In a recent interview with Digital Trends, director Ti West 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. Together, the two films have cemented Goth and West as one of the most exciting director-actor pairs working in Hollywood right now.
Despite their obvious similarities, Pearl is also strikingly different from X. Unlike West’s previous directorial effort, Pearl boasts a vibrant, colorful look that makes it feel, as West recently remarked during a conversation with Digital Trends, like a “live-action Disney movie from the 1940s, ’50s, or ’60s.” The film’s playful Technicolor aesthetic, when combined with its tale of madness and murder, helps cement Pearl as the second great horror movie that West has released this year.
Below, West opens up about how a global lockdown gave him the idea to make his surprise X prequel, reveals what it was like writing the script for Pearl with Goth, and names the beloved Michael Mann thriller that he thinks has the best needle drop in cinema history.
(Note: This interview contains minor spoilers for Pearl and has been edited for length and clarity purposes.)
Digital Trends: You’ve mentioned that you wrote Pearl while making X, but what was that process actually like? How quickly did you write the film’s script?
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.
We were so fortunate to be there that I had the idea that we should make two movies and just stay in New Zealand. I didn’t know how I was going to convince A24 of that, but I thought, “We can’t make a sequel to X because I don’t want to just have more people show up at a farm and get killed. That doesn’t make sense.” So the question became, “Well, how do we use all the same sets?”
I thought, “Well, we could go backward and focus on a younger Pearl.” At the same time, I was already talking to Mia a lot about Pearl’s backstory because we catch up with Pearl very late in her life in X, and that became the idea behind this other movie I wanted to make. I pitched it to A24 and they were intrigued, but they weren’t quite ready to just make two movies. But then we had to do a mandatory quarantine period to get into New Zealand, so we all had to sit in a hotel for two weeks. I went there ahead of Mia, so I started writing it right away.
Eventually, I said to her, “Let’s do it together.” After that, we’d FaceTime and, for those two weeks, we just cranked out what essentially became the gist of Pearl. We sent that to A24 when we left quarantine. They became more intrigued and, about a month later, they said, “OK, we’ll do it,” which is incredible because they were greenlighting a prequel to a movie we hadn’t even shot yet. But because they did it at that time, we were able to make X informed by what Pearl was going to be. It was really a unique situation.
Mia has a co-writing credit on Pearl. What was it like writing with her?
There would be no Pearl without Mia.
