Ti West Talks ‘Pearl’ Being Influenced By Everything From ‘Mary Poppins’ To Norman Rockwell

When X, writer-director Ti West's return to horror, landed in theaters in March 2022, it was a critical and financial success. Made for $1 million, it grossed $14.5 million.

Mia Goth's Pearl struck a chord with audiences, and A24 immediately announced she would get her own titular movie, a 1940s set prequel digging into her bloody and demented past. In fact, it had already been filmed. Like X, it's a killer movie that is set to slay. A third film, set in the 80s, called MaXXXine, is in development.

I caught up with West to find out why he decided not to shoot the period piece in black and white, how the pandemic and an Avatar hiatus helped him, and he was inspired by everything from Hitchcock and Mary Poppins to The Texas Chainsaw Massacre and Normal Rockwell.

Simon Thompson: I didn't expect to be talking to you twice in one year. Did you expect X to be so popular and the anticipation for Pearl to be so high?

Ti West: I hoped that that would be the case. We had the idea for Pearl before making X but only by a month or two. When we went to New Zealand to make X, we had a two-week mandatory quarantine in a hotel, so that's when the Pearl script was written. Also, it was created to be a movie that we can make back to back, or if A24 didn't greenlight it, it would work as a character background for the character, and it would just be great prep for Mia. Obviously, we were hoping for the former, but you never know. It was a bold ask because we hadn't even made X yet. All credit to A24; they loved the script and the plan that we already had all this stuff in New Zealand when nobody could make anything. When you make a movie and build all this stuff, when you're done, you tear it down. That always feels odd and wasteful. We'd already spent all the money and built it. If X hadn't worked, we'd have a sequel to a movie that no one was that interested in. Maybe it just upped the pressure on me a little bit, and that worked out well. I believed in Pearl being more than a sequel; it seemed like something more than that. It's surreal to have two movies in one year but to make two movies at the same time and to be talking to you twice. It's very weird, but I'm okay with that.

Thompson: There are a couple of things I want to pick up on. The first is to ask what Plan B was if A24 had turned around and said they didn't want to release it. Would this have been effectively a very long DVD extra feature?

West: It's hard to say because it's a 'What if?' that never occurred. There are two general versions. One is that we'd never have made the movie because they could have just said no. It would just be a PDF on my desktop and that's the most likely outcome. It would have been a 92-page backstory. I guess there's a world in which nobody liked X, but I don't think that would have been the case. I think it was either that we made it and we believed in it, or we didn't make it. Both options were very much on the table, and they just believed in the project and me enough, so we went off and made the movie.

Thompson: How much time did you have to get everything together, from costuming to creating torsos and effects required for Pearl's victims?

West: On paper, we had very little time. I think between wrapping X and having the wrap party and day one shooting Pearl, the most it could have been was four weeks. When we were prepping X in December or January, they hadn't greenlit Pearl but we were planning as if we were making it. I've worked with many of the crew before, like our DP Eliot Rockett and our production designer Tom Hammock, so when we were making X, we were scheming about what color we would paint the barn and what things we could plant Easter eggs. We were 90 percent prepping X and only 10 percent prepping Pearl during that, but when it came time to start prep on Pearl, we already knew some of the work was done. We didn't have to like R&D what they would be, and we just had to make stuff very quickly. We already knew the barn was going to be a specific red from a swatch, we already knew the wallpapers we had picked out, but we hadn't ordered them yet. Ordering them and putting them up happened over four weeks which is very short and hectic. That's all credit to the crew being fantastic.

Thompson: That's probably where the pandemic worked in your favor because craftspeople were sitting around not doing things for movies.

West: There was very little new work coming into New Zealand aside from us. We were very fortunate that where we were, Avatar happened to be on hiatus, so the crew was around and available. At the time in New Zealand, once you got into the country, there was no Covid, so it was a very practical place to make the movie. We were able to give people jobs who otherwise would have just been waiting six months for work to come back.

Thompson: Did you consider shooting Pearl in black and white? It is set in the 40s, so it would have been representative of films at that time.

West: I considered making it black and white when Mia and I started talking about the idea. Part of the reason for making it black and white would be to feel the era a little bit, but also, if you read the script, you could read it as the movie you saw, or you could read it as a bit of a heavier and feel the weight of the misery on the farm in Bergmanesque way. The main reason I conceived it initially, thinking it might be black and white, was that it would have been faster and cheaper to turn it around. Let's say the house in X had a blue wall. Well, it doesn't matter because it would look gray. Turning it into this Technicolor-inspired thing required a lot of wallpaper, clean up, and a complete redesign. A24, when push came to shove, they probably would have made it in black and white, but at the time, The Lighthouse, Macbeth had come out, and there was Malcolm & Marie, so there was just a bunch of black and white movies happening to be around. I just felt like, 'Ah, why be the fourth black and white movie?' My reaction to that was like, 'Oh, fair enough. Let's go way in the other direction.' I wanted to tell the story in an aesthetic that was very far removed from X, so whether it was going to be a very German expressionist black and white The Night of the Hunter kind of thing, or this sort of Mary Poppins thing, it had to be something that was a big swing. I'm happy that it went the way it did because it's the better movie this way, but briefly, for maybe a weekend, just because of the cost, I was like 'Black and white is what they're going to want to do.' They didn't really care about the cost, and there were all these other films like that.

Thompson: I wanted to ask about inspirations for this. Did you lean more towards a sort of 1940s horror or romance movies? Was it a combination of the two?

West: Perhaps surprisingly, I don't know that horror played a huge part because it was in the script. It was probably more, in a way, the classic Golden Age of Hollywood filmmaking and those tropes, maybe like Hitchcock as far as the suspense goes. It wasn't like I was thinking about Universal Monster movies or certain B movies of the day. What Ever Happened to Baby Jane maybe came into my mind, but that depends on your definition of horror. Once we committed to a very, almost Disney-esque aesthetic, references go out the window because we were kind of in our own world making something. The goal was to make something that felt very childish and full of wonder, but then make it demented and disturbing.

Thompson: Pearl's monologue towards the end of the movie is awesome. How many times did you get to shoot that?

West: Quite a few times. It was less than ten but certainly more than four. I don't remember exactly. Let's ballpark it in the six or seven area. I talked to Mia a lot about that. I was like, 'Is this the kind of thing that we're going to do once, and that's that?' She was pretty ready to do it 99 times if need be until she lost her mind. She was very prepared and committed, so it was not difficult to ask her to do it. Honestly, it was harder on the production because of how long the take was to not have technical go wrong. It's such a fantastic feat of an actress that if the camera were to do something wrong, there's no room for error. That was the biggest stressful thing. We had to make sure that all hands were on deck from the start of filming that scene. We didn't just do the monologue; we did the scene from the top, so it was about 15 minutes or so where it was very critical that nobody messed up. You can't stop in the middle and be like, 'Can we try something different?' Credit to Mia, I think that 100 percent of the time, she made it front to back on all of them in different and more effective ways. I want to say that the one in the movie is maybe the fourth take, but I can't remember for sure.

Thompson: I also wanted to talk about the dinner scene in the finale. It was reminiscent of Texas Chainsaw Massacre.

West: Texas Chainsaw was a thing. It's funny because that came up a lot during X for understandable reasons. When you look down the hallway of the house in X, you can't help but think of Texas Chainsaw because of the way the door is, although it's hard to imagine another way to shoot that. By default, you're making that image. I wasn't thinking much about Texas Chainsaw with the dinner scene, although I can see the reference. I just had this weird demented Norman Rockwell tableau kind of thing in my head. Pearl was very much about these traditionally wholesome painterly images and recontextualizing them.

Pearl lands in theaters on Friday, September 16, 2022.