Yahoo Lifestyle ‘Beetlejuice Beetlejuice’ Writers Break Down The Sequel’s ‘Terrible Men’ and Epic 7-Minute Musical Number
SPOILER ALERT: This article contains spoilers for “Beetlejuice Beetlejuice,” now playing in theaters.
When Tim Burton asked to speak with “Wednesday” scribes Al Gough and Miles Millar after a long day of filming the series in Romania, the duo assumed they were in big trouble.
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“After wrap, he usually was in his car and gone,” Gough recalls. “So we first thought there was something wrong: ‘Oh shit, what happened?’”
Turns out, Burton was about to pitch them on penning a pretty big project: the sequel to his beloved 1988 supernatural fantasy film “Beetlejuice.” Gough and Millar instantly agreed and got to work with Burton on fleshing out the story.
“We’ve done a lot of sequels, and it’s always about figuring out why the sequel should exist,” Millar says. “Why is this a movie, rather than just a piece of commerce because we can make a lot of money as a studio. You have to feel an integrity and say something.”
He and Gough previously cracked the code to a rock-solid second film, writing 2004’s critically acclaimed “Spider-Man 2.” The key to “Beetlejuice Beetlejuice,” according to Millar, was finding the right balance between social satire and sincerity from the original.
The new movie focuses instead on three generations of Deetz women: Delia (Catherine O’Hara), Lydia (Winona Ryder) and Astrid (Jenna Ortega). “I was just thinking, it’s actually about those women and the terrible men in their lives, right? Beetlejuice with Lydia, Jeremy (Arthur Conti) with Astrid and Rory (Justin Theroux) with Lydia, too,” Gough says.
“The first movie said something about the culture of the time: Yuppies move to the country! It’s like a gentrification movie in many ways,” Millar adds. In the 2024 update, Theroux brings some modern smarminess as his character Rory aptly weaponizes therapy-speak to take advantage of those around him.
As for the crucial element of the film’s heart, Gough and Millar didn’t want to simply rehash the original. That’s partly why ghost couple Adam and Barbara Maitland (Alec Baldwin and Geena Davis) are absent from the sequel. “Tim had said upfront that he didn’t want the Maitlands in it. I think part of it is that they’re ghosts, so they wouldn’t age,” Gough says. “We had one moment where we where we tried it, but it just honestly felt like fan service. That story had been told.”
While Gough, Millar and Burton were fresh off working with Ortega on “Wednesday,” her character in “Beetlejuice Beetlejuice” couldn’t be more different than the macabre “Addams Family” icon. “We didn’t want to make her Wednesday, and we didn’t want her to feel like a clone of Winona,” Gough says. “Winona’s character when she was a teenager … was open to strangeness and weird things. Astrid says, ‘I believe in what I can see: facts and science. She has a has a bit of a bleeding heart for her causes, but one of those causes is not her mother.”
By the end of the film, Astrid does come to understand her mother — and what better way to show off their newfound bond than with a zany dance sequence?
Harry Belafonte’s “Day-O” makes an appearance early in the film (sung by a choir at Charles’ funeral), harkening back to the memorable dinner party scene from the original film. Millar and Gough knew they wanted to create a similar musical scene in the sequel, but felt a lot of pressure to live up to their predecessor. “For us as writers, the ‘Day-O’ sequence in the first movie was so iconic,” Millar says. “It was always like we had this fear in the back of our heads: How are we going to top that?”
They found their answer during the film’s climax, when Beetlejuice crashes Lydia’s wedding to Rory, demanding she fulfills her end of the marriage contract she signed earlier in the film. The first film’s wedding scene, while fondly remembered by fans, is actually a blink-and-you-miss-it moment.
“It’s like five seconds, and then Geena Davis comes in riding the sandworm, and he’s done,” Gough says. “With the second chance to have a wedding, what’s he gonna do?”
Cue the music. “We got to the end of the movie and we all wanted a musical number in it, but we couldn’t land on anything,” Gough recalls. “Tim called us and said he has a jukebox in his kitchen. ‘I’ve been listening to the song “MacArthur Park.” What if we use that as the central song in the in the wedding sequence?'”
And they were off to the races, using the original 1968 Richard Harris version of the track (Donna Summer went on to make the song a disco hit in 1978) as Lydia, Beetlejuice, Astrid, Rory and even the priest sang along and busted their best moves.
“It’s a seven-and-a-half minute song. So at first, we’re like, maybe these sections we don’t need? And Tim’s like, ‘Nah, we’re gonna use all of it,'” Gough says. “It’s the kind of bonkers thing the movie needed. Once we sort of had the story down and and the structures, you could then take those big swings, and they felt like they fit into the movie. It was so ‘Beetlejuice.’ When you sit down in the movie and the million ways you think it’s going to end, I don’t think ‘MacArthur Park’ would ever be on your bingo card.”
The sequence’s length also gave the creative team an opportunity to incorporate even more characters into the song. “I particularly love the moment when the song completely shifts gears, and [Willem] Dafoe comes out of the crypt in the bonkers ’70s orchestral rift in the middle of the song,” Millar says. “It really is incredibly theatrical as a song.”
While that wedding is certainly one of the film’s most exciting moments, it’s actually not the only time we see Beetlejuice partaking in a marriage ceremony. Earlier in the movie, his backstory is revealed as the audience watches him wed the terrifying Delores (Monica Bellucci).
It’s the first time audiences get to see a young Beetlejuice, as he robs graves hundreds of years in the past, in a black-and-white sequence narrated entirely in Italian.
“We knew he was old, so we were like, ‘Oh, that’s the era he would exist in,” Gough says. “It was actually Tim’s idea to be like, ‘Let’s do it all in Italian!”
“I think he said it’s like the prologue to a Fellini movie,” Millar adds with a laugh.
Despite fleshing out their “agent of chaos,” the creative team was adamant about maintaining Beetlejuice’s limited screentime. Keaton only appears for 17 minutes in the 1988 film, and the sequel isn’t much different in that respect.
“He’s such a fun character to write, but … he’s not the protagonist of the movie,” Millar says. “It was tricky in terms of keeping the right balance. People love him so much. It’s called ‘Beetlejuice Beetlejuice’ for a reason, so he needs to be essential to the movie.”
Gough and Millar say that challenge helped inform their writing, culminating in a script they’re proud of (with just enough Beetlejuice). “It makes you think harder about what those scenes are going to be, and what his contribution to the movie is,” Millar says. “It feels incredibly satisfying, and like you’ve spent a lot more time with him than you think. That’s the magic trick of that character.”
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