In recent interview with People magazine, Michael Keaton, who portrays the rambunctious spirit in the 1988 Beetlejuice, revealed that he and director Tim Burton were “hesitant and cautious” about making a sequel for the classic but then had so much fun working on it.

“We thought, ‘You got to get this right. Otherwise, just don’t do it. Let’s just go on with our lives and do other things.’ So I was hesitant and cautious, and Burton was probably equally as hesitant and cautious over all these years,” he said.

“Once we got there, I said, ’OK, let’s just go for it. Let’s just see if we can do it, if we can pull this off.’”

Keaton shared that early in production, he and the filmmaker also discussed how neither one of them was particularly interested in doing something that was too technology-heavy.

“It had to feel handmade,” he said. “What made it fun was watching somebody in the corner actually holding something up for you, to watch everybody in the shrunken head room and say, ‘Those are people under there, operating these things, trying to get it right.’”

He continued, “It’s the most exciting thing when you get to do that again after years of standing in front of a giant screen, pretending somebody’s across the way from you.”

Winona Ryder and Catherine O’Hara return for Beetlejuice 2, aka Beetlejuice Beetlejuice, which also stars Jenna Ortega, Willem Dafoe, Monica Bellucci and Justin Theroux in new roles.