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irector 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 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 includ- ed director of photography Haris Zambarloukos, composer Danny Elfman and editor Jay Prychidny. The film was released theatrically on September 6th, as well as in IMAX. Here, Jay Prychidny talks about editing the project and his collaboration with the filmmaker. 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! But grate- fully, when the film finally did get greenlit, they invited me to be involved." 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 shoot- ing. 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 previ- ous day's footage edited, polished and enhanced with music and sound effects… 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." 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 loca- tion 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." Is there a scene that you would point to as a highlight for editorial? "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 pick- ups of Jenna in the train that we filmed later, the whole sequence is basically just my first cut! "But the real editorial musical center- piece is, of course, the MacArthur Park wedding sequence at the end of the film. That was a sequence that 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 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…It took a lot of work, but now, when you look at it, it all just seems completely natural!" BEETLEJUICE BEETLEJUICE BY MARC LOFTUS EDITOR-IN-CHIEF MLOFTUS@ POSTMAGAZINE.COM JAY PRYCHIDNY CUTS TIM BURTON'S LONG-AWAITED SEQUEL D EDITING www.postmagazine.com 22 POST SEPT/OCT 2024 Editor Jay Prychidny The feature was shot at Warner Bros. Leavesden in London.