenager to what, some kind of fucked up adult, or whatever? And what relationships do you have? Do you have kids and … what’s your relationship with that? So it’s not something I could have done back then; it’s only something you could do once you experience those things yourself.”
He continued. “And so for me, it just became a very personal movie, like a kind of weird family movie … that became the emotional hook. The three generations of mother, daughter, granddaughter, life, death—just basic, normal things that we all experience and then, especially if you’re lucky enough to get older, you feel those things. So that’s where it really started and it really could have only happened for me after all this time.”
Later in the roundtable, he reiterated that point. “Only time can show you your own experience in life. I couldn’t have made [Beetlejuice Beetlejuice] back in 1989 … now I feel things after 30 years of going through a bunch of good and bad ups and downs … it’s like when I made Big Fish. I couldn’t have made that film before my father died. I [could] only make that having those feelings that surprised me. So it’s the same as this.”
Unrelated to that theme, but something we’d been curious about, is why Alec Baldwin and Geena Davis’ characters—the ghostly Adam and Barbara Maitland who form the emotional core of Beetlejuice—aren’t part of the new film.
“I loved working with those guys,” Burton said. “I love the first [movie]. I loved all the cast. But it really was—I didn’t think about it, because I wasn’t out to make a sequel per se, you know? I didn’t really want to just throw stuff in just to throw it in … just given the scenario and them being ghosts and all that sort of thing. It just felt like ‘this is the way we did it [in the first movie.'”
Beetlejuice Beetlejuice opens September 6.
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