The legendary cult filmmaker was in high spirits at the 81st Venice Film Fest for the world premiere of Beetlejuice Beetlejuice.

The long-awaited and hotly-anticipated sequel to Burton 1988 fantasy-horror-comedy opens the 2024 Venice Film Festival tonight.

Burton said the movie felt like a return to his roots, to the improvisational and free spirit chaos of the original.

“Over the past few years I got a little bit disillusioned with the movie industry, I sort of lost myself,” said Burton, “For me I realized the only way to be a success is that I have to love doing it. For this one, I just enjoyed and loved making it.”

“We did everything quickly. the things that usually take months we did quickly,” said Burton. “We’d go buy a doll from a toy story and rip it up and put rods on it and do some stuff. That was the spirit, and it doesn’t always happen in films. It have it an energy and a personal nature to it that everybody contributed to.”

Even the special and practical effects were done quickly, giving the movie a homemade feel.

“It’s not going to win any Oscar Awards for special effects, but it doesn’t matter,” joked Burton, who admitted he didn’t even rewatch the original film before starting the sequel.

It’s taken Burton a whole generation to return to the twisted world of Beetlejuice, but fans appear to think it will be worth the wait.

The Warner Bros. title is tracking to open as high as $80 million at the North American box office when it bows in theaters on September 6, according to sources with access to data from leading research firm NRG.

Warner Bros. has been more conservative in its estimates, suggesting an opening weekend in the $65 million to $75 million range. Either way, the movie should scare up a healthy return for the studio and for Burton, who has not released a feature since 2019’s Dumbo.

It’s the longest gap between films–five years–for the prolific and versatile director whose career spans four decades. Burton made his directorial debut with the comedy Pee-wee’s Big Adventure (1985), which became a cult classic, and gained prominence for Beetlejuice (1988) and Edward Scissorhands (1990), which catapulted the young Johnny Depp to major Hollywood stardom.

Burton was joined by pretty much the Beetlejuice Beetlejuice cast at the Venice press conference. including Winona Ryder, Michael Keaton, and Catherine O’Hara, all reprising their roles from the original.

Beetlejuice Beetlejuice focuses on Ryder’s character Lydia Deetz, now a TV psychic, who returns with her family to their old spooky home after the death of her father.

“One of my favorite parts was getting to stare into your eyes again,” Ryder told Keaton when asked what it was like to reunite 36 years after the original: “The atmosphere on sequel’s set was very similar to what I felt as a 16-year-old girl working with Burton on the first film in 1988.”

Sense of  certain playfulness, readiness to try things

“My love and trust for Tim runs so deep and there was a sense of  certain playfulness and readiness to try things,” she explained. “You feel so safe in nonsense, but you also feel completely free.”

Summing up her comeback journey, she said: “It was one of the more special experiences of my life.”

While he said he had been thinking of the Beetlejuice sequel for some time now, Burton said that making Wednesday got him “re-energized” to return to filmmaking.

It made me think abut my own life

“Meeting Wednesday star Jenna Ortega obviously was such an important thing for me,” said Burton. “Working with her and just thinking about the Lydia character and what happened to her decades later. It made me think about my own life, about what happens to you when you have kids and family and relationships.

After two marriages and divorces, Burton developed a romantic relationship with  the acclaimed British actress Helena Bonham Carter (Best known for playing Princess Margaret in the TV series The Crown), whom he met while filming the reboot of Planet of the Apes, in 2001.

Burton and Bonham Carter have two children: a son, born in 2003 and a daughter born in 2007. The couple had broken up amicably in 2014, and he is now romantically involved with the leading lady of  his movie, Italian (and international) star Monica Bellucci.

Simple emotional movie

It just became a very simple, emotional movie. It’s like a weird family movie, you know? It was never about making a big sequel for money or anything like that. I just wanted to make this for very personal reasons.”

Wil there be Beetlejuice 3?

“We’ll let’s do the math,” he said, noting it took more than 35 years between the first and second films. For the third, “I’d be over a hundred. I guess it’s possible with medical science these days. But I don’t think so!”