How ‘Beetlejuice Beetlejuice’ Producer Tommy Harper Became a Franchise Whisperer

Tommy Harper is used to getting phone calls featuring unusual requests. His phone might ring and it’s Tom Cruise and Joseph Kosinski asking him to figure out how to film Top Gun: Maverick in real jets. Or J.J. Abrams is on the line, asking how to bring the massive crew of a Star Wars movie to a remote island in Ireland. Maybe it’s Tim Burton, wanting help choreographing an off-kilter musical number for Beetlejuice Beetlejuice.

“You’re like, ‘OK, that’s a puzzle I have to figure out,’’ says Harper. “I love receiving those phone calls.”

Just like characters in movies he’s worked on, Harper is used to journeying to strange new worlds, and he prides himself on the end goal of “having the audience sit in a cinema, turn off the lights and be transported for two hours.”

The Arroyo Grande, Calif. native cut his teeth as a production assistant on ‘90s classics such as Liar, Liar, before graduating to assistant directing, notching credits on nearly two dozen films, including his first Burton movie, Big Fish, and his first feature with Abrams, Mission: Impossible III.

Along the way, along, he took on extra duties that allowed him to shift into producing, where he bore witness to seismic turning points in franchise filmmaking.

He was the set of Star Trek Into Darkness when J.J. Abrams pulled him aside with the shocking news that he would be directing the next Star Wars movie, and that he wanted Harper by his side as an executive producer. After what became the $2 billion grosser Star Wars: The Force Awakens, he took a detour to run Abrams’ Bad Robot as chief operating officer, before transitioning to independent producing, taking on the $1.493 billion grossing Maverick as his first project.

His latest, Beetlejuice Beetlejuice, comes after a long relationship with Burton, whom he got to know through his wife, who worked for Burton costume designer Colleen Atwood. The feature, which like Maverick comes 36 years after the original, bowed to strong reviews at Venice last week and is expected to notch one of the top September openings of all time this weekend.

It’s an impressive accomplishment, given that the film was made for a thrifty (by blockbuster standards) $100 million production budget. “We can’t make movies for massive amounts of money, and we have to do them more efficiently and think of them differently,” he says of the current state of movies.

Read the his full conversation with The Hollywood Reporter below.

One of your biggest assistant directing jobs was Mission: Impossible III, which brought both Tom Cruise and J.J. Abrams into your life. What did that do for your perspective on the business?

Mission III was my first movie that was literally a globe-trotting movie, shooting from one country to the next and sometimes having days off in between as you’re traveling. That was when my brain shifted and said, “I’m going into producing. I know exactly what I want to do.” I was able to dive in and do more than my normal job on that movie, trying to prep different countries and figure things out with the stunt team.

So, you had desire to transition to the producing side. What were the next steps?

I ran into JJ at a restaurant, and he was like, “We’re going to do Trek. Are you going to do it [as an AD]? And I said, “I would really want to do it, but I want to move up and start producing eventually.” And he was like, “Whoa, OK, well why don’t you production manage this movie?” And I said, “They’re not going to give it to me at the price of the movie.” And he’s like, “We’ll figure it out.” And to his credit, the man made some phone calls, and I started as an assistant director. And quickly I transitioned into production managing second unit and helping out on the main unit as a production manager and then went into producing after that.

Nobody in Hollywood really knew if Star Trek was going to work. When did you have a sense it was all gelling?

I thought it was going to be cool. And especially on the Kelvin set. We were rehearsing and Chris Hemsworth was coming out of one of the transport bays and walking into the bridge and JJ was just sitting there with a steady cam operator and cutting in his head. I was like, “This is really cool.”

You make the jump to co-producer on Mission: Impossible — Ghost Protocol. Jeremy Renner comes in, and at the time people thought, “Oh, he’s younger than Tom. He’s going to be taking over for Tom,” which in hindsight sounds ridiculous. Is it safe to say that was not the plan?

(Laughs.) No, it wasn’t. We never thought that. And Renner’s awesome.

That was the start of a “big stunt” being at the center of the marketing for the Mission movies, in this case Tom climbing the Burj Khalifa. How did you manage that from your perspective?

We went to Dubai and ended up realizing we had to take a bunch of windows out to work with the architecture of the building. With wind flow, when we took one window out on one side, we had to take windows out on the other side so the building wouldn’t collapse, or something else would break. And it was really, really hard. We built a replica version, only a couple floors, on a sound stage in L.A. We rebuilt it in Prague. It took months and months and months of rehearsals of Tom on these buildings. And then we got to the real building. We were rigging it, and we were testing it. We finished in Prague, and Tom had a couple days of rehearsal on the building. And he was like, “Where are the cameras?” And we’re like, “Well, they’re around.” He’s like, “Let’s get them out here and shoot in the afternoon.” We just started.

One of the wildest moments in franchise history was JJ moving from Star Trek to Star Wars. How did you find out you’d be going to a galaxy far, far away?

We had shot Into Darkness were in doing some pickups at Bad Robot. We were in the middle of a lighting setup, and JJ and I were talking in the upstairs kitchen area, and he just casually turned to me and was like, “So did you sit down with Kathy [Kennedy] yet? Is everything good?” And I was completely confused. What did I miss? He was like, “You’ve met with her?” And I was like, “What are you talking about? I’m doing the next Mission [Rogue Nation].” He’s like, “I know you’ve been scouting, but no.”

And he took me aside. Nothing had leaked out. He’s like, “I’m going to direct the next Star Wars movie. I want you to produce it, and so you need to meet with Kathy now. It’s all going to happen tomorrow. My deal’s going to close, and then we’re going to release a statement, and you’ve got to get up to Lucasfilm and meet Kathy as soon as you can.” I was speechless for the rest of the night trying to finish our little shoot that we were doing. And I remember going home to my wife going, “I think everything’s going to change pretty quickly.”

The pressure was on, even more than reinventing Star Trek. How did you manage to hit your date on that one? I think the deal closed, and the movie was out two-and-a-half years later.

It was a bullet train of a ride trying to get Star Trek finished, and Star Wars written and prepped. It was a 16-month period from when he said yes to when we were shooting. We were trying to build this new Star Wars world and design the sets — as JJ was writing the script.

I remember reading behind the scenes of the first Star Wars movies that George did as my nighttime reading. I loved it. And I ended up having to stop reading, because it got to the point where everything was a disaster on A New Hope. R2 was breaking down in the sand and the sandcrawlers wouldn’t work. And it was just total anxiety every step of the way. It was a lot of pieces to try to figure out and put together.

Was Episode VIII ever a possibility for you?

Kathy and I were talking about me going to VIII, and we got to a point where we were in pretty close negotiations and talks. At the same time Kathy and I were talking, JJ approached me and said, “I need somebody to come help me run my company, and I want you to do it.” It felt like a really hard decision. And I just said to Kathy, “I have this opportunity and I think from my career, I want to go work at a company and try to figure out how that side works.” And she was great. She was like, “I totally understand that.” And so I did, and I spent a couple years at Bad Robot, which I really loved, and it was a lot of fun and it was totally new experience for me.    

How did the transition from Bad Robot to independent producer happen?

As my contract was coming up, Tom called and was like, “I hear you’re become a free agent. What are you up to?” And he’s like, “Do you know Jerry Bruckheimer? I’m thinking about doing another Top Gun.” I went and saw Jerry and met with him for five, ten minutes. He just said, “How did it work with Kathy?” And I said, “Kathy and I talked every single day. We produced the movie together, we had a partnership, and we collaborated every single day.” And he was like, “Great.” And then that was it.

Tim Burton is releasing Beetlejuice Beetlejuice 36 years after the original. Tom Cruise released Top Gun: Maverick 36 years after the original Top Gun. Did the two of them have any commonalities in terms of their nerves about returning to these career-defining properties?

Tom would say, “We need to hit a bullet with a bullet.” Tim was like, “It’s got to be very similar to the first one. I’ve got to have my cast, I’ve got to do it the way I did the first one as much as possible.” So the similarities were so in sync with the two of them. Tom would say, “We are making a great movie. We’re going to do certain things that give the audience what they want.” And we’re doing that on Beetlejuice as well. We have sandworms, we’re in the Afterlife, we’re in the waiting room. You’re not doing it just because the fans want it. You do it because the story is driving it.

You’re fielding phone calls from Tom Cruise and Tim Burton about these movies. Who keeps you on the phone longer?

Tom! Tim is very quick. Tom and I talked a lot more about the detail and stuff like that. You have a meeting with Tim for more than two to three minutes — it’s a long meeting.

Tim has gotten very big over the decades. But on this movie, he scaled back in terms of budget. As a producer, do you wish you’d had more to work with?

No. Our industry has changed. We can’t make movies for massive amounts of money, and we have to do them more efficiently and think of them differently. I was doing Lucasfilm’s Willow, and we had resources. Then we were doing Wednesday, which we didn’t have a lot of resources, and we had to go to Romania to actually make it for the money. And it was oddly a blessing, because we fell in love with it. We went and scouted with Tim and saw all the locations within three days and picked everything. Tim said we had to do it on a short schedule. We had to do it on tight budget. Our stages sometimes had holes in them. It was a facility that was a little rundown, but oddly kind of special and unique and brought you back to what you’re just there to make.

And Wednesday ended up being one of the biggest Netflix shows of all time. So you brought that ethos to Beetlejuice 2.

Our first conversations were like, “How do we do this version of what we did on Wednesday where we don’t have all the resources, and we have to shoot it on a tight schedule, and we don’t have a huge budget?” We’re not going to make your usual $150 million, $160 million tentpole movie. We don’t want that. We have to do it under $100 million. We did it 48 days. I think he was really happy, because it just gave a shot of adrenaline. He is back and kind of back to his old school ways.  

Wednesday made Jenna Ortega one of the biggest stars of her generation. Was the Beetlejuice casting around the time she was rocketing to superstardom?  

Pretty much at the same time. Tim was there for the premiere and we’d had the script and we’d been talking about it, and we were just trying to figure out the right time to do it. And I just said to Tim, “You’re here. We should just get a meeting.” She came to the meeting and sat down, and he was like, “I’m working on this new project and there’s a role, maybe you can see something in it.” And handed her the script, and she was like, “What’s Blue Hawaii?” And he’s like, “Oh, it’s Beetlejuice.” She talks about not even being able to drive all the way home, she had to pull over and read it on the side of the road.

You are attached to the long-gestating fourth Star Trek movie, which recently landed a new screenwriter. Top Gun 3 also has a writer on it. But I imagine these are quite a long way from the starting line?

Yeah, there’s a lot of pieces I have to put in it. And I think that the bottom line is you hope that things come together, but things take a long time to come together, and you have to make them right, and you have to make sure the story works. “Oh yeah, two years ago I saw you guys were working on this. How’s it going?” And you’re like, “Yeah, well, things take time.” Then sometimes there’s Beetlejuice. As soon as Tim’s like, “Let’s do it,” all of a sudden it’s a year later you’re shooting, and then a year later it’s coming out. It feels like it happens quick, but for Tim, it’s been 30 years since they’ve been talking about it.