Michael Keaton thinks he sucked in Dumbo but Tim Burton is nonplussed

We’ve done our fair share of ragging on Disney’s live-action remakes (and you know what, we’ll continue to do so as long as they keep looking like that!). So to hear the experience of creating one of those live-action remakes wasn’t that good for the people making it, well, that’s a little validating. Dumbo had a chance to be interesting in the hands of a filmmaker like Tim Burton, but as The A.V. Club‘s Katie Rife observed in 2019, nothing about the film was “especially Burton-esque.” Now, it seems both he and his cast felt it. 

Michael Keaton, who has raved about the handmade quality of Beetlejuice 2, reflected on his frequent collaborations with Burton in a new interview for The New York Times. “I love working with Tim so much, but I don’t think we ever really analyzed why we work pretty well together; we just do,” Keaton said. “I think I let him down on one movie, but that’s just me, and it bugs me to this day. I was clueless on Dumbo. I sucked in Dumbo.”

Of course, Burton disagreed with Keaton’s assessment—”I don’t even know what you’re talking about, but whatever,” he responded—but the auteur does not seem to be a particular fan of his remake, either. “Honestly, after Dumbo, I really didn’t know. I thought that could have been it, really. I could have retired, or become… well, I wouldn’t have become an animator again, that’s over,” he said with a laugh in a recent Variety interview. Beetlejuice Beetlejuice “reenergized him,” he has reiterated, adding that “Oftentimes, when you get into Hollywood, you try to be responsible to what you’re doing with the budget and everything else but sometimes you might lose yourself a little bit. This reinforced the feeling for me that it’s important that I do what I want to do, because then everybody will benefit.”

Where this lesson is most reflected happens to be the story of grown-up Lydia Deetz, a storyline that actually sparked Burton’s interest in the sequel, he now tells the NYT. “For everybody that was a cool teenager, what happens to you as an adult? What’s important to you? What are your relationships like? What happens when you’ve got kids? For me, this movie couldn’t have been made until now. I understand all these things a bit more because of my own strange journey,” he said. 

When interviewer Kyle Buchanan describes Lydia as “an iconoclast, but unscrupulous people are trying to milk her gifts,” Burton admitted he relates to her after decades in Hollywood navigating the intersection of art and commerce. “You’re absolutely right. I’ve been through all this stuff, so it’s quite cathartic,” Burton said. “I identified with Lydia then and now.”