Thirsty six years in between, Beetlejuice has risen back from the dead in Beetlejuice Beetlejuice with new additions to the cast but the same integrity of the original’s practical sets and heart. Offscreen Central had the opportunity to talk to production designer Mark Scruton about the creative process behind the film including maintaining the integrity of the first film, the challenge of evolving the Maitland/Deetz interior, and that iconic funeral veil over the Deetz home.

Jillian Chilingerian: Hi Mark. It’s so nice to meet you. I’m very excited about this conversation because I absolutely loved the movie and walked away with so many questions about the sets and all of it.
Mark Scruton: I’m glad you enjoyed it.

Jillian Chilingerian: I was born in ’99 so obviously I missed the first one, but I was sitting in the theater feeling surreal to be alive. At the same time, there’s another Beetlejuice movie out, and being a part of the lore of it, and the practical filmmaking in the 2020s is inspiring. Starting with you stepping into the project, and decades between the first and second one, what did you walk into with Here are the established rules from the first one and what we want to follow. How do you find your place within that and keep the integrity of the first film as well?
Mark Scruton: I mean, it was an interesting thing. I knew about the project in the background for a while before I got to sit down with Tim and discuss it. I knew that in my mind, I wanted to make more of the same, I didn’t want to try and change that. It came down initially, for me, studying that first film, I loved that movie from way back when I was a kid. It was not a hard task to dig back into but I wanted to make sure I respected that film and Bo Welch designed the first film. I’m a huge fan of his world that is what brought me into the industry in many ways, so I wanted to do all those things justice. Initially, studying the textures, the finishes, and the idiosyncrasy, and tried to figure out what was important and what needed to carry on. We knew we were going to copy some of the original sets, and we knew we had to get our magnifying glasses out and make sure that every detail was the same. It was a case of taking the rules and boiling them down into what’s important, what needs to carry on, what needs to be repeated motifs through the other sets, and then what things I could then play with, where I could take it to, and how I could expand on it. I’ve never done that process personally, and it was a really interesting one to get into because you start to understand somebody else’s mindset, but then you get the fun task of exploring it. With Tim, you get to sit down and and see where he wants to go with it.

Jillian Chilingerian: A lot of time has passed so we’re reintroduced to the characters, and how much they’ve evolved. The interior details speak to that, watching the first film, and going through the archives, how did you want to evolve what their living space looked like past when we last saw them?
Mark Scruton: It was probably one of the hardest challenges of the film because it could be so open-ended. At the end of the first film, we see the Maitlands putting the house back the way it was so the modern look gets expunged, but it never really develops. That was my starting point. It’s like, okay, well, we know, we can’t go back to that post-modern craziness, the 80s. In the end, it was approaching it like another character, and in the film, we had to look at it like that. I went through options with Tim, whether it had gone even more wacky and there’s a lot of trends, actually, in American interior design, which were too really out there. When we were developing this, I was like, Well, is this where she’s gone, but the reality is, Delia, who’s the driving force behind that house, she has matured, and her esthetic has matured. The art show we did, it’s still off the wall, but it shows she’s progressed in her creativity. So then, when I had to look at it as like, Okay, well, you know what quite a big thing for big high-end sort of Connecticut houses and everything else, is restoration work. The Maitlands decided to put it back the way it was and then we thought Delia would have eventually done that when it became cool and trendy and meticulously recreated, the carpentry and the architecture, and put it right back the way it was, and then gone mad, and color-drenched it, and put all the modernist interior design trends back on top of it. So I had to think through the architectural journey that she’d gone through so by the time you get to the end of it, that’s what came out. When we had the funeral garb, the crystals, drapes, and everything it was just a gift to me, because it really meant you could give it what is effectively a very modern interior, but still make it feel Gothic and cloistered.

Jillian Chilingerian: With the funeral, I love the veil outside the house because the house is such a character in itself and a part of the soul of the movie. What was the process of getting that veil, ensuring it appeared right on camera?
Mark Scruton: It was a job. I mean, it’s straightforward to draw these things anyway. It’s great you drew it like a nice wrap present with a bow on the front and think that’s fab, but the reality is choosing the fabric was a job, because we looked at silks and satins and all those sorts of things, but they were far too dense, and it made it just a big, amorphous, black blob. We realized we’re never going to take it off so you need to see the house, what level of transparency? Can you film it? Because a lot of veils are strobe-like mad when you film them on digital cameras so there was a lot of experimentation to get the fabric. Then we had to find that much fabric, not many places carry that quantity of that very specific net that we use. So we brought stuff from London. from LA, some of it was in Boston and then the whole thing was built from a pattern, so it was built like a dress. Of course, it didn’t fit, when you have a first bit of an outfit it never quite fits and so we spent a long time with staple guns and pins and pulling it and nipping it and tucking it with me stood down on the ground going, pull that in and tuck that so it took a long time to get the folds and the pleats and the way it hangs and flows, but it was all done with people and pins, basically to get it to sit.

Jillian Chilingerian: This idea of balancing, and familiarity in this world that we know with the attic, and the model is very iconic. We know the waiting room of the underworld. How do you balance keeping those mainstays of the things that the Beetlejuice crowd wants to come back for while also giving some new versions and additions?
Mark Scruton: It comes back to what I was saying earlier on about once you understand the rules of that world, then you can play with them. I studied it so much that I started to understand what was important and then like with Wolf Jackson’s office, I knew the basics. But then I went away and trawled through every cop show that I could think of that had those precincts and those offices because he was meant to be the sort of failed 80s actor. Once you’ve got your rules, and you’ve got your reference, then you have to try and meld it all together to try and give it its spin. For every set we did that was a new set, we had to take the basics and then give it a spin that created its new environment. We wanted every environment to be something new for viewers, you didn’t want them to get bored or it’s another silver room with some wacky floor. Something we haven’t seen, or something different and surprise people with what we’ve done whilst keeping it true. That was the balancing act, which I drove a lot of people mad trying to get that balancing act just right.

Jillian Chilingerian: My last question would be I don’t know if this was intentional, but in the wake, they’re eating the shrimp cocktails to me, it was like a throwback to the dinner scene from the first film.
Mark Scruton: Yeah, it was intentional. Lots of that. There were so many little gags in there. We had great fun with the graphics and all those things. My favorite thing is, and I didn’t think it was going to make it into the film, but there’s the scene where they reunited with Astrid’s dad, and they all sat around the table in what was meant to be like a break room, and back just over their corner, you can see a stack of board games and on top of it is the game of life. Which I put there specifically, but I never thought you’d see.

Jillian Chilingerian: Thank you so much for this time. I’m so excited that we got to chat, because again, love the film, and I’m just so amazed by what you and your team were able to pull off.
Mark Scruton: I am please you appreciate it. That’s great. That’s what it’s all about, isn’t it? I love, I love hearing people that got it, which is fantastic. So thank you very much.

Beetlejuice Beetlejuice is currently available on demand.
You can read our review of the film here.