Ti West‘s X made its world premiere at SXSW and arrives in theaters on March 18, unleashing a full-throttle, savage throwback slasher with surprising humor (my review).
Shortly after the premiere, we sat down with West to discuss his unique approach to building tension in his latest, which makes innovative and unique editing techniques. The filmmaker also discusses the love letter he nestled into this brutal slasher and why.
In our interview, Ti West also teases what to expect from the already filmed prequel, titled Pearl – the trailer accompanies X in theaters – as well as potential trilogy plans.
On building tension and surprising savvy horror audiences
“Oh, it’s a little hard to explain because you could tell a joke and the whole room laughs, and your friend can tell the same joke, and nobody laughs. There’s something about how you knew to pause a little longer on that line or say that one word a little louder. So, there’s an element of that. It’s just intrinsically; this is how it seemed to me would make it scary. Some of it is just an instinct for the mechanics of it all. I think I can get people to focus on this and not see that, and either I’m wrong, or I will be correct,” West explains.
“But I guess to more specifically answer your question, a big driving part of this movie and making it like a slasher movie for me was that I wanted it to be craft-focused. And so, the camera direction, the editing, the sound, the music, and everything, is very meticulously crafted. It was just to try to get an audience whose pretty hip to horror movies these days and try to surprise them a little bit, which is easier said than done.“
On the humor of the film
“I had absolutely zero interest in making a nihilistic movie. It’s not my taste, per se. I didn’t want to make a movie in which everybody’s lives went horribly wrong, and then this is what they’re doing with their lives. Everybody wanted to be in the story of this movie. I wanted to make a movie mostly about filmmaking, but I didn’t want to make a Hollywood set movie because I’m not interested in that. I don’t have any relation to that. I also didn’t want to make a movie about making a horror movie because that just becomes this meta thing that I’m not interested in.”
A covert love letter to filmmaking
“But because horror and porn, especially in the seventies, have this symbiotic relationship of being the outsider independent genres. It made sense that if I could show people what it’s like to make an adult movie and how making it is nothing like watching it is like, it would hopefully endear you to the craft and process of filmmaking. Which would hopefully also open your appreciation to the movie I was making at the same time. So, you would be thinking about the craft because you’re watching people try to craft things. I have a great reverence for the craft of cinema, and I find it to be endearing and charming. I’m impressed that 60 people go out into a pond with a fake alligator and try to do this stuff. I wanted to make a movie that really celebrated that energy. It also happens to be a really violent slasher movie at the same time.
“I felt like horror was soft, and that’s what started me thinking about slasher movie, being, traditionally speaking, a very sex and violence low brow kind of thing. I wanted to try to do something hopefully crafty with that and unexpected, but I also wanted to deliver. Because for every slasher movie I ever saw, I can remember every serial kill in all of them. I can remember probably every sex scene in all that. There’s a visceral feeling to the dangers of those movies. While this movie is, I think, less dangerous in a way because it’s an oddly optimistic toned movie, it’s spirited in a way that you’re excited about the kills, but you’re also lamenting that some of these characters have to go.”
On the prequel and planned trilogy
Ti West’s X Photo Credit: A24 & Christopher Moss
“I’m very grateful for A24 having done this. Part of the idea of this movie that’s cool to me is that there is a bigger thing to it all. What I can tell you about Pearl, because we’ve already made it and it’s done, is it is very much a story about Pearl. So you will learn more about her. It is stylistically very different from X. You do not need one without the other, but they enrich each other in a specific way. In the way that X is affected, let’s say by 1970s horror independent filmmaking and Americana cinema, Pearl is influenced by a very different era of filmmaking. If we do the third one, it will be affected by a different type of cinema.
“It’s been amazing. If [A24] didn’t like the script, we just wouldn’t have made the movie. They were the only people to make it with. I was in quarantine for two weeks in New Zealand when I wrote Pearl, with this idea of, ‘I don’t know if I could convince them to do it, but if I could write something good enough,’ and Mia [Goth] and I would collaborate over FaceTime. I was like, ‘If we can get something that’s undeniably good enough. If they really believe in this like they say they do, they’ll do it.’ Then A24 called. They believed in it, and we’ve made the second one.
“I’m excited for you to see Pearl in the near future.”
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