It’s ironic that the color in Pearl, the latest from Ti West, is so striking — because for a brief moment he almost lensed the Mia Goth horror film in black and white.
“When we first came up with the idea, we toyed with doing a 1918 period-appropriate, German Expressionism kind of thing,” West told MovieMaker.
Pearl, which is available on Blu-ray and DVD today, is a prequel to X, the horror film A24 released in March. X follows an elderly woman named Pearl (Mia Goth, again) who goes on a killing spree as a porn shoot takes place on her family farm. It was shot in New Zealand, a land nearly devoid of COVID, while much of the world was locked down.
To take advantage of the location, West and Goth wrote Pearl, an origin story. West pitched it to A24 early in the making of X, and tried to make Pearl as financially feasible as possible. So he suggested shooting in black and white, because black and white cuts costs.
“If a wall is the wrong color, it’s just gray now, we don’t have to worry about repainting it,” West explained.
But A24 executives already had a handful of recent black-and-white releases, and told West they weren’t necessarily interested in funding another. So he told them: “The other idea I have is to go all in on the other direction and go full-on Technicolor-inspired, almost like a Disney movie.”
A24 was sold.
X was heavily inspired by auteur-driven, gritty ’70s films like The Texas Chainsaw Massacre, whereas Pearl‘s cinematography openly embraces the artifice of Technicolor. (The word refers to a series of motion-picture processes, dating back to 1916, that resulted in ultra vibrant but not very realistic-looking colors.) The 1939 Technicolor classic The Wizard of Oz was a key reference point because of its color palette — Pearl is a vibrant explosion of ruby reds and Dorothy’s-dress blues, and there’s even a scarecrow.
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But Oz was also helpful in getting Goth out of her X headspace. West needed his star and Pearl co-writer to “completely forget X,” he tells MovieMaker, and had no time for it to happen organically. Pearl started shooting just three weeks after X wrapped.
Acting as a “palate cleanser,” West said, the Wizard of Oz helped clear Goth’s mind and prepare her to take Pearl back in time from her withered 1970s state, to a time when she was a sheltered young woman harboring dreams of becoming a dancer in the moving pictures. X and Pearl share a theme of how a desperate delusion is necessary to crave and ultimately achieve stardom.
Mia Goth and Emma Jenkins-Purro in Pearl, directed by Ti West and co-written by Ti West and Mia Goth.
West, Goth and the crew also revisited other Hollywood classics during pre-production on Pearl, primarily for “production design, costume design and cinematography” inspiration, West says.
Achieving Pearl‘s Technicolor visual palette digitally was not a simple act of making “things colorful,” West explained. It’s all about “the contrast ratio between things” and asking “How colorful do you go in contrast to something else? What are the highlights versus the shadows?” he adds. Classics like 1948’s The Red Shoes helped pinpoint those proper color ratios on Pearl.
When it came to set-design, the questions became: “Do we do painted backdrops now and again? Do we put branches outside the window that look totally phony, like in Gone with the Wind?” West said. Again, the point was to embrace the artifice.
The X franchise will continue: West has announced that a third film, MaXXXine, in which Goth will reprise the other role she plays in X — a coke sniffing, adult-film ingenue. But MaXXXine is set years after X, during the peak days of adult-video rentals, and its grainy, jumpy VHS aesthetic reflects its era just as X and Pearl reflects the film trends of their eras.
Pearl, co-written by Ti West and Mia Goth, directed by West and starring Goth, is now avaoilable on DVD, Blu-ray, and video on demand.
Main image: Mia Goth and some stuffed shirt in Pearl.
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