Tim Burton said during the Venice 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.
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Speaking on making a second installment 35 years after his 1988 cult original, Burton revealed, “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.”
“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.”
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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. But then meeting Jenna was obviously such an important thing for me.”
As for there being another “Beetlejuice” in the works, Burton appeared to laugh off the question. “Let’s do the math… it took 35 years to do this, so I’ll be over 100,” he said. “But I guess it’s possible with the advent of science these days, but I don’t think so.”
“Beetlejuice Beetlejuice” kicks off Venice Film Festival tonight as its opening film. The film sees the Deetz family return to their old family home, this time with Ryder’s rebellious teenage daughter who discovers the model of the town in the attic, opens the portal to the afterlife and releases Keaton’s Betelgeuse once again.
After its Venice premiere, “Beetlejuice Beetlejuice” is set to spook theaters in the U.S. on Sept. 6.
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