Tim Burton and Michael Keaton’s return to the fantasy horror comedy hit is lensed by Greek-Cypriot cinematographer Haris Zambarloukos. Adrian Pennington reports.
When director Tim Burton sat down with his cinematographer to discuss a sequel to 1988’s cult hit Beetlejuice he told Haris Zambarloukos (BSC); ‘I’ve already made that film’.
“There’s a world already set up, there is a precedent there but he didn’t want to breathe life into old bodies. He wanted to treat each scene of the new film on its own terms,” says the DoP of his first experience working with Burton. Zambarloukos regularly composes films with Kenneth Branagh including spooky house feature A Haunting in Venice (2023). He says the Edward Scissorhands director knows what he wants.
“Tim is a man of few words but I didn’t necessarily have to ask what he wanted. Just by knowing Tim’s films, you understand the distinctive style and you start from there. He asked me for my thoughts about things so I did have creative freedom, notably around tests in prep.”
These tests were less about honing specific cameras and lenses (Venice 2 with Panavision Ultra Panatars in this case) and more about defining colour and texture.
“For instance, how do we progress from a simple green glow in the afterlife to making it more kinetic? Could we move to a space where things had a pulse and undulated and shifted colours all the time?
“We don’t move the camera a great deal in this film but very often there is movement in the colour and light. In the real-world scenes, we chose to shoot through leaves and have dappled light where we could. There might be a curtain rustling just to suggest something off-kilter.”
It’s a simple but effective evocation of a spooky underworld in which Zambarloukos uses pulsing greens and oranges, often through a mist which is an effect produced from butane gas.
“We used a flickering effect from a butane gas fire called Witches Fingers which the SFX department controlled. It’s basically five copper pipes that you could bend and manipulate to be what you wanted them to be. We’d favour anything that gave us a subliminal feeling of movement and uncertainty in the frame.
“In a ghost house film, it is the sleight of hand that matters. It’s all a mirage,” he adds.
Blurred lines
Beetlejuice Beetlejuice revisits the Salem-esque community of the Winter River where Lydia Deetz (Winona Ryder) makes a living as a TV host from her ability to see the undead but is forced to channel her inner goth to save her daughter Astrid (Jenna Ortega) from purgatory. In doing so, she reluctantly enlists the help of mischievous afterlife fixer ‘Mr Juice’ (Michael Keaton).
“I always feel that you understand what a film is going to give you in the first 10 minutes,” he says. “Here we have stop frame animation, real-life sequences and we’re immediately plunged into the afterlife with the unfortunate death of a graffiti artist.
“By the time the film ends, it has all merged. Script-wise, the story is set over the course of Halloween - one day and night - and we transition into the night and into the afterlife by way of exteriors shot at twilight.”
An example would be when the ‘shrink heads’ escape from the afterlife and run out of the Deetz house. “For me, when it all happily merges, is a combination of the whole design of the film. We not only have an ensemble cast but an ensemble production crew. That’s something I’ve experienced before including on Mamma Mia! with all the choreography but never to this degree. It took so many kinds of performers and live SFX to pull off even the simplest shot.”
Scenes featuring the shrink heads in Beetlejuice’s boiler room were shot on a set large enough that Zambarloukos could frame wide shots and still accommodate dozens of crew.
“Each of the shrink heads is a puppeteer in a suit with an animatronic head which requires one or two people on remote control servo devices. Each of the 20 puppeteers would be blindly performing in the suit while their heads, eyes and lips are being manipulated in unison. Then we have Keaton giving this incredibly physical performance but you’d only get 3-4 takes max. On top of that, we’d have pulsating light cues and then another 10-15 other light cues. The pressure was on to get it all right because if one person makes a mistake then you all have to redo.”
Steady hands
Zambarloukos was aided by being able to work with most of his regular camera and light team including Gaffer Dan Lowe, key grip Malcolm Hughes, first assistant camera Dean Thompson and Steadicam op Stamos Triantafyllos as well as camera operator Des Whelan who has worked with Burton for 20 years since Charlie and the Chocolate Factory.
“Keaton didn’t improvise as much here as with the original but he gives off this incredible energy on set. They rehearsed and pretty much had [his performance] figured out before shooting. Tim doesn’t shot list but he has shots in his head. You can always tell Tim has an idea of what he wants and he gives space to the actors and we’ll adjust the shot according to what’s happening on the day.”
Further tests included infrared photography of a scene in the ghost TV show we see near the beginning of the movie and for a black-and-white sequence. The latter in particular caught Burton’s fancy as resembling “an old-fashioned nitrate film, with glowing whites” and was coincidentally being tested at the same as Denis Villeneuve was doing something similar for Dune II.
Burton throws the works at the climactic scene set in a church and includes animation, puppetry and CGI in a musical number.
“We try to do as much in-camera as we can. We put Beetlejuice in an inflated suit designed by creature effects supervisor Neil Scanlan on a crane and raise him up and up, then CGI [led by VFX Supervisor Angus Bickerton and the team at Framestore] comes in and blows him up.”
The film’s exteriors were shot in Corinth, a town in Vermont which was the same location as the original. Additional material was shot in Manchester-by-the-Sea, Massachusetts, notably the scene in which Astrid cycles downhill through town and crash lands a tree house because the geography and architecture of the place made more sense. The graveyard scenes were filmed at West Wycombe, Bucks; “If you think about it, New England was named that way for a reason,” says Zambarloukos. Interiors were shot at Warner Bros. Studios Leavesden. The body of photography took nine weeks but the shoot was interrupted in 2023 by the strikes.
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