Ti West has released two great horror films this year: X, a slasher set during a 1970s porn shoot, and Pearl, the bloody origin story of X‘s most fascinating character. He knows his movies aren’t for everyone, so he asked every actor when making X the same question: Why?
In our latest Things I’ve Learned as a Moviemaker, Ti West shares his favorite on-set stories and how he works through every step of the filmmaking process, from writing to filming to editing. He’s a genre filmmaker with high-minded ideas and a deep love of film history: X looks at the rise of auteur filmmaking in the 1970s, while X, set in 1918, looks at how the new technology of motion pictures reshaped and fired people’s imaginations.
But given the sex and violence in both movies — and the potential vulnerability for the actors — he wanted to understand their motives for taking big creative risks alongside him.
“With X, I asked every cast member, “Why the hell do you want to be in this movie?,” West wrote. “Because there was no shortage of reasons not to be in a movie like that. So I was interested in hearing why they would want to do it. And if we were on the same page, then great, and if their reasons didn’t align with my reasons, it’s like, well, this is not the project for us.”
Since he started as a filmmaker two decades ago (you can learn more about his early years in our interview with X and Pearl producer Peter Phok, above) West has found that people bring a wide range of expectations and fears to set. He says he tries to understand his collaborators as well as he can.
“On set you’re going to run into all sorts of personalities, because you’re working with a large number of people. Some of these people are going to be a bit eccentric, and you must be ready for that. You have to be open and thoughtful to the fact that everybody there — certainly actor- and filmmaker-wise — whether they will admit it or not, are going to have insecurities surrounding: What if this thing is not good? What if I’m a fraud, and this is the one that everyone discovers that on? That’s something that everybody goes through. You have to be empathetic to that, so that you’re not forcing someone into being defensive,” he says.
“A lot of clashes on set come from people arguing over something that has nothing to do with the thing they’re arguing about. What they’re actually fighting over is about something else from three weeks ago. Now it’s manifesting itself as this, because someone didn’t communicate properly. You have to be a bit of a psychologist, and you must try to be as understanding as possible to what people’s goals are.”
His best collaboration on X turned out to be with Mia Goth, who plays two different roles in the film: The aspiring starlet Maxine, and the elderly, jealous Pearl. When X was shooting in New Zealand during the pandemic, West and Goth quickly hit on the idea of making the prequel Pearl. X was released in March, and Pearl arrived soon after, in September.
Though West and Goth co-wrote Pearl, with her starring and him directing, some of their best decisions were made in the moment on set — including a creepy smile Mia Goth developed and held on the spot. She tells that story here.
And the success of X and Pearl have led to yet another collaboration — Ti West and Mia Goth will next work together on the sequel MaXXXine, which follows, you guessed it, Maxine, as she goes off in search of stardom in the VHS era.
Pearl and X are now available on VOD.
Main image: Mia Goth plys Maxine, a young Texan looking for stardom in X, from Ti West. Photo by Christopher Moss, courtesy of A24.
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