It’s been five years since Tim Burton’s last movie hit cinemas – his live-action take on Disney’s Dumbo. In the intervening years, the director had moved away from feature films, instead entering the streaming game with his massive Netflix hit series Wednesday, imagining the Addams Family’s daughter solving spooky mysteries at a supernatural high school. But now, Burton is officially back on the big screen with Beetlejuice Beetlejuice – a long-awaited sequel to his 1988 classic comedy, reuniting the director with Michael Keaton’s garrulous ghoul and Winona Ryder’s outsider Lydia Deetz. While sequels can be eyed with skepticism from audiences, make no mistake: this is deeply personal territory for cinema’s greatest goth auteur.
“I actually had sort of lost interest in the movie industry,” Burton tells Empire in the world-exclusive Beetlejuice Beetlejuice issue. “I felt like I’d had enough with studios,” he admits, “I’d had enough of all this kind of stuff.” But Wednesday left him creatively rejuvenated, and when that show’s writers – Alfred Gough and Miles Millar – penned the screenplay that would become Beetlejuice Beetlejuice, the result was a story that connected to Burton on a personal level. “From the first [film], I really identified with Lydia,” he says. “It was a character that I understood, that I felt very strongly about.” That, too, became his way in to the sequel. “The new film became very personal to me, through the Lydia character,” he explains. “What happened to Lydia? You know, what happens to people? What happens to all of us? What’s your journey from a gothic kind of weird teenager to what happens to you 35 years later?”
Because, while Beetlejuice gets title billing, he was used sparingly in the original film – an agent of chaos deployed in short, shocking bursts. And on the sequel, it’s the Deetz family (Ryder’s Lydia, Catherine O’Hara as her mother Delia, and Wednesday’s Jenna Ortega as her daughter Astrid) taking centre stage, with Lydia’s evolution grabbing Burton’s pitch-black heart in particular. “Sometimes, as you get older, you lose yourself a little bit,” the filmmaker explains. “That’s very much how I feel, and felt. You go down a path – for me, I started making movies, I make some good ones, I make some bad, you take a journey. So that’s what made this more of an important and personal thing for me, all those feelings. You have relationships that change you, you have kids that change you. After all these years, that became the reason to make it. I identified with Lydia back then, and I identify with her now.” Get ready for some real heart among all the ghoulish goings-on.
Read Empire’s full world-exclusive Beetlejuice Beetlejuice cover feature – going on set of the film, and speaking to Tim Burton, Michael Keaton, Winona Ryder, Catherine O’Hara, Jenna Ortega, Willem Dafoe, Monica Bellucci and Justin Theroux about what’s in store – in the July 2024 issue, on sale Thursday 6 June. Pre-order a copy online here. Beetlejuice Beetlejuice comes to UK cinemas from 6 September.