In 2001, Walt Disney Pictures began to consider producing a sequel, but rather than using stop motion, Disney wanted to use computer animation. Tim Burton convinced Disney to drop the idea. “I was always very protective of Nightmare not to do sequels or things of that kind,” Burton explained. “You know, ‘Jack visits Thanksgiving world’ or other kinds of things just because I felt the movie had a purity to it and the people that like it… Because it’s a mass-market kind of thing, it was important to kind of keep that purity of it.” Burton said.

On the direction of the film, Henry Selick reflected, “It’s as though he [Burton] laid the egg, and I sat on it and hatched it. He wasn’t involved in a hands-on way, but his hand is in it. It was my job to make it look like “a Tim Burton film”, which is not so different from my own films.” When asked on Burton’s involvement, Selick claimed, “I don’t want to take away from Tim, but he was not in San Francisco when we made it. He came up five times over two years, and spent no more than eight or ten days in total.”

Tim Burton had hoped to direct, but placed Henry Selick in the director’s chair instead as Burton was busy working on Batman Returns.

In the original poem written by Tim Burton, the only characters that existed were Jack, Zero and Santa. All the other characters were made up for the movies, although he describes some of the presents which were given out, including in some cases the names of the children.

Tim Burton wrote a three-page poem titled “The Nightmare Before Christmas” when he was a Disney animator in the early-1980s. Burton took inspiration from television specials of Rudolph, the Red-Nosed Reindeer, How the Grinch Stole Christmas! and the poem “A Visit from St. Nicholas.”

For a while, Tim Burton was considering to direct, but could not due to a conflict with another movie

Helena Bonham Carter’s prosthetic makeup for The Witch took five hours to apply. “I was pregnant throughout filming, so it was weird being a pregnant witch,” the actress reflected. “I had morning sickness, so all those fumes and the make-up and the rubber…it was hideous.”

Tim Burton focused on the story and limited the use of digital effects. Costume designer Colleen Atwood created special dresses for identical twins Ada Tai and Arlene Tai, who played the role of Ping and Jing. One set of dresses created the effect of fused twins on camera, while another set enhanced the added CGI of conjoined twins.

Young Edward becomes a traveling salesman for a company that sells hands with metal tools as fingers, all held together by a plastic base. The crew were aware that people would draw connections between it and Edward Scissorhands, and therefore purposely did not include scissors in the design.

Tim Burton later compared Ewan McGregor’s acting style to regular colleague Johnny Depp.