Ti West made his name directing nimbly paced throwbacks to horror films of old, from his haunted house breakthrough “The House of the Devil” to his found footage film “The Sacrament.” But after directing six horror films in a row, with very few breaks in between, he decided to take some time off to make sure he didn’t start repeating himself.
While on his break from horror filmmaking, during which he directed for TV shows such as “Scream,” and “Tales From the Loop,” he thought about making a pure slasher film, something he hadn’t done before. Trying to find his own unique spin on the subgenre, he decided to make slasher film about people making a film. He wasn’t interested in making an overly meta piece about shooting a horror movie, so he eventually settled on a close counterpoint to his favorite genre: porn.
“Slasher movies have always been sort of seen as this lowbrow sex and violence kind of sub-genre,” West says. “And so I was thinking that in the ‘70s, adult filmmaking and horror filmmaking were not that different. They have kind of a symbiotic relationship. They were made outside of the system, and they could go direct to consumers via drive-ins or grindhouse theaters or adult theaters, and eventually VHS. So I thought making a movie about people making an adult movie would satisfy what I was trying to get after, bringing an audience into the filmmaking process.”
The result, “X,” is a throwback to slashers of the 1970s, following a group of filmmakers under the employ of producer Wayne (Martin Henderson) who travel to a remote farm in Texas to film an adult film, “The Farmer’s Daughter.” But when the couple that owns the farm takes an interest in the group, the crew has to fight for their survival across one long night. It’s both a celebration of the roots of the slasher genre and a film that plays with audiences expectations constantly, from the dynamics of the core cast to the completely human killers in the mix –– both of whom will be explored in the upcoming prequel film “Pearl” that West is currently writing.
With the film releasing in theaters Friday, Variety spoke to West about bringing ‘70s Texas, merging porn with horror and putting Stevie Nicks’ “Landslide” into the film.
Did you have any specific films you found inspiration in when you were developing “X?” The most obvious comparison is the original “Texas Chainsaw Massacre,” but were there any others?
It’s really more of a decade of filmmaking than anything specific. The late ‘60s and through the ‘70s was a really, really great time for American cinema and auteur filmmaking and more experimental filmmaking on a large scale. “Texas Chainsaw” obviously looms over this movie, that is a slasher movie set in Texas in the ‘70s, but there were also movies like “Two Lane Blacktop” and “Smokey and the Bandit,” sort of this era of movies that has a very particular Americana vibe to them that I think in a modern corporate society doesn’t exist anymore. And that just became an interesting milieu for the movie to take place.
Did you do any research into what the porn industry was like before you made the film?
A little bit, but not too much. The movie, despite it being about people making a porn, it’s more about them making it than it is about porn. The ‘70s is kind of a golden age of adult filmmaking finding its footing. Then, when you made an adult movie, it still had to be a feature length movie, and it still had to have a story, you had to make it like a real movie. It wasn’t like you just get a webcam and off you go. The people that were making it, were making a full regular movie that just happened to have explicit sex in it. So to me, I wouldn’t say it’s like any other movie, but in a way the process was like making any other movie.
What about ‘70s Texas? What did you do to make sure the details were right?
It’s an exhaustive amount of everything from Google to books and whatnot. One tidbit I will say is in the ’70s, beer in America was regional. You couldn’t just get any beer anywhere in the country. And in the Texarkana region, there was Lonestar, Shiner Bock maybe Budweiser. But another one that is no longer being made was actually called Pearl. And I remember when we found some vintage Pearl cans on eBay, we were like “is this too much?” But we opted to see it as not too much, so some of the characters in the film are drinking Pearl beer. You just kind of go on a little hunt and start thinking, “This is what I remember, this is what I like and here’s a photo from Life magazine and I’m trying to go for this vibe.” And as you go, you just sort of snowball your way into it and you try to just really create a believable world to put the audience in with the characters.
I found the depiction of porn in the film interesting. I was expecting a horror film about people making a porno to portray porn as degrading or dangerous, but in the movie, it’s something that’s genuinely liberating for the actors.
It’s subjective, and everyone’s gonna have their own experience. But within the movie we were making, when we sent the script out, the question I would ask actors when I first met them was ‘Why the hell do you want to be in this movie?’ Because a lot of times, people would have an idea in their head of what the movie was, and what they were terrified it might be. And then I had an idea of what the movie actually was. When I was talking to people about Wayne, a lot of people interpreted Wayne as like slicked back hair, gold chains, toothpick, a creepy guy. And I was always like, ‘This is so off base.’ I kept looking at the script like ‘I swear this is obviously not that.’ Martin just immediately understood that he’s this ambitious entrepreneur who loves all these people and wants everybody to win. And it’s not this nihilistic gross thing. There’s no shortage of that story to tell if you want to tell it, but that wasn’t really the story we were out to tell.
A lot of horror movies that I’ve seen have, to be frank, really unlikable casts, who you wouldn’t necessarily mind seeing murdered. “X” though, has a really charming group of characters who the audience do grow to care a lot about. How’d you develop that chemistry?
It’s an ensemble movie, so when I was casting it and meeting everybody I was really trying to think ‘so-and-so goes with so-and-so and they get the same jokes,’ because you had to really believe all of these people were friends and you had to relate to them, you had to like them in order for the second half of the movie to be suspenseful or scary. If they were people you didn’t like you would just be like “let’s get this show on the road.” Whereas because you like them, there’s many moments in this movie that the audience is like, “well, so and so can’t die, they’re like the main part of this movie, what is the movie going to do if they’re gone?” And then they’re gone. As someone trying to make something scary, or suspenseful, or at least subvert people’s expectations, I have to endear you to something that when it’s gone, you’re just like, “I don’t know where this movie is going now.” There’s no hateable character that obviously is going to do something stupid and get killed.
I wanted to ask about the big scene where Bobby-Lynne (Brittany Snow) plays the Fleetwood Mac song “Landslide.” Why that song? How’d that number come together?
I wrote it into the script. I had no backup plan. So we’re very fortunate to get the song, because the movie is what it is. Not everyone says you can use your song in your movie. Thankfully Stevie Nicks did and I just had my that song in my head the whole time writing the movie, and I think it’s an amazing song and it has this really great, melancholic feeling about aging and I wanted there to be a musical interlude that kind of kicks the movie into the sort of second half in a way that you didn’t expect. And so that was always the goal.
Mia Goth plays both one of the porn actors Maxine and one of the killers, Pearl. How’d you transform her for the movie? I didn’t realize it was her until pretty far into the film
It was a great idea until I started doing it and I was like, “Why did I do this to myself?” So it took about six hours to get her in makeup and that’s before a 10-hour day, so it was a Herculean task on her end. And then anytime they were in a scene together, we’d have to shoot them over two days, one day whereas she was Maxine and one day where she was Pearl. It’s always the stuff that’s most satisfying in the movie that’s technically challenging, you shoot someone getting killed in a movie, everybody loves that. But filming it is so tedious because you’re trying to get blood to land in a specific spot and it never does and then you have to clean it up and you’re running out of time. So it was kind of like that. But humungous credit to Mia for owning the performance in such an amazing way that almost nobody gets it during the movie. Some people get it at the end credits, and a lot of people don’t even get it until someone else tells them later, including press people who are like “until I got the press notes, I didn’t know.”
The killers in the film, Pearl and her husband Howard (Stephen Ur), are very human in the film: they’re not portrayed as typical horror film villains at all. Why did you want to depict them in that manner? How do you want the audience to interpret their actions?
It’s not good. Despite all their human feelings, they’ve gone too far in how they’re taking them. But for me, I wanted to set up sort of traditional horror movie villains and almost treat them like monsters in a monster movie, but then just have them be regular people, because I think that’s interesting, aesthetically, to treat them as these horror archetypes, but then as you get to know them, you start to realize they are people with feelings. Now maybe they’re doing something with those feelings, they shouldn’t be doing and maybe there’s chaos that’s going to ensue from that. But I did want to humanize them. I didn’t want them to just be like, you know, personality-less evil or something like that.
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