Director Tim Burton and actor Michael Keaton reunited for Warner Bros.' Beetlejuice Beetlejuice, the long-awaited sequel to Burton’s 1988 feature. Keaton is joined by Winona Ryder, who plays Lydia Deetz, as well as Catherine O’Hara, who takes on the role of Delia Deetz. New cast members include Justin Theroux, Monica Bellucci, Arthur Conti Jenna Ortega and Willem Dafoe.
After an unexpected family tragedy, three generations of the Deetz family return to Winter River. Still haunted by Beetlejuice, Lydia's life is turned upside down when her rebellious teenage daughter (Ortega) discovers the mysterious model of the town in the attic.
Burton’s team of creatives included director of photography Haris Zambarloukos, editor Jay Prychidny, creature effects/special makeup FX creative supervisor Neal Scanlan and composer Danny Elfman. The film was release theatrically on September 6th, as well as in IMAX. Here, Jay Prychidny (pictured, left) talks about editing the project and his collaboration with the filmmaker.
Hi Jay! How did you get involved in this project?
"I edited Tim Burton‘s four episodes of the Netflix series Wednesday, so I was very hopeful I would be invited to edit this film. I really had no idea if I would be asked, as I was hired on Wednesday because of my television experience. But Beetlejuice was my favorite movie as a kid, so I just desperately wanted to be involved. After doing Wednesday Season 1, I got hired to edit Scream VI, which was my first major studio film. I thought, 'Ooh well, maybe this might give me more of a chance.' So, I stayed in touch with Tim and let him know what I was up to. I was editing that film in LA, so I set up a meeting with Tim one weekend when he was staying in Malibu. I was intending to somehow pitch myself to do Beetlejuice, but when I asked him about it, he seemed uncertain that it would ever be a real project! So, that was that! But gratefully, when the film finally did get greenlit, they invited me to be involved, which was truly just such an incredible thrill. I think I pretty much leapt out of reality at that point, and I’m not sure I ever touched back down. It was such a surreal experience at so many points, meeting and working with people who have been legends for me throughout my life. And I’m happy to report that the old adage to ‘never meet your heroes’ has yet to ring true for me in my experience.”
Can you talk about your workflow? Were you cutting as the film was being shot?
“As is always the case with Tim, he wants me editing nearby set when he is shooting. I get set up in the main studio, so I can show him dailies or cuts or anything else I need him to approve. Whenever he has a break from filming, he’ll pop by editorial. It’s a very tight time frame between me getting the dailies first thing in the morning to having all the previous day's footage edited, polished and enhanced with music and sound effects…Often with a 5pm deadline, so he can have the scenes delivered to him before he leaves the studio for the day. It can truly be a mad dash editing marathon trying to just pull all of these materials together in a few short hours. Once I get a scene cut, I pass it off to my assistants to start laying in sound effects. We’ll collaborate back-and-forth on a direction for the sound design while I look for temp music. When they hand me back a completed sound design for a scene, I’ll do a mix pass on it while I lay in the music. Then we load up all the new cuts on an iPad for his private review overnight, along with any newly-recut scenes based on feedback we’ve gotten from him throughout the day. We also had a fantastic visual effects editor, who would create temp VFX for us to put in our daily outputs. The incredible speed at which we were working really required everyone to be creatively juiced up and ready to go!”
What editing setup were you using?
“We set up our Avid systems at Warner Bros. Leavesden studios in London, where the film was shot. We stayed there for pretty much the entire run of the post, as it was a convenient location for Tim to get to, even after we had stopped filming. My three assistants and I worked off of the same shared storage system, and we also had a Salon sync box for when I needed to edit remotely, such as at Tim’s Hamlet in France, where he wanted to do his director's cut. The Salon sync box works extraordinarily well and allows me to have a local mirror of all of the drives back at the shared storage system at Leavesden. It even supports bin locks, so my assistants and I can still work exactly the same way as if we were working together locally. I really hate using Jump Desktop for remote editing because the frame rate and quality just aren’t good enough. I love that this system allows all the media to be stored locally and allows you to have a proper video signal output for your television monitor. And any project changes get automatically synced across all systems. You barely ever have to even worry about it.”
Is there a scene that you would point to as a highlight for editorial?
“I’m such a musical nerd, so this movie gave me so many opportunities for fun musical showcases! One of my favorite scenes in the film is the Soul Train sequence. The entire chase through the underworld in Reel 5 has so much fun, energy and excitement, and was just a blast to edit. But the Soul Train sequence in particular, just provides such a huge jolt of energy to the film at just the right time. Other than for a few pickups of Jenna in the train that we filmed later, the whole sequence is basically just my first cut! Like all scenes, I cut it in just a couple of hours the day after it was filmed. But it already felt so good that we didn’t really change anything past that first cut. I can’t remember anyone ever having a note there.
“But the real editorial musical centerpiece is, of course, the MacArthur Park wedding sequence at the end of the film. That was a sequence that, unlike the Soul Train, went through many editorial revisions. The thing that made it so complex was Tim’s notion that it should be a ‘mashup’ of the original Richard Harris song. He filmed many sections of actors lip-syncing to different parts of the track, but without a real sense of how it would fit together. You could just put all the sections together in the same order as the song, but it would lose steam very quickly. So, we had to find very clever ways to transition the music to different parts of the mashup so we could cut out or rearrange sections to tell the best story visually. The one bit of song sync Tim was insistent on was when Willem Dafoe comes out of the crypt with his ghoul squad. He always wanted the fast-paced disco section to start when they first entered the scene. So that made it quite a trick to somehow get to an entirely different section of the song when we cut back inside the church, and everyone is lip-syncing to a part of the music in a totally different key, pace and rhythm. It took a lot of work, but now, when you look at it, it all just seems completely natural!”
What else would you point to?
“I also remember having the idea to use a big orchestral MacArthur Park reprise when the Sandworm breaks into the church. It took a long time to get that sequence into a place where it felt right to me. Definitely not the normal few hours after it was shot! The moment always just felt like such an awkward letdown. But using a grand new orchestral reprise and motivating it by cutting to repurposed shots of the ghoulish musical band in the balcony just somehow gave the sequence the grand emotional resolution I had been looking for.
“There are many examples in the film like that, where some creative concept just turned the editing of a scene on its ear, and finally made it work, which made working on the film an incredibly creative, energizing and fulfilling experience!”