Michael Keaton, Winona Ryder, Catherine O’Hara and their director, Tim Burton, look back on the first movie, the Day-O scene and their ghost comedy’s afterlife. If you wonder why it took 36 years for Beetlejuice to spawn a sequel, consider how complicated it was simply to reunite its busy principals for a video call last month. Director Tim Burton joined from the south of France, where he was editing the second season of the Netflix series Wednesday , while Winona Ryder signed on from Atlanta, on a brief break from filming the final season of Stranger Things.
Michael Keaton spent the call roaming a cabin he’d built in rural Montana – “I’m reheating coffee, if you want some,” he told the group – while Catherine O’Hara, the last to sign on, did so from her cottage in Ontario, Canada. Still, even on a video call that catered to a torturous number of time zones, the quartet’s comic chemistry remained strong. Ryder said revisiting their decades-old bond was the best part of making Beetlejuice Beetlejuice , which opens in New Zealand cinemas September 5.
“It was nostalgic, but not in any saccharine sense,” Ryder said. “It went straight to the heart.” In the 1988 original, the newly dead couple Barbara and Adam Maitland (Geena Davis and Alec Baldwin) marshal all their ghostly might in an attempt to scare away the Deetzes, city slickers who’ve moved into their Connecticut house.
Eccentric hauntings ensue, including a memorable dinner-party possession whe.