Keeping the plot of a film under wraps is hard enough work as it is in the age of constant surveillance—we already got a sizable chunk of Greta Gerwig’s upcoming Barbie film from candid set photos alone. But keeping a film’s entire existence a secret from the jump? That’s practically a lost art, fallen by the wayside after J.J. Abrams’ Cloverfield shocked audiences back in 2007—when an unnamed, undated, instantly viral teaser teed up the official trailer launch just weeks before the film’s premiere.
So when March’s SXSW premiere of Ti West’s bloody-brilliant slasher X ended with the reveal of a prequel film entitled Pearl—which would follow X’s lethal granny all the way back to the WWI era— it was practically a miracle that no one knew about it beforehand. What’s more, it wasn’t just an announcement: The film, which was shot back-to-back with X, was already gearing up for release. A teaser trailer graced audiences patient enough to linger into the last stretches of X’s credits.
Six months later, Pearl is tearing its way into theaters Friday. Where X was a grisly homage to both ’70s horror and retro porn, Pearl is a technicolor wallop to the gut. The film follows Pearl (a transcendent Mia Goth, reprising her role from X, just without the uncanny old-age makeup) in her early days on her family’s Texas farm, as she struggles against her mother’s cold German upbringing and sheltered religious beliefs. Pearl longs to escape to a greater destiny, just like the girls in the movies she’s forbidden to see.
West is continuing his delightful pastiche take on eras of cinema’s past, while Goth—who co-wrote the film alongside West while quarantining for two weeks prior to the New Zealand shoot—sinks her teeth even harder into her character this time around. Pearl is a proper character study; Goth can flip from reserved to ferocious in the flick of a switch. It’s nothing short of dazzling to watch. But like X, Pearl’s chief accomplishment is its ability to draw a surprising sense of empathy from those watching this murderous villain pitchfork her way through everyone in her path. The two films achieve a remarkable symbiosis, peeling back the layers of their central villain’s past to plunge deeper into her psyche.
Ahead of the film’s premiere this weekend—and of Monday’s announcement of a third, not-yet-shot conclusion to the trilogy, MaXXXine—The Daily Beast spoke with Mia Goth and Ti West about relatable villains, the Spanish flu, preparing for Pearl’s intense monologues, and how far along the third film might be.
Both X and Pearl are wildly fun movies, but they are also so empathetic toward Pearl’s character. When she’s older, we see her as discarded; when she’s younger, we see her as someone longing for love and wanting so badly to be seen. She’s a killer, but she’s also human. Why was it important for you to maintain that sense of humanity when writing this script?
Ti West: I think with anything, you need to relate to and care about the characters. If you don’t relate, and you don't care, then the whole movie doesn't do much for you. It just becomes a bunch of stuff. Especially in X, when Pearl is the villain, I didn’t want her to be supernatural. I wanted her to be a regular person. If you’re a regular person, then [her actions are] complicated. If you’re a regular person, then you can’t vouch for what she’s doing, but you can understand how that could happen.
You like [Young Pearl] because she's ambitious. And the audience is also ambitious. You also relate to the idea that there’s a life out there for you that’s more than the one you have. …That relatability is key for any movie, just to experience it with the character.
The theme of illness—both physical and mental—is woven throughout Pearl. How did you decide to flip what you were currently experiencing—you wrote the film while quarantined in a hotel room—into a dissection of masking? Both in terms of the literal masks people wear to protect themselves and the figurative ones we adopt, in order to make ourselves seem normal to society.
West: The short, less-compelling answer is that when subtracting age from old Pearl to get to young Pearl, [we] happened to land very close to 1918. So it was very easy to move [the story] to 1918, which happened to be a very interesting year in general, and certainly a very interesting and topical year to when we were writing the movie. It seemed like the whole world was relating to something that people were not relating to before we started writing the script. We knew that it was going to be a story about someone who was isolated regardless of sickness, and who wanted a life different from the one that she had. But to add on top of it a world war and a pandemic and all this uncertainty—that just felt modern.
But also, to your point, people are pretending to be the people that they want to be, and that, thematically, is there. … I think that people will have a little more empathy and relatability to a character who is struggling with isolation [now], because everyone in the world happened to be going through it.
It struck me that in the film’s third act, Pearl removes her mask to society to reveal her real self in grim, horrific glory. Mia, there’s a single long take that was harrowing, to say the least. How do you prepare for a scene like that, both as an actress and a writer who understands this character so deeply?
Mia Goth: I’d never done anything like that before, so I was very nervous leading up to that scene. Thankfully, Ti had scheduled the shoot in such a way where that was actually the last scene of the shoot—we shot that on the very last day—so I’d go over the lines every morning and every night. I didn’t go to drama school, so I didn’t have the traditional tools to break something down like that. I just had all the prep that I did, the shooting that we had [so far on Pearl], and all the filming that we had on X—I just brought everything with me. I think the fact that we shot that on the very last day, [all of the] emotional baggage that I had from the entire shoot all informed it. We did it for the first time and that was a little nerve-racking because you don’t know how it’s going to go, but it turned out pretty well, and we were able to relax into it after that. We probably did it five or six times.
I imagine it must take a couple of hours for the muscles in your face to recover from smiling as hard as you do in that scene, no?
Goth: I was so pleased with how that went in the end. I was buzzing. It’s actually far more difficult to shake something off when I think it has gone badly. It takes me a lot longer.
Is it difficult for you to shake out of Pearl’s mindset when Ti calls cut? Is her mind something that you live in throughout the duration of the shoot, or do you drop it off-set?
Goth: I felt like I was pretty much on set almost all the time.
It wasn’t really something that I ever let go of or wanted to. There were times when my call-around would be like eight hours, so I would literally go back to my hotel, sleep, and wake up eight hours later and get to set the next day. It was a challenge, but I loved it, and I was so ready for something like that. And I just feel like everything I had worked on and been involved in was leading me up to this.
In X, we saw that there are things in common between [Goth’s younger character] Maxine and Pearl, things that are driving Pearl’s desire and rage. The prequel connects them even more closely, especially ideologically. Yet they strike me as two wholly singular characters, not retreads of each other. How did you ensure that the synergy was clear while also maintaining Maxine and Pearl as individuals?
West: Conceptually, we sort of talked about Maxine and Pearl as different characters but the same person. But [we were] writing two different people, who just have similar feelings about devout topics—they’re just coming at it from a different angle. I don’t try to think about subtext too much while I’m [writing]. ….. If you try to write it, then you’re getting preachy, and no one wants that. If it can organically become part of [the script], that’s great. And the only way that you can do that is if the character is a fully formed character that has their own interests.
Mia, is it difficult to go between those two characters?
Goth: The only thing that was difficult about that was the practical elements to it all—the fact that I was in a makeup chair for 10-to-12 hours at a time to get ready for our shoot [of Pearl’s scenes in X] that day. In terms of the characters, I very much treated them as two individuals. They shared a similar essence, a similar spirit. But they were their own individual people. And it just so happened that all the prep and the work that I did for Maxine would in turn inform Pearl and vice versa.
I have to ask a little bit about Pearl’s … dalliance with a scarecrow. Was dancing with and kissing a scarecrow a fun break from the heaviness of the shoot? Were you able to have a laugh on set during it?
Goth: I wouldn’t say it was having a laugh on set, but I would say it’s—every day on set is fun. The fact that we can be on set, and be making Pearl—it was all so miraculous to us. … All the heady work is done before you get to set, so when you get there, you play and you explore. You just try to think less and start feeling it and see if something special comes.
I’d be remiss if I didn’t try to pry just a little bit—is there anything you can share about the status of a potential third film in the trilogy? I would love to see what Maxine got up to in the ’80s after she escaped the ranch in X.
West: We’re all very hopeful. We’ve had a great experience with A24 and X, and thankfully, we made these two at the same time. There was a prequel whether anyone liked it or not!
Goth: [Laughs]
West: That was a real miracle in itself. We have now caught up with ourselves. We didn’t make three movies at the same time. So, now, my whole “making two movies at once” has occupied my life fully until basically Friday [when the film hits theaters]. And if there’s an opportunity to do more of it, I certainly would not hesitate to work with Mia and A24 again. There are ideas for sure. But yeah, we’ve only made two.
That’s something you’d want to keep secret, I imagine. Much like you did with the prequel.
West: That was its own miracle! Every time I think that we made it all the way to SXSW and no one knew [about Pearl]. I don’t know how we did that.
The film’s SXSW premiere was exciting, both as a fan of yours and someone who was anticipating X heavily.
West: That’s also kind of the fun of these movies. It’s such a vanguard idea—to make these two movies back to back without having filmed the first one yet. And to be able to keep it a secret and to release them is all in the fun and the spirit of what these movies are. These movies are cinematic, and they should be fun trips to the movies. … So anything that can give it some lure is fun.
I stayed at the end of X in the theater, knowing the trailer was coming, and to watch the delight go across everyone’s faces who didn’t know it was going to be there was a pretty spectacular thing to see.
West: That made it worth doing. That was the hope, I don’t know that I’ll get another chance to do something like that again.
