Ti West has had a busy year.
The writer and director’s unique, raunchy slasher X premiered in March and met with critical success, with lead actress Mia Goth delivering not one, but two phenomenal performances. Drawing heavy influence from classic campy, gory slashers, X follows a group of 1970s adult movie stars and their crew as they discover unexpected terror while attempting to film a pornographic movie on a remote Texas ranch.
Just months after the release of the wonderfully gory film, West announced that he and Goth had secretly written and recorded a prequel film while X was in production. Located in 1918, Pearl is an intense character study of the deranged killer from the first film; the prequel recently received a lot of praise from Martin Scorsese.
And if that wasn’t enough, West announced another upcoming movie – this time a sequel, titled MaXXXinecatch up with the titular last girl of X in Los Angeles in the 1980s.
But West says if A24 hadn’t been green Pearl with enough time to get them filmed X and its prequel back to back, the trilogy would not have happened.
“We would never have made this movie. That was part of it. It was like when we go home, this script is nothing. I knew that when we wrote it. I knew it was either a gamble doing this in a row, or it was a writing exercise, and that was all, because it wouldn’t make sense. The budget of the movie would be huge to recreate all these things,” West told Bloody Disgusting in a recent interview, sharing that reusing the set from X was immediately crucial to the making of the prequel.
“It really was a movie that was born from one of the most unique timing scenarios ever. But that’s how I knew we could do it, because of all the write-offs of everything we had already put together with X, I just knew there was a way to make a movie that looked much bigger than it was and to give a space and an identity that wouldn’t feel like a bonus movie, but like a second completely different, completely realized story,” he added.
West teases character evolution in MaXXXine
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While West says the upcoming sequel MaXXXine would have been “fine” immediately following X, the director thought it was important to go back before moving on in the story. While he didn’t reveal much about what fans can expect from the third film, West says it will showcase Maxine Minx’s “evolution.”
“I think what will be fun in maXXXine, I’m not going to tell you what it’s about, but what’s nice is that it’s an evolution of the character, like you met Pearl in X, but then you get to know another side of her in Pearl Yes, you met Maxine. It is a continuation of Maxine, but she is at a very different point in her life. It’ll be interesting to catch up with her when we do, and to see Mia Goth in yet another way.”
There is no release date for MaXXXine after all Pearl is now in cinemas.