In a recent interview with Digital Trends, director TiWest opened up about the making of his acclaimed X prequel, Pearl.
Not many filmmakers are having as good of a year as Ti West. The writer-director made waves March when he released X, his A24-produced love letter to 1970s slasher flicks. Now, he’s back with Pearl. The new film, which is a prequel set 60 years before the events of X, reunites him with star Mia Goth, who reprises her role from the first film and plays Pearl‘s titular killer.
Ti West: The bulk of it was about two weeks. I say that very specifically because we went to New Zealand to make X because it was peak COVID and New Zealand was a safe place to make a film. So after we’d gotten our visas sorted, been granted our essential workers permits, and had a crew assembled, we were going to go and build all these locations for X. To me, it seemed weird to then just tear all that down and go home when we had no sense of whether we’d ever make a movie again.
She would then send stuff to me and I would put her scenes into more of a script format because she hadn’t really done that before. We would just bounce stuff back and forth, or I would say, “Hey, what kind of scene do you want to do in a movie?” She’d go, “I like this,” and we would say, “OK, well how can we work that into it?” We came up with the film’s scenes that way.
In a way, but once you start committing to the aesthetic, you have to commit, you know what I mean? You couldn’t half-ass it or else it wouldn’t look like anything. It was weird, though, because we were coming off X, which was a very different aesthetic. So when we started working on Pearl and we started redesigning the sets, I definitely thought, “Oh … I hope this works [laughs]. There are some big swings here.
The violence in Pearl feels very different than it did in X, which leaned into its ’70s-inspired slasher movie version of gore. Was that a conscious decision on your part? I don’t know why it became a monologue, but I think one day we just thought, “Maybe she’ll just say how she’s feeling.” From there, the dominoes slowly started to fall and we ended up with the monologue that’s in the movie, and Mia kills it. It’s all a credit to her.
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