The Vista is a 101-year-old single-screen movie theater, one of the last of its kind in Los Angeles. A few years ago, midpandemic, Quentin Tarantino bought it, fixed it up, even opened a coffee shop next door and named it after the Pam Grier film “Coffy.” When asked why he bought the Vista or the New Beverly, another single-screen he owns, Tarantino has said: “I’ve got a living room. I want to go to a movie theater.”
A few weeks ago I went to a sold-out double feature at the Vista: the film “X” and its prequel, “Pearl.” Both came out in 2022, both were released by the art-house mainstay A24 and both were directed by Ti West, a filmmaker sometimes compared with Tarantino — not least because both have made movies that are obsessed with the process, history and mythology of moviemaking itself. For Tarantino, that film was “Once Upon a Time in Hollywood,” in which two working actors stumble through the Hollywood of 1969, as one film era crashes into another. For West, it is “X” and “Pearl” and the trilogy’s final film, the newly released “MaXXXine.” These are, like most of West’s films, nominally horror movies. But they are also much stranger and more slippery than that label might suggest. In all three films, the horror stems from the characters’ drive toward stardom and their ruthless, sometimes psychotic ambition, which is fully unleashed by the possibilities of the silver screen.
Martin Scorsese, a fan of West’s, wrote to me that he thought each film in the trilogy represented a “different type of horror, related to different eras in American moviemaking.” The first, “X,” is “the ’70s, the slasher era”; “Pearl” is “’50s melodrama in vivid saturated color; “MaXXXine” is “’80s Hollywood, rancid, desperate.” They are, Scorsese wrote, “three linked stories set within three different moments in movie culture, reflecting back on the greater culture.” By smuggling thoroughly modern ideas into films that were also steeped in the aesthetics of the past, Scorsese thought, West had done something bold and thoroughly cinematic.
That night at the Vista, after “X” played, West sat onstage with the actress Lily Collins, who is in “MaXXXine,” and they talked about the making of the trilogy. Weeks earlier, over breakfast, West had shared with me an idea he was considering for the event: He wanted to surprise the audience by screening the new film instead of “Pearl.” It would be the first time he put “MaXXXine” in front of a real, live, movie-loving audience, as opposed to critics and press and industry types.
The idea delighted West, he explained, because he was always interested in the process of leading an audience to that place where they know something is coming, and they probably have an idea of what it might be, but they find when it arrives that it is not at all what they expected. One of his favorite movie moments that does this is in “Raiders of the Lost Ark,” at the end of the bazaar chase, when the crowd separates and a swordsman steps out. Indy looks at him for a beat, and you think to yourself: This is really exciting — he’s going to have a big battle against that guy with the sword! But instead, Indy simply pulls out his gun and shoots the guy.
The Vista that night was crowded with West superfans — people who had not only seen “X” and “Pearl” but had also arrived dressed in the jean-short overalls or old-timey red dresses their main characters wear. In each film, it is Mia Goth who plays those characters: first a young stripper named Maxine Minx, and then Pearl (who in “X” is a very old woman), and then Pearl again in “Pearl,” which is set in 1918, filling in her back story. The roles have helped turn Goth from an indie-horror darling to a major star, with roles in upcoming Marvel and Guillermo del Toro films to prove it.
After West and Collins were finished taking questions, she asked the audience how many of them had seen “Pearl.” Nearly the entire audience raised their hands. “So why are we going to show you ‘Pearl’?” she asked. “Why don’t we just show you ‘MaXXXine’?” There was applause and hooting — they liked the idea, but couldn’t yet imagine that it would actually happen. “You want to see ‘MaXXXine’ instead?” Collins asked again, to growing applause. Then West stepped in: “OK, so, look — you’re going to be the first people to see this movie.”
And suddenly, finally, everyone got it, and the place went bananas, and West stood up and moved to the back of the theater and stood there, sometimes motionless, sometimes pacing, watching the audience watch his new movie.
West grew up in the woodsy suburbs of Wilmington, Del., near the Bidens and a small private school called Tatnall, which he attended from kindergarten through 12th grade. The filmmaker and video-game writer Graham Reznick went there, too, and met West when they were in kindergarten. First they drew comics together; later they made the sorts of dumb films boys make, blowing up army men with firecrackers, recording it on a Hi8 camcorder. By their teens, they’d immersed themselves in their local video store, drawn to movies that seemed to them to exist in the same visual universe as what they had been getting up to in the woods — things like Peter Jackson’s “Bad Taste” or Sam Rami’s “Evil Dead,” scrappy films where you could practically see the guy holding the camera and deciding where to point it.
Then, junior year: Dr. Chipman’s film class, where they studied Hitchcock and, specifically, “Psycho.” As Reznick explained to me, that film “leads you down a path, thinking the movie’s about one thing, and then it shifts gears in the middle.” (West’s “X” trilogy is chockablock with “Psycho” references; “MaXXXine” even features a chase sequence through the Universal lot that ends at an old Bates Motel set.) I spoke with Bruce Chipman on his final day of teaching after 51 years, and he remembered West quite well, as the rare student who seemed deeply interested in where the camera was and how it moved. “You can always tell the kids who are kind of on the edge of things, observing,” he said.
In 1999, West and Reznick headed to New York City — Reznick to N.Y.U. and West to the School of Visual Arts, where he lucked into a class taught by the filmmaker Kelly Reichardt. She is, West says, “very much responsible in many ways for me having a career.” In high school, he saw a movie called “Habit,” made by and starring Reichardt’s friend and frequent producer Larry Fessenden. Reichardt floated the possibility of having Fessenden come in to talk to her class, but it kept not happening, and West kept bugging her about it, and finally, West says, “she was like, dude, here’s his number. Just go meet him.” West did. And when Fessenden needed an intern, Reichardt recommended West.
“Now, Larry will tell you the story that I used that internship to duplicate copies of my short film to send to film festivals, and he’s not wrong,” West told me, but when I asked Fessenden about this, he just laughed and said what he really remembered was taking West aside: “I said, ‘Listen, kid,’” — here he put on a mock showbiz voice — “‘when you finish with college, if you ever want to make a feature film, you come back to me, eh?’” In Fessenden’s telling, West showed up in his office something like three days after graduation. “And the thing that really shows you what’s so strategic and smart about Ti — he didn’t come in with one dream project. He came with, like, four different log lines.” One even had an environmental angle, which he knew Fessenden would be a sucker for. Fessenden greenlit the idea that day.
The career West would go on to build is as old as Hollywood. A boy with big dreams heads to Los Angeles to make movies. Only he quickly realizes that to actually get the not-insubstantial sums of money required to make a movie, he will have to go elsewhere, to places where films are being made more cheaply. So he lives in Los Angeles, but for more than half the time he is somewhere else, on the road, working, making movies.
West made several, often for very little money, and usually — in part because he is an only child and has trouble giving up control, but also because it’s cost-effective — he wrote and edited the movies too. One, about a trio of hunters who fear that they are being hunted, he made for about $10,000 in the Delaware woods. Another, about two friends investigating hauntings in a creepy old inn, was inspired in part by the creepy old inn he and the crew stayed in while making a different film entirely. The result, “The Innkeepers” (2011), was the first West film to catch Scorsese’s eye; after seeing it, he told me, “I thought: OK, I want to see everything this guy does.” The film reminded him of the work of Val Lewton, who was put in charge of RKO’s “horror unit” in the early 1940s and given a simple mandate: The films had to be under $150,000 and 70 minutes, and the studio heads would pick the titles; otherwise he could do what he wanted. The films he oversaw, starting with “Cat People” in 1942, were atmospheric and psychological, the tonal opposite of the screamy monster movies put out by Universal at the time. The amazing thing about “The Innkeepers,” Scorsese said, was that “you could eliminate the ghost story and the film would work without it, which echoes the way Val Lewton made his films: He always made sure that the core story had to stand on its own, apart from the supernatural elements.”
To Fessenden, it is an understanding of pacing — like West’s determination “to both frustrate the audience and then reward them” — that really ties together talent. “It’s also something you can only do if you’re defiantly independent,” he said. “Because, of course, in our blockbuster, Hollywood fare, everything is basically sort of commodified, and there are no challenging cinematic ideas because it’s all about the three-second cut.” I told him I was interested in what Reichardt made of West’s work, but he said she didn’t really watch new genre movies. He did, however, offer up a common thread between the two filmmakers, particularly in West’s early work. “I would argue — and this is maybe the whole point — they’re both interested in the texture and the timing, the slowing-down of time,” he said. “Now, Ti’s recent film is more bombastic, of course. But, at its core, the reason he’s known as a slow-burn guy is there’s a tremendous attention to everyday details. Ti’s build dread. Kelly’s, she builds maybe more like empathy. But there’s a similar thing going on.”
The knock on West’s recent movies is that they are movies about movies. When a film’s core interest is in the craftier aspects of the craft, it is easy to let other essential elements — character, story, performance — take a back seat. And sure, the “X” trilogy does act as a kind of skeleton key for entire rooms of underseen cinema, inspiring copious list-making on sites like Letterboxd. But their appeal is broader than that; these are not just movies for film dorks. And their wider success can, I think, be boiled down to two features: They are personal — more personal than West will ever let on — and they star Mia Goth.
We’ll get to Goth in a moment, but the thing to know about how “X” came about is that before he sat down to write it, West had been working in television for five years, directing episodes on 11 different shows, and he was comfortable. TV was comfortable, compared with the grind of hustling up money to make films. It was: “Can you be on a plane on Monday?” So he did it for a long time. And when, eventually, he again felt the pull to make a movie, he thought about what he loved, what he revered, what was worth the trouble of making a movie. And what he came up with was: movies.
So he wrote a screenplay. It was a story not entirely different from his own — an old story, about as old as Hollywood. A girl with big dreams wants to make it in the movies. She, too, is from somewhere far away; not Delaware, but Texas. And she, too, is ambitious — willing to do whatever it takes to get what she’s after. The movie she and her friends set out to make is also a low-budget genre flick; not horror, but porn. West’s story begins with them hitting the road and renting a house from an elderly couple on a farm, but the couple turn out to be freaky and murderous — particularly the wife, Pearl. When it’s all over, the only one who has survived is the girl with the big dreams and wild ambitions; it is her ambition, or perhaps her willingness to do whatever it takes to get what she says she deserves, that saves her. The film ends with Maxine Minx driving off, hellbound for Hollywood.
“X” hit theaters in March 2022. It was a modest hit and critical darling, but the film that would really transform West’s reputation was already waiting. He’d shot “X” in New Zealand, which was, for a stretch of the pandemic, one of the few places in the world where you could make a movie. Immediately after finishing it, he began work on a prequel, set in 1918 and focused on the origin story of the first film’s monster, the murderous, lusty old woman: Pearl.
“He goes, ‘So, you know, I’m thinking we’re in the middle of Covid, and nobody’s making movies,’” Mia Goth told me. “‘If we’re going to go all the way to New Zealand and spend all that money to get everything and all the people that we need over there, all this energy, why don’t we just make a second movie?’” She and West spoke every evening; she would write in the morning; they’d send ideas back and forth. She was thinking about “harder,” “grimier” films like Lars von Trier’s “Dancer in the Dark,” in which Björk delivers what she considers “one of the best female performances ever put down.” The movie that emerged, she says, is like a cross between “Dancer in the Dark” and “The Wizard of Oz.”
Watching “Pearl” I thought, more than anything else, that the folks who made it must have felt as if they were getting away with something. It is shot and acted in the style of a 1950s melodrama, from a director like Douglas Sirk, and it is absolutely gleeful in its deranged strangeness. At one point, Goth humps an Oz-esque scarecrow, and it is ridiculous, yes, but also very sad, and shot very beautifully, and tracked with a soaring orchestral score, and Goth is transcendent in her total commitment to depicting Pearl’s loneliness and desperation. These were the feelings that West and Goth and the rest of us were working through in 2020 and 2021, when they wrote and made it.
Reznick, West’s childhood friend and fellow filmmaker, told me that West’s best work comes from figuring things out as he goes along. “I don’t think Ti had a master plan for these movies,” he said, talking about the trilogy. “I think he felt them out in an experimental way.” Filmmaking, he said, was often about recognizing happy accidents, and West was particularly good at this. West was often described to me as a control freak, but it was the moments when he had to react after losing control that he was at his best.
One of the most striking elements of “Pearl” happened like this. West initially imagined and pitched the film in black and white, but A24 pointed out that there were already a bunch of black-and-white movies on their slate — so he did a 180 and saturated the thing in color. Goth told me that the shift into “this Technicolor fever dream” informed her sense of who young Pearl should be. “You know, I don’t know if she would have been so animated. She might have been a little more reined-in, more demure.” That the look and the lead performance in “Pearl” — the two most memorable aspects of the film — had come about thanks to a chancy pivot called to mind that moment in “Raiders of the Lost Ark” that West loved so much. That, too, was by chance: There was actually a whole choreographed plan for a complicated fight between Indy and the sword guy. But Harrison Ford had come down with dysentery and was too sick to pull it off. So he simply drew his gun.
Six months after “X,” during the buzzy run-up to the Venice Film Festival release of “Pearl,” West took a final gamble and pitched a film that would complete the trilogy. Doing it the way he wanted would cost at least as much as “X” and “Pearl” put together. It would be set in 1985, in Hollywood, as Maxine gets her big break in a lowbrow horror flick. Of the three films, “MaXXXine” is the one that most revels in its movieness. That makes sense: It is the first movie West has made in Hollywood after two decades of living there. It’s giddy; it’s fun. It is delighted to take you on a chase scene with Kevin Bacon playing a scuzzy private detective running through a movie lot. But “MaXXXine” is also about Maxine’s ruthless ambition, which is once again the thing that both defines her and drives much as the plot.
As West was telling me the story of making these movies, I could not help thinking of his story as being akin to the three screenplays he wrote and the character at their center. It wasn’t too great a stretch, I felt, to see his story in Maxine’s. So I asked West about his relationship with ambition, a topic that the trilogy has quite a lot to say about.
“If, ultimately, you just want to write about how it’s about ambition, OK, I don’t care,” he said. “But it’s like, if I was reading this article — which, I think, in fairness, I don’t really read them — but if I was reading it, what I would be wondering is: Why do people go to the movies?”
He paused, then sharpened his own question: “What is it about seeing movies that people like?” He paused again. The thing he was always grappling with, he admitted, was the thing that was at the heart of what had gotten him back off the metaphorical couch to make “X” in the first place, and that thing, that question, was actually more about him.
“Why do I like movies enough to make them?” West asked himself.
Ryan Bradley is a writer based in Los Angeles. He last wrote for the magazine about the band Khruangbin.
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