‘Mia deserved an Oscar for Pearl’: Ti West on making his horror trifecta with Mia Goth
Share:
The genre auteur made his return to horror with the retro slasher ‘X’. Now, he’s earning some of the best reviews of his career with its prequel ‘Pearl’. West speaks to Annabel Nugent about the Oscars snub, Mia Goth, and the so-called state of cinema.
![[Mia Goth reprises her role as Pearl in ‘Pearl’]](https://static.independent.co.uk/2023/03/22/11/PEARL%201.jpg)
Last year, Ti West was granted admission to an exclusive club whose members include Alfred Hitchcock, Ingmar Bergman, and Spike Lee. Like them, West can now say he has released two films in a single year. His Seventies-set slasher X and its lurid prequel Pearl were shot back-to-back and released within six months of one other in the US. The latter is now finally hitting UK cinemas, which has put West on an unusually long conveyor belt of press, giving interviews for a film he believed to be done and dusted months ago – not ideal for a director who prefers writing in short bursts. “I find writing to be unpleasant, so the faster I can get it done, the better,” winces West over Zoom from Los Angeles. Pearl was written during a two-week hotel quarantine in New Zealand.
![[Jocelin Donahue as Samantha in ‘The House of the Devil’]](https://static.independent.co.uk/2023/03/22/19/shutterstock_editorial_2378427c.jpg)
If the film was made in a rush, it doesn’t show. Unlike X, a terrifically bloody pastiche of Seventies grindhouse about an amateur porn star (Mia Goth) and her crew who are hunted down by murderous geriatric farmers, Pearl takes its cues from Douglas Sirk melodramas and Disney movies. West’s murderous plot, about a freckly farmer’s daughter (Goth) with big dreams and homicidal tendencies, unravels patiently, and in sumptuously saturated colours – the antithesis of the sterile-looking office room he’s speaking from now. The double whammy of Pearl and X has earned West – a genre auteur known for soliciting shivers in The House of the Devil (2009) and The Sacrament (2013) – some of the best reviews of his career. No mean feat given that he hadn’t made a horror movie in nine years. “Generally pretty happy” is how West feels about Pearl’s critical reception. His mind is elsewhere, though, namely on MaXXXine, the trilogy’s final instalment, on which he is currently working. “Now, I’m trying to stick the landing.”.
