The Letterboxd Show 3.25: Ti West
[clip of Raiders of the Lost Ark plays]
BRODY The Ark is a source of unspeakable power and it has to be researched!
EATON And it will be, I assure you Doctor Brody, Doctor Jones. We have top men working on it right now.
DOCTOR JONES Who?
EATON Top… Men…
[The Letterboxd Show theme music Vampiros Dancoteque by Moniker fades in, plays alone, fades down]
GEMMA Hello, you’re listening to The Letterboxd Show, our podcast about the movies people love watching from Letterboxd: the social network for people who love watching movies. I’m Gemma, they’re Slim, and like many film lovers this month, we are ready to get into the spooky season. And before we talk to our very first special guest of spooky season, Ti West—no big deal—we should mention that this episode is sponsored by our best friends at Shudder, the premier streaming service for horror, thriller and the supernatural. And with Hallowe’en fast approaching, there is no better time to dive into Shudder’s unbeatable collection of new and classic scares. Do you have Shudder, Slim?
SLIM Gemma, you know I have Shudder. I would never let that subscription lapse as long as I live. It’s the home for Hallowe’en with original series and movie premieres every week, including a new film from Dario Argento, Dark Glasses, and V/H/S 99, the latest in the hit found-footage franchise hot off its world premiere at TIFF—both premiering this month. And Shudder has two new series that are must-see for movie-history fans: The 101 Scariest Horror Movie Moments of All-time where filmmakers and genre-experts like Edgar Wright and Mike Flanagan countdown horror’s greatest scares and Queer for Fear, a four-part series on the history of queer-horror from executive producer Bryan Fuller.
GEMMA It’s... it’s too much. I’m going to have to keep Shudder subscription going all year, not just October. Speaking of which, until the end of October, Shudder is also offering 31% off new annual subscriptions. Go to shudder.com and use the promo code HOME—get to it. But let’s talk about how we’re kicking off the month of October. Slim, when I look at the most popular films on Letterboxd right now, so many of the top films are horror, horror, horror—with women at the bloody heart of them. And the most horrific and entertaining of all is Pearl, a character we met in her senior years in the movie X earlier this year, which director Ti West followed crazy-fast with Pearl’s origin story and that is in cinemas now.
SLIM We had to get Ti on the show—no way we can start Hallowe’en without him. And there are indeed a few scary movies in his four favorites which are: Peter Jackson’s Bad Taste, Raiders of the Lost Ark, Two-Lane Blacktop and Tobe Hooper’s The Texas Chain Saw Massacre. Ti, welcome to The Letterboxd Show.
TI WEST Yeah, thanks for having me. It’s great to be here.
GEMMA How are you? It’s been a bit of a... like, a whirlwind putting not just one but two movies out in a year. You crazy man.
TI WEST Yes, it’s turned out to be quite a busy year for me. I went to New Zealand about, I don’t know, a year and a half ago or so, almost two years ago now. And I was planning on being there for three months, maybe four if I wanted to see some sights. And next thing you knew I was there for thirteen months making two movies and I haven’t had a day off since, since basically Hallowe’en two years ago.
SLIM Cripes.
GEMMA Oh my god. We do that to people. We suck them in Ti, we suck them in. As the resident New Zealander on the show, there’s a tradition in New Zealand current affairs where—and it sort of, it’s because we’re such a tiny, sad, little country of desperados at the bottom of the world, the first question—this is the running national joke—the first question that any famous visitor gets asked is, ‘So what did you think of New Zealand? Do you like us?’ [Slim laughs]
TI WEST It worked out, I had been in New Zealand once before, but only for like two days. This time, I was there as I said for thirteen months and it was great. I mean, it was—we were there because of Covid, and at the time, it was like at the peak of Covid and there was no Covid in New Zealand, so you could safely make a movie there. And so that was great in its own right. But we just had an amazing experience and living in Wellington for a year was fantastic for me. And I had a really—you know, everything about the country was perfect for the movie, and was perfect for our time there and the crew was amazing. And so, you know, outside of maybe like not being able to get everything off Amazon in two days, they had everything else we could possibly need. [Slim & Gemma laugh] Or eBay for that matter. Sometimes we were doing some shopping for the movie being like, ‘How are we going to find it here in the midst of a pandemic?’ But other than that, I mean, it’s a really great place, I would encourage anyone to visit it.
GEMMA Wellington’s a really small town and given that he directed the first film that we’re going to talk about today, did you go around to Peter Jackson’s house and play with his dolls and look at his poster collection?
TI WEST I did not—
GEMMA Did you sign an NDA? [Gemma laughs]
TI WEST That would have been cool, but no. I did edit the films at Park Road, which is his facility and so he was working on [The Beatles: Get Back] at the time, so I’d see him in the hallways now and again. I met him once very briefly, but we were both like, you know, he was racing towards three movies again, and I was racing towards two movies, doing my best to keep up with the New Zealand tradition. [Gemma laughs] And we were pretty much locked in our rooms most of the time, so. But we were probably more or less the only two people working in the facility because there wasn’t really anything else going on there.
SLIM Well, some people have called your world of X, your [The Lord of the Rings], really, in comparison, you know, the three movies.
TI WEST Interesting. Well, I don’t know what to make of that. [Slim & Gemma laugh] But there’s certainly two of them. There will be three. So at least that similarity is there. But yeah, I mean, it became the running joke, of course, in New Zealand that when we sprung it on the crew, like, “We think we’re gonna make another movie back-to-back,” and they were like, “Ah, sweet as.” [Ti laughs] They were pretty ready for it. [Gemma laughs]
GEMMA I love that story. Before we started recording, you were telling us about how every New Zealander texts you “sweet as” and you’re like, ‘Where’s the other ‘s’?’
TI WEST Yeah. Or where’s the rest of the sentence, more specifically? We just kept thinking they were trying to say some larger thing and they just got cut off or something. And then eventually, we discovered that this is just the lingo.
SLIM I thought the same thing with Gemma and Matt at Letterboxd. I just let it ride for six months before I even bothered to Google what they were saying. I was like, ‘I’ll figure that out at some point later.’ But so we’ll drift into Pearl later in this discussion, it’s in theaters. I saw it yesterday, I went to see it. There was me and I saw 1pm showing of Pearl. But before we get into your faves and Pearl later, can you just give us a taste of what to expect, maybe visually, with MaXXXine, because the the teaser trailer for MaXXXine has come out, and it had this like awesome VHS-style ’80s vibe. Have you thought about what you want people to expect with the third movie, with Mia? And the visual vibes in Pearl were out of sight, but what did you have in mind that you can at least mention early for MaXXXine?
TI WEST The thing is, we made X and we kept Pearl a secret the whole time that we made it. And then we sort of dropped this little teaser for Pearl slash an announcement that it existed at South By for the premiere of X. And then we kept MaXXXine a secret for the whole time through Pearl and then dropped this little thing at Toronto [International Film Festival]. So I’m gonna just continue on with the saga of keeping a secret. [Gemma & Slim laugh] I think in 2022, or in this case perhaps in 2023, it’s very rare to get to where we’re not know a lot about a movie, and to not know everything that happens in this movie. And for me as a filmmaker and as just a film fan, I would be excited if I didn’t know, if there was some interesting trilogy of movies, and I didn’t know what to expect from them. So I’m going to be a bit cagey and probably say like, it’s going to be as starkly different from X as Pearl was, but it’s not going to be like Pearl.
SLIM Very political, we’ll allow it.
GEMMA Diplomatic.
TI WEST And the teaser, I mean, the teaser is in the ballpark for sure. I mean, the teaser’s not arbitrary. I mean, it’s not necessarily—the teaser has a little bit more like teaser aesthetic going into it, you know, I’m not going to shoot the movie on VHS or anything like that. But it’s about a different era of—a different type of filmmaking in a different type of era.
GEMMA It’s not going to be shot in rural New Zealand yet again, unlike Peter Jackson’s 1987 debut Bad Taste...
TI WEST It is less rural than Bad Taste. Yes. [Gemma laughs]
GEMMA So I’m excited to get into this. I’ve seen this movie so many times. I didn’t even rewatch it this week for this conversation. But it’s a rite of age in New Zealand, you know, it’s just what we watch on the weekends. ‘The population of a small town disappears and is replaced by aliens that chase human flesh for their intergalactic fast-food chain.’ When did you first see this film, Ti?
TI WEST Hard to know for sure. I saw it once when I was relatively young, probably in the early-’90s. So I was probably like twelve or thirteen, somewhere in there. And it was just a gross movie. And I only saw it because it had a middle finger on the box cover and it just seemed like it was daring me to rent it. And I didn’t think much of and other than it was gross and there was a puke scene that was really gross. But then when I started getting interested in filmmaking, which was maybe like four, three or four years later maybe, I was revisiting a lot of stuff and I was looking at movies very differently, because I was thinking about them as from the perspective of a filmmaker rather than the perspective of someone who just watched movies. And I think I’d probably rewatch maybe [The] Evil Dead or Evil Dead II and it was like, whoa, there’s a lot of really amazing craft in these movies that if you weren’t thinking about that were just these like, crazy, gross, horror movies. But if you were thinking about craft, you were like, ‘Wow, actually, this is very inventive of Sam Raimi’ and whatever. And so in doing that, I think I went back—or maybe Braindead (Dead Alive), was the beginning of me thinking about Peter Jackson in a more of a filmmaker perspective. And so I went back to Bad Taste then and I would say that the reason I put it on the list—you would think I put it on the list because I went to New Zealand and made movies and a person plays two characters, all these things that seem now to be very conveniently apropos to choose this movie. But it’s weirdly just a strangely organic situation because it was the first movie that made me think I could make movies, because when I watched Bad Taste from the perspective of a filmmaker, I realized that it was just some guy doing it. And he was playing the part himself and he was playing two parts himself, and those were his friends and this was clearly his hometown. And his hometown was as irrelevant to the world of filmmaking as mine was because Wellington, New Zealand meant absolutely nothing to me, just like Wilmington, Delaware meant absolutely nothing to anyone else for that matter. So it became apparent to me that like, ‘Oh, the camera’s just on a car, like I see how he’s making this.’ And it was the first time I could get a sense of like, you could just go and do it, you’d have to have the follow-through to do it. And you’d have to be, like, inspired and talented and all these things. But technically speaking, if you could get a bunch of people together and organize that, and commit, you could make a movie. And so that was really why that movie became so profound to me. And the fact that that really had that impact on me and then to many years later, be in New Zealand, making two movies in a row, where one character plays two characters and then being at the same post [facility], it was incredibly surreal and strange, because it wasn’t like I planned that and it wasn’t even as if, like, I was thinking about Bad Taste when making the movie, or it had nothing to do even why I was thinking about Mia playing two roles, like it was just completely not on my mind. And then it just became this really weird full-circle that like, here I am with a world on pause making two movies standing in the place where a movie that made me go like, ‘Ah, I could probably do this,’ was. I mean, it was very strange. And so it was profoundly unique situation to find yourself in.
GEMMA Fewer exploding sheep in your film... [Slim laughs]
TI WEST That is true. Yeah, there was a little—I mean, we did have some brains and some exploding heads. But yeah, not as many exploding sheeps or chainsaws going through people and not a big, you know, puke meal, but ah… [Ti & Slim laugh]
GEMMA Slim, I need to know because, you know, I said it’s a rite of age for New Zealanders, I think we all watch it when we turn thirteen or something. It’s sort of compulsory. But was this a first-time watch for you? Peter Jackson’s debut?
SLIM I had this logged on Letterboxd. This is the first time I like sat down to pay attention to watch it and it was more of an eye opening experience for me. The gore in this is so fun. And I agree, if I had seen this when I was younger, I would have had the same feeling, like, ‘I could do this. I can see Peter Jackson and his friends having fun, doing this on weekends. Like why am I not doing this?’ And I think I got those vibes maybe from the first time I saw [The] Evil Dead, that was maybe like, you know, my American version. But it’s so invigorating to see someone be able to do this decades ago. And I think it’s still fun! It’s still a hoot to watch today. It’s not like, there was no real point in this movie I was like, ‘Man, that’s really dated... Like, man, their budget really stunk there.’ Because when they’re doing the rocket launcher scenes, and you can pretty much see the string that it’s sitting on and going towards the building, that’s even more exciting to me watching it because I appreciate it more, I have that respect, like, ‘Oh my god, that’s a smart idea to do that shot.’ And like the scene where you see the alien upstairs with the light, you know, kind of getting closer to the light to almost trick the eye that it’s, they’re becoming bigger. It’s like I’m slapping my forehead having even more in enjoyment watching it because you can see how Peter was so inventive back then. And you almost wish that—let’s make more people watch this movie. [Slim laughs] So that you can see your creative dreams come true, pretty much.
TI WEST For as silly as the movie is, I mean, it’s truly like if you can get past that and look at like—it’s really kind of a, I don’t mean to be disrespectful to anyone else who worked on the movie, but in a way a one-man-show of like, insane ingenuity. And it’s solely the mark of someone who is super brilliant. Because, yes, they put the rocket on the string because that’s what they did in movies. But like, they did it. Like they did it by themselves in New Zealand and it works enough, you know what I mean? [Ti & Gemma laugh] You know, if you watch the making-of when it’s him going, “Well, I had to build these guns, so I found some metal then I put holes in them and I built the guns,” you’re like, ‘Well, that’s like a genius doing something,’ even though what they’re making is sort of absurd movie, the level of commitment and the level of ingenuity and craft and everything is really remarkable. And that’s I think what’s so interesting about the movie, it’s a really fun movie to watch and it’s funny and it’s gross and entertaining and all that, but there is something about kind of seeing the filmmaking behind the curtain and championing it and rooting for it that is really unique to this movie. And I would agree [The] Evil Dead has an element of that, but [The] Evil Dead is a sort of more nihilistic movie in it’s tone—Evil Dead II not so much. But there’s a fun to Bad Taste, that you’re like, you’re rooting for the low-budgetness of it, because even though it is low-budget, it’s better than what you could do. [Gemma & Slim laugh] And you can’t help but acknowledge that. But for me, it was like, you know, I think a lot of people—well speaking for myself—it’s like, the idea of becoming a filmmaker and entering the movie business was just a door that was closed. And it was a door that remained closed, and I didn’t even know how to get to the door. It was such a, ‘I don’t know, people in Hollywood do that. I don’t even know what that is.’ This was like a weird permission that like, ‘No, no, you can just make it outside of that.’ And that’s—which, you know, that speaks to same thing with like, let’s say in X, they’re making a porn movie instead of a horror movie and because porn and horror had this symbiotic outsider relationship, and I think for me, anything that was sort of made outside of Hollywood was appealing to me, because I just, I had no sense of how anyone would even get involved in something like that.
GEMMA Yeah, I just, I love that so much. I do think you’ve been slightly disrespectful to Peter Jackson’s mum, when you say, “You can sort of feel that one person made this.” [Slim & Gemma laugh] Because there’s, one of my favorite facts about the movie is, you know, we all know the story if we know Peter Jackson’s origin tale, is that it was made piecemeal on weekends, him and his mates, you know, going out to the hills. But his mum would send them off with sandwiches every weekend. And I’m just saying that because anyone who’s listening who’s a parent, or, you know, planning to be a parent, when your kid starts making weirdo stuff and blowing up sheep’s brains with their friends, just bring them sandwiches... Because next minute, they’re gonna be making multiplex trilogies and keeping you in the style to which, you know, you deserve having brought them up. So, yeah, I have that to say—
TI WEST She also loaned the oven—
GEMMA Yes!
TI WEST For a lot of homemade prosthetics, so no, for sure. A major, major influence on the film, no doubt.
GEMMA Yeah. I mean, it goes further. Also, I think that one of the things around the filmmaking that never really gets enough praise is the script itself, the dialogue itself, given that they were writing it as they went and sort of making up lines as they went. And cute little factoid is that for several years in New Zealand, I produced the weekly arts current affairs show that went out on our major television network. And each year, we would run a poll like, ‘What is the best New Zealand painting of all time?’ And the last year of the series we ran a poll on the most iconic line in a New Zealand movie, and there are many iconic lines—well, iconic to our tiny country—but the one that one was from Bad Taste, and it is the, one of the greatest lines in cinema, spoken by Peter Jackson... “I’m a Derek.”
[clip of Bad Taste plays]
DEREK I’m a Derek... and Derek’s don’t run.
TI WEST It is a great line. I figured that’s what the moment you were heading towards. I was like, you’re either gonna go into, I don’t know, “Bastards have landed,” or something or you’re gonna land on what I would assume—if you had not said that, I would have corrected you and said that that would be the best line of the movie. [Slim & Gemma laugh]
GEMMA We should move on, but not before remarking that October is of course, Hallowe’en, and October 31 is Hallowe’en and it’s also Sir Peter Jackson’s birthday, which is one of the greatest facts of all time. Happy birthday month, Sir Peter. Shall we move from one incredible blockbuster director to another? Steven Spielberg, 1981, the original Indiana Jones movie Raiders of the Lost Ark, with a script by George Lucas, Philip Kaufman and Lawrence Kasdan. This has over 8,000 fans on Letterboxd—many, many fans. It rates at a nicely high 4.2. It’s the most popular film of 1981, according to our stats, and the third-highest-rated for that year, and it introduced the world to a new adventure hero. How old were you? Where were you when—who took you to see it for the first time?
TI WEST So this one has kind of a very similar, I guess for lack of a better term, origin story for me as Bad Taste, but from a different side of the fence in a way. So I probably saw this before Bad Taste—I’m sure I did. I probably saw it when I was like, six or seven years old. And I had obviously seen movies before and I always liked movies. But this was the first movie that I was very obsessed with. This is the first movie that movies as a thing were like, really amazing to me. Like I had seen movies before, I loved them and I always wanted to watch movies. But when I saw this movie, it was like, ‘Oh, these things are great. Whatever this is, is great.’ And unlike Bad Taste, this was a movie that perplexed me in every possible way of how anyone—this movie, as far as I’m concerned, was just birthed into existence in its completed format. Like it wasn’t something that people made, it was just sort of like, the door opened, this movie came out for all to enjoy and that was that. And that’s how, in many ways, someone like a Spielberg or something seemed to me from afar, because it was like, every aspect of it was impenetrable to understand how it could exist. And that to me was such an amazing pedestal and obviously, it’s just a great movie in general, it’s a very entertaining movie. Based on what you just said about Letterboxd, people like the movie, not a controversial opinion that Raiders of the Lost Ark is popular. [Gemma laughs] But for me, it was sort of the pinnacle of like, ‘Wow, to do something like this. I wouldn’t even know how to do that, but that would be amazing.’ And it made me think that movies in general were amazing. And I think a big part of it is, yes, the story and the fun of the blockbuster aspect of the movie and Harrison Ford’s performance, but there’s a level of craft to the filmmaking—and it’s very particular to Steven Spielberg. I mean, if you watch a Peter Jackson film, you can tell it’s him by the way, he moves the camera and by the way he focuses on other things, or some things instead of others, Spielberg is the same way. And there’s a certain level of craft in this movie in particular, all the way down to the Paramount logo turning into the mountain in the beginning, that is such a filmmaker aware that he’s making a movie, and like manipulating that experience at the highest level. And the scope of the movie is incredible. You know, there’s probably no, arguably no better moment in cinema than when he shoots the swordsman. I mean, that’s such an eruption of a moment to have in the movie, which is like, in many ways breaks out of the movie, it’s an absurd moment. And it’s something that they came up with on the fly, because they were running out of time. But it’s like, I don’t know of anything that could land better in a movie than I’ve ever seen in my life, than when that moment happens. It’s the most perfect, like, ‘We’re going to stop this movie for a Three Stooges-type joke. And it’s going to totally work because he’s going to sell it and then we’re going to get right back to the movie you’re in,’ and no one’s gonna go, ‘Well, that took me out of it...’ You’re just going to cheer. And the ability to do that is something that is, I don’t know, very few people on Earth can do that. I don’t know that I can do that. That is so remarkable to me. And there’s so many moments like that in the movie and so many quotable moments in the movie, and that’s a testament to I think, just the overall craftsmanship of the movie flowing from one thing to another and being at peak-level enjoyment the whole time. And that’s, you know, there’s no shortage of other adventure movies that have been made and they’re just not as good.
SLIM Naughty AKA Juli Norwood left a review on Letterboxd: “You can’t swing a dead cat by the tail without hitting one iconic moment after another in this stunning classic!” And you talked about craft, have you watched the Light & Magic documentary on Disney+ about ILM yet?
TI WEST I haven’t, no.
SLIM Oh my god, Ti, you gotta check this out. They go through, they have so much archival footage of the team at ILM making these movies and they get into interviews with all of the historic people behind ILM. And they talk about how they shot this stuff. And it speaks to, it reminds me of Bad Taste, like what we were talking about with Bad Taste, about the ingenuity, so much recommend. But the tagline to this movie, I mean, is this the greatest tagline of all-time? “Indiana Jones, the new hero from the creators of Jaws and Star Wars?” [Gemma & Slim laugh]
TI WEST No, I can tell you what the greatest, the greatest tagline ever, hands down, is from the movie House II. [Gemma laughs] So there’s that, you know, it’s a relatively B-movie called House, which has a pretty good tagline. But House II: The Second Story is a perfect tagline. [Slim & Gemma laugh] It’s a reason enough to make the movie to have that tagline.
GEMMA Yeah, absolutely.
SLIM the deep-v that he wore in the first House movie, the lead actor in that movie? Oh my god. It was like a blouse. It was so deep. It was incredible.
GEMMA Well, I’m just going to derail things if I say what I’m gonna say, but I’m gonna say it anyway. You’re all talking about movie craft and that’s really nice and whatever—can I just read this review by ciara on Letterboxd—which I completely agree with. I mean, Slim and I have notes for this show, Ti, I don’t know if you know that, and we also get Jack, who works with us to provide a whole bunch of Jack’s Facts around, you know, where the movies stand and all of our ratings and rankings and he gives us all of these amazing reviews and lists to point out and then we write down notes and my notes just says, “No words just googly eyes and a dangling tongue and ‘take me’ written on my eyelids.” Ciara, I’m not alone: “I’ve never wanted to fuck anyone more than I want to fuck 1981 Harrison Ford and it’s literally all I’ve been thinking about for the entire two-hour duration of this film.” I mean, here’s the thing, so many adventure films change for me as I age and rewatch them, like E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial, I watch it now from the perspective of Elliott’s mum, but one thing that never changes and never will change is how I am just a horny tween whenever I watch the Indiana Jones movies.
TI WEST Dr. Jones is a really—I mean, the thing is Harrison Ford obviously was, this is post-Star Wars, and obviously he was a very popular person, but like, I can’t think of a more—you can’t put something out somebody else in that outfit with a whip and it will work. Nothing about Raiders of the Lost Ark should work. It should all be silly, and it should all be really corny and fall on its face and the jokes shouldn’t land but it’s truly like a movie star who’s like, ‘I got this.’ And I feel like I don’t know if it was on that movie, but there was some story, I think I heard, I could be completely wrong and attribute it incorrectly, but where Harrison Ford said something about like, one movie he was doing and was like, “Is this the kind of movie—” I think it was Indiana Jones, just like, “Is this the kind of movie where I always keep losing my hat?” And Spielberg was like, “Yeah,” and he’s like, “I got it.” It was like something like that, where he was just like, “I understand what this is now. I’m gonna do my thing.” But it’s an iconic character for a reason. But he is like—yeah, I mean, the blinking-eyelids scene is incredible, like that’s an incredible beat in a movie. I mean, and sure that’s a script thing more than a directing thing, probably, but those two things are working so well hand-in-hand. I mean, I’m sure you could argue that Spielberg has made better movies or people could like someone better, but I would say that the craft is—I mean, [Indiana Jones and the] Temple of Doom is my favorite, I will say, of the three.
GEMMA It’s mine too! I’ll always come back to [Indiana Jones and the] Temple of Doom, always.
TI WEST [Indiana Jones and the] Temple of Doom is remarkable, because there’s no other movie that’s like it. It stands on its own island, completely. It’s really incredible.
GEMMA And do we all agree that we just need to reignite the franchise with Ke Huy Quan, with Short Round, you know, donning their hat and going around. And I saw someone tweet today, I sent this tweet to Slim, you know, “And the job needs to be to go around to other countries that have stolen antiquities and steal them back.” But then I was like, ‘but then those countries would have had to store those antiquities behind, you know, many puzzles and doors and pits of doom.’ So I don’t know how that would work, but I’d love to see that.
TI WEST I would say one of the movies I’m most anticipating, and I’m anticipating it with sheer terror, is the next Indiana Jones movie.
SLIM Oh my god, yes. Yes!
TI WEST I think that he’s a good choice as a director, I think that Phoebe—I just don’t know, I don’t know how they’re going to do it. And it terrifies me to no end.
SLIM You saw that clip of Harrison like, crying after they showed footage?
TI WEST I did.
SLIM I mean, I started crying seeing Harrison cry after seeing the footage. [Gemma laughs]
TI WEST Yeah, you know, ah... I’d like to think it could be done, but we’ll just have to wait and see. But it terrifies me. In many ways, I have a... I root for them. But I do wish that in many ways, sometimes, three would have been enough. But forever Raiders of the Lost Ark will be the movie that sort of ignited my ion towards movies and it kind of always be on anytime someone asked me to make a list outside of the sheer enjoyment of the movie, it will always be the one that was like, ‘Ah, if only that could be something I do.’
GEMMA You’re so not alone. I mean, Letterboxd, there’s lists, Andrea has a list movies that got us into movies. Wesley, The Basics of Cinema Starter Pack. Josh Larsen writes: “Has any movie done a better job of introducing its major characters?” It’s just such, just an absolute banger classic, like the whole series. And I mean, [Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the] Crystal Skull, we don’t talk about it, I guess. But maybe, maybe I’ll go back to it.
SLIM I think it’s fine. I think [Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the] Crystal Skull is fine. I think the CGI cuts it back several notches in some scenes, but I’ve recently rewatched it and I had a warm heart for it, warm heart on Letterboxd for [Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the] Crystal Skull. [Gemma laughs] What more could you ask for? There needs to be more adventure movies, though, that’s my thing.
GEMMA Yeah, I agree.
SLIM It’s like a running theme in this podcast where I talk about Amblin and Amblin vibes, about how they made like all-ages horror, all-ages adventure. And it’s just so difficult for these kinds of movies to exist nowadays, I feel like. But I wish someone would take up the banner and maybe the new Indy will do it for us, we’ll see.
TI WEST Well, I think it’s a couple of things. One, again, going back to the craft of the making of Raiders [of the Lost Ark] is like, that is way above even today what most people can do. And that’s a credit—I mean, if you’ve watched West Side Story, the Spielberg version of it, whether or not you have any desire to see a remake of West Side Story, whether or not a West Side Story remake was necessary to be made. I don’t know how old he is, he’s in his 70s. The technical craft in the making of that is astounding, like it is astounding to the degree that I would argue that most people cannot do that, on Earth today. I’m sure there’s people that could probably give it a run for its money. But it’s a very, very, very small list because of how difficult it is to craft something to that specificity. And he had that, he has it now and he had it then. And I think people think that like, ‘Well, it was just a studio movie and you just make an adventure movie put a movie star in it.’ It’s like, no, no, no, no. It’s going to take way more than—I mean, think of how many Jaws rip-offs there are that aren’t Jaws. It’s a real skill-set that I think—I don’t want to say he doesn’t get credit for it, of course he gets credit, he’s the most famous filmmaker alive. But I think it’s sort of been taken for granted in a way and Raiders [of the Lost Ark] is a good example of a movie that to recreate something like that, the scope of that movie is enormous. I mean, they travel the whole world, and all these different locations and every one of them has some giant set piece, exciting element. And everything has—there’s so many good lines that every scene is memorable and could compete for the better one. You know, if you like the swordsman thing where he gets shot, then you could turn around and be like, well what about when it’s like, “Shoot them, shoot them both.” That’s an amazing moment. And then they shoot them and it’s like in the shadow on the walls, how you see it happen. And that’s all very traditional-style filmmaking, classical filmmaking, but put into this outrageous adventure story. And I think that’s really, really difficult to do. And it’s not something that can be just, you can’t just throw money at it to do it. You have to throw a real vision and ingenuity about it, as you were saying for the ILM thing, which I’ll have to now get the Disney+ subscription to watch that. [Gemma & Slim laugh] And I think it’s like, yeah, if you look at it from a filmmaker standpoint, it’s incredibly difficult to do that.
GEMMA I was just thinking about how much I love the Indiana Jones ride at Disneyland. It’s so good, it’s the best ride in the whole freakin’ place. And then I started thinking about whether there could be a Pearl ride that takes you around a lake and an alligator pops out at you like the shark does at Universal. [Gemma laughs]
TI WEST I’m all for this. I’m all for like when I get through this trilogy there being some sort of theme-park attraction for it. Why not? [Slim laughs]
GEMMA I mean, this is what’s gonna put Whanganui, New Zealand on the map, right? Is a Pearl theme park. It’s gonna be amazing. You get roast pork with maggots for lunch...
SLIM Oh my god.
GEMMA Ah, it’s gonna be so good. Wow. So congratulations, your second film, and your first film, both of your films are heading towards the top five of 2022 in our horror movies on Letterboxd.
TI WEST Oh, very cool.
GEMMA That’s pretty impressive. So congrats on that. I also saw Pearl just yesterday at the Alamo Drafthouse downtown Manhattan. Can we talk about maggots?
SLIM Gemma has this in her notes twice, I feel like, in our Pearl section. It says literally, “Can we talk about maggots?” at the top and also, “Can we talk about maggots?” at the bottom. [Gemma & Slim laugh] So something has resonated.
GEMMA I don’t know, I just haven’t been the same since I saw Bones with Snoop Dogg and had just start making a list on Letterboxd called and Maggots in Movies. [Slim & Gemma laugh]
TI WEST I’m sure [The] Lost Boys is on that, that’s the most famous maggots scene I can think of.
GEMMA It’s 100% on the list, along with A Bug’s Life, for different reasons, non-horror. Okay, but, we’re talking about quite a lot about the the art of cinema and the art of filmmaking. And what was great about X, apart from everything, was that it was specifically about this film crew. What’s wonderful about Pearl is that we get taken inside a projection booth and not only do we have the relationship between the projectionist and Pearl going on, but we also get to see projection-booth . So I wanted to ask you about that. And obviously, there’s gonna be more coming in MaXXXine, which you refuse to disclose to us. But really interesting and interested in how you, you sort of continue to show your fascination and appreciation for the filmmaking craft through these films.
TI WEST Well, that was really the reason to make X. I had spent five or six years away from making movies, and I was directing episodes of television, having a great time. And I was thinking like, ‘Well, maybe I should get back and make a movie.’ But I was trying to figure out why I would want to do that, because I was enjoying doing television. And making a movie is sort of like two years of trauma at best. And I hadn’t made a horror movie in almost probably ten years at that point, because I had made so many in a row, it just felt like I didn’t want to just repeat myself or just, you know, it’s such a ordeal to make a movie, that just to set up and do things you know how to do, just to do them is quite boring, and to derail your life for a significant amount of time to do that, doesn’t seem very appealing to me. And so I was just trying to think of what I would want to do. And I had been developing some TV series of my own and working on that. And then I just was like, you know, I felt like horror movies had gotten kind of soft, like modern horror movies. And I felt like maybe it was time to try to do something a little bit, you know, out there and a little bit gory, and lean into what I loved about horror movies. But more specifically, I wanted to—I love the craft of filmmaking. And that’s what made me think like, ‘Okay, if I’m going to come back to making a movie, I want to really put the craft on display.’ And one way of doing that outside of me just, you know, doing technically interesting things was to try to make a modern audience be charmed by the craft of filmmaking, which I think people don’t have the reverence for cinema that they once did, because it’s just been, we’re inundated with so many moving images that is not as special as it once was. And so I thought, ‘Well, okay, then I should make a movie about people making a movie.’ But I didn’t really necessarily want to make a movie about people making a horror movie or something like that. Because that just felt like a meta, too meta for what I was actually trying to do, which was trying to like, you know, show the craft of filmmaking rather than comment about like, how silly it is what, you know, I do or something like that. And that’s when I thought that, well, porn like horror were the sort of outside genres and they could be made independently. And I felt like the story of X was to show you what it’s like to make a movie and to take something that you could do without any of the permission of the system or of Hollywood and things like that, and you could create your own little business and your own little movie stars and you could distribute it and they’re on their way with this plan to change their lives and to follow their ambitions, and they’re going to use movies to do it. They’re going to use a maybe a type of movie most people aren’t expecting, but that’s what they’re doing. And it would show you that something that the final product is supposed to be erotic, the making-of it is not that. And maybe if you started to see what it was like with them making that movie, you would be thinking about some of the things I was doing in the overall movie of X, and maybe you’d have a little bit more appreciation for the craft, whether it be some of the camera work I’m doing, with editing that I’m doing, whether it’s doing all the performances, special effects, makeup, score, whatever it have you, just the art form that all these different department heads are bringing to the movie, you would think, ‘Oh, this is cool,’ because the end of the day I think movies are cool. And so, because of that, the camera, the characters, and the tone of the movie is influenced by that type of like bootstraps, independent filmmaking, like auteurish, Americana, ’70s exploitation filmmaking. But none of that has anything to do with Pearl and her character. And so with Pearl, to turn this into a prequel, but more importantly, a trilogy. The other movies had to be as influenced by cinema as X was, but this type of cinema made no sense. So for me, Pearl, who is someone who has these hopes and dreams and ambitions and is lusting after the glitz and glamor of Hollywood, she was just more affected by a different kind of cinema. And it wasn’t a making a movie kind of thing, and it wasn’t, ‘We’re going to do it ourselves and become stars,’ it was more like, ‘I will be accepted and get a life that’s better than the one that I have, that I’m dreaming of.’ And that to me, when I picture that in my head, I picture this sort of more of a golden age of Hollywood in the sort of, the glamor of showbiz. And the lure that in theory it represents and could present for somebody. So that’s kind of the approach to that. And by doing so, it was more of an observer rather than a filmmaker. And so going into the projection booth and seeing behind the scenes and seeing how it works, and seeing the sort of magic of that, was the cinematic influence, I guess, for lack of a better way to put it on Pearl. And so in MaXXXine, it’s a different thing, but it is also affected by cinema.
SLIM I thought Ti was about to drop some nugget of information about MaXXXine and I was like, “Gotcha! Gotcha!” [Gemma laughs]
TI WEST I’ve gotten good at keeping secrets at this point.
GEMMA And then the line goes dead. And it’s like, ‘Oh, damn.’ I have to tell you one crazy thing. I made a short film based on a family story about fifteen years ago, and it has a scene in a projection booth in which a projectionist splices out a frame of film, for a mother. And when I was watching that scene in your film, I just say, ‘Ah, this is so beautiful! I love these moments.’ And it was also a wartime, it was World War II. Also, you know, the film was made in Wellington. So I feel like—oh and also the donkey in our film was trained by the same animal trainers who trained your Pearl’s animals.
SLIM My god. I just got chills.
TI WEST We’re very linked. The film was part of a bigger scene, actually, because there’s quite a lot of Pearl that is not in the movie. There’s like a day and a half of story that ended up getting cut out. And so what actually happened—
GEMMA Director’s cut... director’s cut...
TI WEST Nah, it’s cut out for a reason. I mean, someday there’ll be a way of seeing it, but extended versions are never better. [Gemma & Slim laugh] But yeah, there’s a reason you take them out. It just works better. But you do miss some of the stuff. And for instance, the film blows out of her pocket, and she goes looking for it in the corn. But in X, in the script, and what we actually shot, is she finds it, and she finds it at the base of the scarecrow.
GEMMA Ahhh...
TI WEST Then when she goes home later when she’s in her room, she’s daydreaming about it and she’s like looking at it and she’s using a candle and she holds it up in front of the candle and the candle projects the light on the ceiling, and she’s watching that light and then she gets it too close to the flame and it goes up in flames, and things like that…
GEMMA Ahhh!
TI WEST …and there was more to that film and the projectionist story than is in the movie. And it’s only not in there just because, once you kind of got it, when you did more of it, you were kind of like, ‘Yeah, no, but I already know this,’ and just the momentum, you did feel it kind of like stall—you wanted her just to get to the dancing. It’s like that’s what you wanted to get to. But yeah, there’s quite a bit. I’d say like twelve minutes or something that I did, was just a wholesale lift out of the movie, which is one of the last things—
GEMMA People are listening right now going, ‘Gotta get my hands on that footage.’ [Gemma laughs]
TI WEST There’s some great scenes in there for sure.
GEMMA Getting hands of footage.
SLIM A24 boxset release of Pearl—watch at your own risk. [Gemma laughs]
GEMMA I just want to explain that our film was based on a family story where my great grandmother was watching a wartime newsreel and saw her own son, my great uncle Jim—not on a donkey, actually on a camel, but Hero Animals didn’t have a camel they could train so we made a donkey in the film. And the projectionist cut out a frame of film for her. So I just—I don’t know, it’s just like, people don’t—it’s not the same as, what do we do these days? “Here’s a screenshot, darling. I love you.” [Gemma & Slim laugh]
SLIM I love the projectionist room in the movie. I wanted to live there. He had that bed back there and I was like, ‘Damn, man, you got a great gig!’
GEMMA Yeah, but how about when he’s just like, “Oh, do you want to see something else?” and shows her porn and then realizes he’s in a little bit too deep.
SLIM Bohemian.
GEMMA Oh my god.
SLIM Bohemian. He’s very bohemian. I love too that the visuals of the movie, it almost felt like I was in that projection room. You know, the colors were popping. And some of my friends were asking me what I thought of Pearl, you know, because my group of friends, I’m lucky enough that they’re all on Letterboxd so I can see movie reviews come in Thursdays. And it was awesome to kind of just like go in pretty much alone own in the theater and have this—I had a great experience seeing Pearl in theater. All my friends were talking about Mia Goth. Mia Goth is a vision, absolute vision in these movies. The monologue, everyone was talking about, that’s getting a lot of the kind of buzz and it’s 100% true. There’s another scene at the credits, that I do want to point out. That was my favorite scene in the whole movie. I love that you kept that in. I won’t say too much about it for people that haven’t seen Pearl. But man, five-star scene at the end the movie. [Gemma & Slim laugh] I love that thing to death. So fun.
TI WEST That’s funny, because I mean, that’s definitely become probably the most enjoyed part of the movie, and I would share in that. But like the Cairo-swordsman situation, the plan for that was to have her smile and then I was going to do a freeze-frame because the movie opens with a freeze-frame of her feeding that goose to the alligator and it says ‘Pearl’ and I was gonna freeze-frame with the end. And just randomly when we were about to shoot it, I was like, “Hey, I have this weird idea. What if like, we just try to do an organic freeze-frame, because I can stop it whenever I want and freeze-frame whatever. But I want to look for the right time of your smile that is both happy and sad at the same time. And I don’t know if that’s going to be five seconds in, I don’t know.” So I was like, “Just keep holding it.” And she was like, “Okay.” And so we did that and I just didn’t say cut for like three minutes, and that’s what happened. And then I was like, “Cut. That’s the end credits.” And then we only did it that one time.
GEMMA Wooow.
TI WEST And that was just a random idea that happened where I was like, ‘because I can freeze frame whenever, I don’t know if it should be two seconds, five seconds, twenty seconds. Let’s go.’ And I didn’t think I would go that long, but I was just enthralled watching it. And I was like, I just want to know what will happen next. And then I just went on that ride, you know, with her, just like the audience does. And again, one time, and that was that.
SLIM It’s like a horror-movie version of the ending of Police Squad! episodes with Leslie Nielsen. [Gemma & Ti & Slim laugh]
GEMMA That’s so good. I am so fascinated to hear that, and I’d love to—I know we’ve got two more big, big films to talk about. But I sort of want to hear more about the way you work with your actors and actresses. And maybe the way into the question is, I love that you’ve brought Tandi Wright who plays Pearl’s mother to the attention of the world because she is one of New Zealand’s best. And her monologue also should just be drama-school audition fodder for the rest of forever. She’s also one of the best intimacy coordinators in the industry in New Zealand. And, you know, there’s there’s some of that going on with Pearl needing to bathe her father and yeah, just sort of a general amorphous question about how you create safe space in films that feature death and sex.
TI WEST Well, I think especially with something—well Tandi was our intimacy coordinator on X, that’s how I met her. And we just spent a whole bunch of time was Tandi because she was there all the time on X, and we just loved Tandi. And Pearl came around, I was like, “Tandi, you should audition for this.” And she was like, “Oh no.” And I was like, “Well, why not?” I was like, “Worst case, you don’t end up in the movie. And we have a five-minute awkward conversation, and we get back to work. Best case, you end up in the movie, and then we’re making another movie together.” And she was like, “Oh, I don’t know. I’ll think about it.” And then on one of the weekends, maybe that weekend or the weekend after, I got a link and the link was Owen Campbell, who plays RJ, filmed it and Martin Henderson who plays Wayne, he read opposite her and she did that whole monologue at the kitchen table. And she was completely off-book and just nailed it. And it was like, whoa. And then on that Monday, I was like, “Tandi, you’re in the movie.” And so it was a really—and Tandi is amazing and she’s amazing in the movie, but the story of it was literally, I was around her every day as an intimacy coordinator and just liked her so much and thought, ‘She’s also an actor, she could do this, and let’s see what happens.’ And so it’s really satisfying, because I like found the perfect person for the role. But I also, it was a really satisfying story to just be like, “Hey, let’s do this together, because we’re already in it.” But she’s great at both roles. And I think on X, a big part of it too, for a movie that had a lot of sex and violence and things like that, it wasn’t really a mean-spirited or nihilistic movie, it was a fun movie. And I think everybody that, you know, the first question I asked everybody when talking to them, whether it be in the movie or work on the movie is, “Why the hell would you ever want to be in this movie?” And you know, people’s answers were really all over the map and were interesting. And I tried to really compile the right group of people who would be great in the movie, but also kind of were like, down for what we were doing, you know? And so there was never a situation that anyone would feel like something unexpected was—everyone felt like, ‘Yeah, we all know what we’re doing here. And we all get along, and it’s all fine.’ And the spirit of the movie was like, fun and not like, you know, dark or something. It wasn’t like these characters, their lives had gone astray and they’ve ended up in this scenario where they have to do this. And because of that, I think just the overall atmosphere, I try to keep a light atmosphere on set as well. So it’s just sort of like, you know, everybody’s happy to be there. I mean, for me, I don’t know if important is the right word, but it’s like, you want to make a good movie, but you also want people to look back on the experience of making the movie fondly. And be like, ‘That was one of the best that I had.’ And I think, I’d like to think that people on X and Pearl will look back—it is a strange time in life ’cause of Covid—but just to say like, ‘That was really great, you know, going off and making those two movies.’
GEMMA Do you think the cast of Two-Lane Blacktop had a great time traveling across 1971 America? [Slim & Gemma laugh]
TI WEST It’s hard to know what they’re thinking in the movie, which is kind of the sort of enigma of that movie is that it’s—I mean, part of the reason that I picked that is that it’s probably, most likely people will think [The] Texas Chain Saw [Massacre] was probably the biggest influence, say on X, and oddly enough, it had very little influence, aside from just the obvious, they’re in a van and they go to a farm kind of thing in Texas. But I really wasn’t thinking about that movie that much because totally, it’s so different. But Two-Lane Blacktop, I think is one of the—I think it might be a perfect film. I think it’s one of the best examples of what an independent film in an era of like Americana-auteurish filmmaking could be, because it, there’s nothing else quite like it. And it’s such a movie that was made, like on-the-go. And I suppose the movie exists as a metaphor and things like this. And that’s all, we can talk about that in a different conversation. But I’m not—like it’s hard to articulate what it is that’s great about Two-Lane Blacktop, which I think is sort of the magic of it, is that it’s an experience. And it’s sort of the inverse of Easy Rider in a way, which was also an amazing movie of a similar time, that just does the opposite of it. And there’s something about this sort of existential malaise of the counterculture kind of not living up to anything exciting, that’s just really special about the movie. And from a color-palette and vibe standpoint, it was probably the most influential of trying to set what I wanted X to feel like as far as—I mean, X is certainly the characters are more influenced by louder characters, more like Smokey and the Bandit more than Two-Lane Blacktop. But there’s something about the way America is photographed in that movie that feels so perfect of an era that it’s hard to define why. And that was something that we, even down to the gas station, were really looking at. Like we had a photo of the Two-Lane Blacktop gas station on the wall, and it influenced a lot of what the gas station in X looked like. And their performances in that are definitely subdued and you don’t know what they’re going on. And mostly they’re not talking and Laurie Bird is this really kind of magical, unprofessional actor in this movie, that’s just so watchable. And it just feels like aligned with the time and aligned with the kind of filmmaking that is like, there was one moment where this movie can be made and exist and it will never happen again. And that’s what it feels like really alive when you watch that movie. I mean, and it’s also the kind of movie that people either deeply love or find to be the most boring movie of all time. Like it’s polarizing in such a clear-line kind of way, which I think is always interesting for anything like that I think transcends being a movie and kind of falls into the art category a little bit more.
GEMMA I was gonna say, Slim, you’re an American boy with a car you love. What side did you fall on with love for Two-Lane Blacktop?
SLIM I loved this movie. I had actually never even heard this movie until it was in your four faves. And there was one review that mentioned, like quote, ‘wandering existence’. “A wandering existence might seem alluring, when in reality, the odds are against you. But in Two-Lane Blacktop, it appears to be the last fantasy left in a jaded America.” And this really reminds me that Letterboxd list that gets grief but is really true about like, ‘no plot, just vibes’. And this has like, immaculate vibes. You’re following around these two in a 1955 Chevy Bel-Air coupe. They race for money betting with their competitors. Along the way they unintentionally attract a well-to-do drifter driving a new GTO. This older man looking for attention antagonizes their efforts. It’s such a strange vibe, you’re right, you’re you’re just following this crew in a very slow, methodical, lazy pace, and I was sucked in the whole time. You only really, the only unravel pieces about their personality. But like, GTO, what a character. I was so infatuated with Warren Oates in this movie.
TI WEST Yeah, Warren Oates is amazing.
SLIM James Taylor stars in this movie which is bonkers in and of its own right, but Warren, my god, what an amazing character on film to just pick him apart in the course of this entire movie.
TI WEST Yeah, he certainly emits the most, you know, between James Taylor and Dennis Wilson. But there’s something about the movie as well, that feels like, you know, X was a movie where people were from a place where despite their ambition, there was no road pathway out, and then this sort of porn filmmaking idea became like, ‘Well, maybe this could be our way to a life we want.’ And there’s something about Two-Lane Blacktop that is kind of like the anti-ambition of that era is now just landing in a place, like, loneliness and sort of shoulder-shrugging, and there’s something really weirdly existential about that, that comes out of this movie that I think is really compelling. And I don’t know another movie that does it as well. Because they’re not blasting the songs of the day and being like, “Fuck the man, like, we don’t care.” It’s not that, even though they’re of that generation, and they’re the kind of people that in theory would be doing that. They’re almost like the real-life people who this is what happens versus the movie-people who then get involved in some big situation. No, they just go from town to town, and they make a couple hundred bucks, and they get to the next race. And they’re just—it’s like the opposite of [The] Cannonball Run, you know? It’s sort of like, this is what it would really be like doing it. [Gemma & Slim laugh] And there’s something about that of just like, existing in this sort of American landscape in that time that feels just so perfect.
SLIM You’d almost expect this to have a kind of loud, Vietnam War-era soundtrack, you know? Like, “Oh, here comes this song, here comes that song.” But it’s pretty muted. You know, you’re just along for the ride, and you’re feeling what they’re feeling. I mean, how bonkers is it, them talking about how, “We might need to pick up some work just to afford the next part and then before we go to the next town.” Like oh my god, this life...
TI WEST Yeah, like what they’re after is completely not satisfying or exciting like it normally would be in a movie. Like the Vietnam soundtrack version, where they’re racing in exciting sequences and winning big money, is a movie that makes sense. This movie is like an experience and that’s what I think is so, it’s so unlikely that someone would make a movie like this. And I think that’s what makes it so special, is to see the more real-life version of a movie-type story. And I think it’s very rare that you get that. And also this movie, when I first saw it, I think I was like, probably, maybe around—it was when I first moved to New York, so I was probably eighteen or so. And this movie was out of print for a very long time, and so it was a very difficult—it was one of those like back when there used to be the kind of white whale of movies of like, you can’t find some. This was one of those ones that was always like, if you get a chance to see it, it’s really special. And every once in awhile, it would play in the theater, I feel like I probably saw it at the MoMA or something. But yeah, it’s just a really special time capsule. A great example of a movie that was made independently, like they just went out and drove around and made this movie. It’s a very made-as-you-go kind of movie and it wasn’t improvised, there was a script, but they didn’t, they kind of worked day by day on the pages of the script. And that’s what I think also gives it this sort of like lackadaisical charm to it, is that it wasn’t scheduled in such a way that it was a professional production. It was more like, “Okay, we’re driving from here to here today, and we’re filming these scenes today.” And they didn’t know that yesterday, and there’s something that was just interesting that Monte Hellman was up to then.
GEMMA Laurie Bird, Marilyn Burns in The Texas Chain Saw Massacre—I want to be a ’70s indie actress. Is Marilyn Burns’s performance in [The] Texas Chain Saw [Massacre] just one of the best of all-time. That last twenty minutes, I’m exhausted every time. My god.
TI WEST Yeah, I mean, the thing about [The] Texas Chain Saw [Massacre] is that it feels like a one-of-a-kind movie. And there’s an aggression in that movie that leaps off the screen that no other movie has even come close to doing. And there are plenty of other demented and dark and disturbing nihilistic movies that have been made with horrific performances, but the rawness and the like, just meanness of that movie is to this day still really can’t be rivaled. And so in many ways, you know, it came up a lot with X, because people in a van, in the ’70s in Texas go to a farm, and I knew that and I thought like, ‘Okay, let him think that and then the movie will be something very different and that will be a good way to subvert their expectations.’ And part of the reason why I was always like, the movie has less in common with [The] Texas Chain Saw [Massacre] than people gave it credit for, is like, the tones of the movie couldn’t be more different and the tones are what makes the movie. I mean, the sort of aggressiveness to [The] Texas Chain Saw [Massacre] and her just sheer terror for 30 minutes of that movie is unrivaled by anything else. And that’s what makes it such a classic that it is. It’s like at one point, when you see that movie, maybe when you first see it, you think it’s just kind of like a disgusting horror movie, or it’s this sort of grindhouse kind of thing, or this low-budget kind of monstrous serial-killer thing. But as you sit with the movie, and as you become familiar with the movie, and you think about again, going back to craft, like how would you even make a movie like this? It’s not obvious how you would do that. It’s not clear how you would take someone to that place and to hold it consistently the whole time. And it’s just a sheer dedication to, I don’t know, terror, for lack of a better word. And that’s I think why that movie is so spectacular. And it feels like an accident film. It feels real. And it feels so random and dangerous in a real-life way.
SLIM An accident film. I love that phrasing. Gemma, had you seen this before?
GEMMA No, it was the first time watch. And you say it’s aggressive but I would also say every shot is so unbelievably beautiful. And I was like, I was almost distracted by how beautiful this film is, which is such an outrageous thing to say about [The Texas Chain Saw Massacre]. Everyone goes on about the color red on film, how it pops. The greens in this is so vivid. Oh my gosh.
SLIM Two movies this episode with hitchhiking and I cannot imagine hitchhiking ever in my life. [Slim & Gemma laugh] It’s such a different time capsule where hitchhiking—I mean, Two-Lane Blacktop has hitchhiking out the wazoo in that movie, and it’s totally normal, copacetic. I have so much fun watching [The] Texas Chain Saw [Massacre]. My favorite scene, I’ve written in two, I think, Letterboxd reviews is when she gets overpowered by that push broom, that bristle broom. She can’t eat him with that broom. It cracks me up. But I think I’d seen the remake first before I had ever seen this version. Who was the lead in the other [The] Texas Chainsaw [Massacre]?
TI WEST Was it Jessica Biel?
SLIM Jessica Biel, yeah, I think I’d seen that in theaters. And I think a couple years ago, I had watched this for the first time it was like, ‘Oh, I don’t get it.’ But then as I sat down and watched it, I was like, ‘Man, this would have been so mind-blowing if I had seen this as a kid.’ I probably would have been freaked out.
TI WEST One thing is, I have friends with [The] Texas Chain Saw [Massacre]—and it’s interesting that both of you have not seen this, because that’s fascinating to me that there could be people left that distill that experience. But I had friends, probably still have those friends, that are like, ‘Oh, I can’t watch that. I can’t handle it.” And I was like, “But you don’t even know what’s in it.” And I was like, “You really don’t see that much.”
GEMMA No, you don’t.
TI WEST But it infers a lot and the spirit of the movie is so intense. But, you know, for instance, I think what people get most freaked out about is like, I don’t want to see someone get put on a meat-hook. And it’s like, well, you don’t really see that. I mean, it happens, but it doesn’t happen like you think you’re going to see all these horrible, disgusting bloody shots, it’s not a very bloody movie. But the aggressive nature at which it goes down—I mean perhaps one of the best kills of all time is when he gets hit with a hammer in the beginning. I mean, there’s something so confronting about that, that you realize, like, ‘Oh, we’re in deep shade in this movie.’ And that’s what’s so special about the movie.
GEMMA And one of the funniest moments of all time was when they’re trying to get the old man of the creepy family to help. Oh my god, this film is also so much funnier than anyone gives it credit for. And I think one of the reasons, that’s exactly the reason I hadn’t watched it yet was, ‘Eh, I don’t need to put myself through that,’ but one of the reasons I love doing this show with Slim and the team here is because it gives us an excuse to watch it when people like you recommend it. And I just, you know, in of one of the best kills of all time, can I just before—we know you have to go—but I really want to compliment you on some of the incredible camera moves that you’ve made in Pearl and specifically, the projectionist taking the pitchfork moment—sorry, spoilers. But that entire camera move and then the reveal and then the second reveal. I just love it. It’s so beautifully set up. It’s as gorgeous to look at as [The] Texas Chain Saw Massacre and it’s funny and it pays off.
TI WEST Well that’s perhaps a collection of Bad Taste, Raiders of the Lost Ark, Two-Lane Blacktop and [The] Texas Chain Saw [Massacre] all subconsciously coming together and trying to, you know, make some craft of my own.
[The Letterboxd Show theme music Vampiros Dancoteque by Moniker fades in, plays alone, fades down]
SLIM Our guest today was Ti West. Cinemonster and it’s never too late to dive in. The link for more information along with all the links for this episode are in the episode notes.
GEMMA Pretty exciting, Hooptober is up to a year nine.
SLIM Oh my god.
GEMMA Nine long years of horror-season watching, it’s amazing. And be sure to also listen to the Weekend Watchlist, our other weekly podcast where Mitchell, Slim and Mia explore the latest releases in cinemas and on streaming that drops every Thursday. And in a small, very minor miracle they even let me on for 90 seconds in the latest episode. [Slim laughs] Don’t know how that happened.
SLIM Legal forced my hand. [Gemma laughs] Legal was always behind me during the entire recording of Weekend Watchlist and they were tapping their fancy penny loafers behind me.
GEMMA Big hand on your shoulder from behind. Thanks to our crew: Jack for the facts, Brian Formo for booking and looking after our guests, Sophie Shin for the episode transcript, Samm for the art, Moniker for the theme music and Slim for keeping my 90 seconds in Weekend Watchlist this week. You can always drop us a line at . We love getting your letters. The Letterboxd Show is a Tapedeck production. And Slim, you Americans, you’re all the same. Always over-dressing for the wrong occasions...
[clip of Two-Lane Blacktop plays]
Nice set of wheels you have here. How far are you going?
New York City... we’re on a ten-day leave.
Well yeah, you’re in luck. I can take you all the way.
[Tapedeck bumper plays] This is a Tapedeck podcast.