Beetlejuice Beetlejuice : How a Last-Minute Script Update Changed the Sets
Courtesy of Warner Bros. Pictures Worldwide Marketing
When pre-production began on Beetlejuice Beetlejuice, the sequel to the iconic 1988 Tim Burton film, it didn’t seem like Winona Ryder, Michael Keaton, and the rest of the cast and crew would be returning to their original shooting location of East Corinth, Vermont. The original script for the sequel hardly called for exterior shots of the town (known as Winter River in the films), with a lot more set inside the Deetz home and in the afterlife. “Relatively late in production, the script had quite a big shift and suddenly the house was a much more prominent part,” the film’s production designer, Mark Scruton, tells AD, noting that the change was driven by Burton’s desire for the home to have a bigger presence in the movie. “Pretty rapidly I got on a plane, hired a car with a location scout, and went back out to the original location.”
Watching the 2024 film, you’d think the town had barely changed between the two-decades-apart shoots. According to Scruton, you’d be right for the most part. “Rather extraordinarily, the town was exactly as it had been in the first film,” Scruton says. “It was kind of extraordinary, as a huge fan of the first film, to suddenly be standing there in Winter River.” Though little had changed with the town itself, the Maitland/Deetz home never really existed—the fa?ade was constructed, then torn down, for the original film—so they needed to rebuild it entirely. Thankfully the same hilltop, a distinctive perch with a view of the rest of the town, was still empty, just as it had been when it was discovered in the ’80s.
The mandate for much of the film was to keep things as consistent with the original as possible, but the home was a special case. The exterior underwent a postmodern, geometric reimagining under the direction of Delia Deetz (Catherine O’Hara) and her interior designer, Otho (William Glenn Shadix), the first time around, but Scruton had the feeling that audiences would prefer to see it in its original Victorian farmhouse state, especially since Beetlejuice ended with a reversal of the interior changes. Scruton and his team rebuilt the dwelling as it appeared at the start of the first film, when it was under the Maitlands’ ownership, but covered it in a black veil to reflect the period of mourning the Deetzes are in during the sequel. “I had been reading about Victorian funerals, where they would veil the interior,” Scruton says. “With Delia, it just made sense to do something as dramatic and over the top as that.”
The team was immediately in agreement that the veil was in character for Delia Deetz, but actually making it a reality was quite difficult. Scruton did camera tests with a number of different fabrics, but few had the proper amount of translucency that would keep the structure itself visible. “It was a straightforward bobbinet in the end that we found and it worked really, really well, but of course there wasn’t enough of it, so it had to come from three different countries to get that volume of fabric,” Scruton says. “It was built like a giant dress, we built a pattern and everything was cut to fit.”
In the first film, the home’s interiors went from a “chintzy country cottage look” to a postmodern extreme, then back again. This time, Scruton tried to imagine the direction Delia would have taken the home’s design in the decades in between. “I think that was my biggest headache of the movie,” Scruton says, explaining how difficult it was to envision exactly what Delia might have done. He put all of the hand-built carpentry details back in, as he imagined Delia would have because of more recent trends surrounding historical restoration, but went with a color-drenched grayish blue tone for a bit of flair that the eccentric matriarch would crave.
The entire downstairs was reimagined with this direction, while the attic and Charles Deetz’s study were meticulously remade. Scruton had access to some drawings made for the original production, but “they’d obviously seen better days,” he says. Knowing that the film would be scrutinized by the hordes of super fans, he and his team watched the first film over and over again to make sure all of the details were up to snuff. The model of the town in the attic was particularly detail-oriented, and was created by hand.
Scruton played with the rules established by the first film’s production designer Bo Welch for the afterlife scenes—the distinctive forced perspective tricks and tongue-in-cheek easter eggs. New spaces include a Soul Train station, an immigration area, a dry-cleaners, and the office of Wolf Jackson (Willem Dafoe), for which Scruton studied ’80s cop shows, among other spaces. “I was like a kid in a candy store with it,” Scruton says. “It was a once in a lifetime chance to work on something that I loved so much growing up.”
Originally Appeared on Architectural Digest
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