Rather than be overly protective about some of his most famous intellectual property, Burton wanted to let the legacy leather-goods house and its designers follow their own instincts. “They consulted me, and we talked about this and that, but I respect them and I respect what they do,” he says. “It’s more fun for me to see things beautifully done.” Fashion, after all, he says, is a medium different from film. “I mean, I’ve seen Nightmare merchandise, and some of it’s good and some of it’s really bad,” he says with a laugh. “And even the bad ones are kind of good sometimes.” One example? A “big fat Jack Skellington.” “Well, no, he’s not a big fat Jack Skellington, but as a stuffed little toy, he’s kind of cute,” Burton adds with a laugh. “Things change and mutate, and you just [need to] keep the spirit of something, but then do something [with] your own interpretation of it.”
Many members of The Nightmare Before Christmas’s original 1993 audience are now adults atop creative industries. Burton’s work, in a way, is part of their own imagination. “The things that inspired you from the very beginning, they just stay with you,” Burton says. “Whether it’s conscious or not, it’s just part of your DNA.”
Revisiting past work, Burton says, “can be a beautiful experience, but not always.” Though he says he “had no real desire” to make a sequel to Nightmare, Burton did direct 2024’s Beetlejuice Beetlejuice, a sequel to the 1988 film Beetlejuice, starring Winona Ryder and Catherine O’Hara. Returning to the film 35 years later “made sense” for him “emotionally.” “It was like, nobody’s getting any younger and blah, blah, blah,” Burton says. “I really did that movie not to make a sequel, but it was something that I enjoyed, and we tried to do it in the style of the first movie, shot it quickly, did live effects. So it was an experience that meant a lot to me. And I think for me, it’s always important to make something that I really, really feel.”
