‘Pearl’: Ti West & Mia Goth Discuss The ‘X’ Prequel & Aesthetic Ambitions [Interview]

A subversive throwback to ’70s sleaze, “X” has more on its mind than shock value. That’s not to say that down-and-dirty pleasures were hard to come by in Ti West’s A24-produced slasher (which hit theaters earlier this year), about amateur adult filmmakers facing off with murderous octogenarians on a decrepit farm in rural 1979 Texas. It is, after all, a film that counted “The Texas Chainsaw Massacre” among its sizzling, sex-and-slaughter influences. 

But West — whose past retro-horror pictures include “The House of the Devil” and “The Innkeepers” — has earned a reputation for enriching his genre fare with exceptional craft and sharp, savage insight. And with its inspired double casting of Mia Goth as aspiring porn star Maxine Mink and withered farmer’s wife Pearl, “X” allied the filmmaker with an actress capable of mirroring that ambition.  

READ MORE: ‘Pearl’ Review: Mia Goth Totally Kills It In Ti West’s ‘X’ Origin Story [Venice]

Uncannily magnetic enough to amplify the film’s haunting evocations of death and desire, Goth also supplied to “X” a star-making jolt of passion and gravitas, which served to heighten West’s already intensely cinematic style. Pulling off one final twist, the film’s credits revealed the coming attraction for a previously unannounced follow-up: “Pearl,” a Technicolor-styled prequel to “X” set almost 60 years earlier.

While quarantining in New Zealand ahead of pre-production on “X,” West realized he had a potential franchise on his hands. His cast and crew were gathering in the COVID-free country to make a slasher, and Goth was already preparing to play both its final girl and the pitchfork-wielding killer. Approaching the actress about the idea of a prequel filling in Pearl’s tragic backstory — which, crucially, could be set around the same farmhouse, allowing the production to reuse sets built for “X” — West collaborated with Goth to write the script. 

READ MORE: ‘MaXXXine’ Teaser Trailer: Ti West Reveals Surprise Third Film In His ‘X’ Trilogy

Though West initially visualized the prequel as a bleak, black-and-white drama inspired by Ingmar Bergman, he ultimately envisioned another lurid aesthetic for “Pearl.” Trading out the surface jaundice and moaning ambiance of “X” for brightly saturated colors (by cinematographer Eliot Rockett) and a sweeping orchestral score (by Tyler Bates and Tim Williams), West situated the prequel in Golden Age territory, closer to “The Wizard of Oz”  but with hints of “Psycho” creeping beneath the surface. Goth and West sent A24 a draft of the script shortly before “X” started production, and it was greenlit four weeks later, with a shoot scheduled to begin a month after “X” wrapped.

Set in 1918, the prequel introduces Pearl as a starry-eyed teenager, trapped on her family’s farm without the means or opportunity to seize the life on stage she’s meant for. Awaiting her husband’s return from the war, Pearl tends to her comatose father (Matthew Sunderland), resents the domineering mother (Tandi Wright) who seeks to crush her dreams of stardom, and performs exuberant dance routines in front of the farm animals — when she’s not serving them to the alligator lurking in a nearby swamp. One day, a movie-theater projectionist in town (David Corenswet) shows Pearl a pornographic film, claiming she has the “X factor.” Emboldened, she vows to audition for a regional church revue, despite not having formal dance training. Gradually, Pearl’s darker side comes to light — with bloody results.

As “Pearl” charts its protagonist’s unraveling, Goth makes her terrifying and sympathetic, endearing and demented. West, meanwhile, revels in the setup’s arch flourishes, even as the action veers toward an over-the-top climax that sits Pearl across from her sister-in-law (Emma Jenkins-Purro) for a mesmerizing monologue in which her fantasies and reality appear to finally collapse and congeal in real-time. 

A few days after the film’s world premiere at the Venice Film Festival West and Goth spoke to The Playlist about shifting from “X” to “Pearl” and crafting its unusual look.

You finished shooting “X” and, three weeks later, you started shooting “Pearl.” In what ways did the tight turnaround of that transition require both of you to consciously shift gears, and in what ways did “Pearl” feel more like a natural extension of “X?”

Ti West: Certainly, for me, it was weird. When we finished “X,” we were in production. We had done weeks of production and being on set every day. Let’s say we finished on a Friday; on Monday, we were back in the office on “Pearl.” On the one hand, we were so used to working nonstop that carrying on was not such a big deal. And we knew everybody was fine with that. But to go from 12 hours on set every day to just being in the office was a very jarring experience. And to go to the same office that we had done prep for “X” in and have it no longer look like “X” and have it be this whole different aesthetic, with all these props for me to look at and all these new wardrobes, it was like, “Whoa.” For sure.

I knew it was coming. But once I was finally seeing it, I was like, “Okay…Let me try to get my brain around this.” But we were pretty warmed up from working, so keeping the snowball rolling wasn’t so bad. But it definitely took a minute to adjust to what the new movie was because it was such an extreme departure from the other one. But I have also felt so unbelievably fortunate to be in the situation to do that. It was beyond cool… But we were tired, for sure. 

Mia Goth: I agree with everything that Ti just said. We had just shot “X,” and we’d been prepping for months, and we had really gotten ourselves warmed up by the time we dived into “Pearl.” Speaking as an actor, and in terms of my craft, I felt very free by that point. I felt incredibly comfortable with everyone that I was working with. I was able to take all the prep, and all the work that I had done on “X,” and use that to inform young Pearl and what I wanted to do with her.

In those three weeks as well, your crew had to turn the sets and locations of “X” back in time 60 years while twisting them across genres. The swamp, where you had an alligator and the submerged car in “X,” more resembles a studio backlot. The barn is not yet this rotting husk. The farmhouse is brighter and more homely.  What was it like to come back and see the production remade in this way?

West: It was very weird. For me, it was a little bit less weird than it probably was for everybody else, because I was working on it all through prep. I was back and forth to the farm a lot, but the real testament to that was when we did our first tech scout with the crew. 90 percent of them were our same crew from “X,” and we had spent weeks on this farm when it looked like [it does in] “X.” And we had built the barn and the farm, so people were very accustomed to working on that farm — all day, all night, whatever. And then they all went back to their lives, and we prepped in the office in Wellington, New Zealand; the farm was three hours away, in a place called Whanganui. I was back and forth — because I was there with the art department, picking out wallpapers — but the rest of the crew weren’t. 

And then finally came the day of the tech scout, when everyone came back to the farm for us to show them what we were shooting, and it was like a lucid dream. They all pulled down the driveway to a place they were so familiar with, that they knew like the back of their hand, and they didn’t recognize any of it. The grass was short and green, and the barn was red, and there was even a different kind of cow. Going into this dirty and cobwebbed house where we’d spent so many hours, and having it have bright-red wallpaper, most of the tech scout involved people just being really overwhelmed by that. I forget what day you went out there, Mia, but it probably was a similar experience.

Goth: Stepping onto that farm for the first time after they had redressed everything just made me feel very confident, as though all my ideas and what I was doing with Pearl was going to fit perfectly into this world. Had I stepped onto that set and it wasn’t as enhanced and as vibrant as it had been, I might have felt a little insecure as to what it was that I wanted to do. Seeing it brought everything together nicely.

Pearl’s mother criticizes her for “wandering around in foolish fantasies,” calling it a “sign of weakness,” and while performance does provide Pearl with escapism, it also gives her this sense of empowerment, even when she’s only dancing for the audience inside her head. Mia, what was your approach to that performative side of the character’s psychology?

Goth: Yeah, well, it was a real gift to be able to play somebody that had such a complex inner landscape. How did I go about doing that? Really, that was the main challenge. I don’t know how I went about it, to be honest. That’s just who Pearl is. It’s hard to explain. [to West] How did you go about doing that?

West: In many ways, the example is just the movie. It’s what we filmed.

Goth: That’s just what was on the page. You just have to work toward figuring it out, but that’s what was written. It’s how she is. She wears her heart on her sleeve. She says, at one point, that she feels things very deeply. She feels a lot. And that’s just what was on the page. That’s what was being asked for.

In the writing process, then, how did you find the right story to illuminate Pearl more fully as a character? Unlike in “X,” you see many more sides of Pearl than anybody else in this film is able to see. We essentially become the audience Pearl so desperately wants.

West: Having made “X,” or at least with “X” having been written at the time, you spend a decent amount of time with Pearl in that movie, but you don’t really get to know her. She’s not the main character. She’s not who brings us to the farm. We end up with her, but we’re catching up with her very late in her life. Mia and I had been talking about how she got there — or, rather, stayed there — and what types of potential tragedies in her backstory would have led her to be in the situation she was in. 

That was just an interesting thing to talk about, if nothing else, as backstory for the character. to make “X” a better movie. But as we started to do that, for me, a big part of it was that people can really relate to ambition. Knowing we were going to make a movie about someone who ultimately does murderous things, getting an audience to relate to Pearl was a little bit of a project. You have to make sure that you’re not being standoffish to the audience, that they’re not just seeing a psychopath they don’t care about. You want people to relate to her. And in order to do that, a lot of what’s going on in Pearl’s head is universal. Most everybody has things in their life they wish were different, and things they wish that they had. If only they had those things, they can imagine the life that they would want to be living and how great it would be. 

Certainly, in many ways, for both of us, showbiz is a weird thing. It’s such a narrow bullseye you have to hit to be successful in show business, and the overwhelming majority of people who set out to do it will fail. And, then, the small minority of people who actually do it are full of failure, also, and that’s psychologically and emotionally draining. For someone like Pearl, who’s been dealt a not-so-great hand and desperately wants to have a life like she sees other people have, she’s giving it all she’s got to get the life she wants. Ambition is something that everybody can relate to and root for. 

It’s weird to root for Pearl, because of what she does. But there’s a moment in the movie when she goes to the audition, and essentially everyone who’s seen the movie is like, “I really hope this works out for her.” That’s despite her killing people. It’s a testament to Mia’s performance, but it also just speaks to an inner human need to want to be seen and want to get the most out of your life.

“Pearl” has this eerily vibrant Technicolor aesthetic. Seeing it applied in service of a more twisted psychological portrait than one typically associates that style with, I was reminded of Herschell Gordon Lewis’ “Blood Feast” and “The Magic Land of Mother Goose” as much as influences you have mentioned, like Douglas Sirk melodramas and “The Wizard of Oz.” How did you approach tapping into the sinister side of a “Disney-fied” aesthetic, its potential for darkness and horror?

West: The most interesting part of Technicolor, for me, was that it was the type of aesthetic this sort of story is not typically told in. You don’t see Disney movies that transpire the way this movie does. That felt compelling to me, because it was a way to take something somewhat retro and modernize it. That felt fresh, like a new way to look at it. It also matched Pearl’s emotions and her naïveté, and it was interesting to set up a world like that and say that all is not necessarily right within it. 

To bring more grounded themes into something like that, I hadn’t seen it done much. It was a way to still get the audience thinking about cinema — which was a big part of “X,” to be thinking about cinema while they’re watching it. With “Pearl,” it’s a different kind of cinema, but it was a way to make the audience hopefully leave the theater thinking about movies. You rarely see a movie with 80 minutes of orchestral score playing through it, and that makes you realize you’re watching a movie. It’s fun to [lean into] the theatrical nature of that and then have the climax be a six-minute close-up monologue that’s about internal issues.

You’ve spoken about Maxine and Pearl as possessing a certain duality, that they are different people but the same character. Given the kinds of cinema that “X” and “Pearl” explore, one could envision that character through archetypes, as say a final girl in a slasher or a stifled dreamer in a colorful melodrama. How actively were you each considering archetypes in locating the character?

West: We were just trying to be truthful with her. That was a big part of it. In this wacky movie, we were just trying to be as genuine with her and as nonjudgmental as possible. Even in “X,” as well, we tried to approach Maxine and Pearl without judging them. We just wanted to supply them to you, and then you can do what you will with them. I think “Pearl” was the same way. It was a heightened movie, but we always just approached it as if we cared about her.

Goth: My work was focused on a much smaller, intimate scale. It was less about what was going on outside, with the Technicolor. Of course, I considered that and took into account the world that she was living in, but I really let Ti deal with the setting and decided to focus much more on her internal landscape and what she was grappling with internally. Like Ti said, we were trying to find the most authentic, vulnerable version of her. Ti deals with the world, and then I met him halfway.

West: We try to make sure we know we’re in the same movie together. For any of the cast, you want to make sure they’re situated in the correct tone; otherwise, it might feel foreign or stick out. But once that’s calibrated, you shouldn’t play into the aesthetic. And that goes for me as well. In directing it, a little bit goes a long way. 

And, to be honest, those costumes [by Malgosia Turzanska] go a long way. That situates people in the world. Even in the opening of the movie with the title sequence, it was like, “Okay, here’s the first five minutes of the movie that teach you how to watch this movie.” And once your audience knows how to watch the movie, the rest is just about being as relatable and as genuine as possible, rather than trying to keep playing into the aesthetic or into archetypes.

Goth: It would have been very easy to go from exploring a character to having a caricature. 

West: Right.

“Pearl,” from A24, is in theaters on September 16.