Ti West Talks ‘X’ And His Return To Horror Being A Crash Course In Filmmaking

Director Ti West’s return to horror is a triumph. Almost a decade after the visionary filmmaker’s last entry in the genre, X is perhaps his finest work to date.

Set in the 70s, it’s about a group of people who head to a remote location in rural Texas to make an adult movie. However, when the elderly owners of the farm where they are filming find out what is going on, bloody chaos kicks off.

The indie boasts an eclectic ensemble cast which includes Mia Goth, Jenna Ortega, Brittany Snow, Kid Cudi, and Martin Henderson. A creatively rejuvenated West walked me through the journey that led him back to horror and why X is like a crash course in filmmaking for the audience.

Simon Thompson: I always look forward to your work because I never quite know what I will get other than quality. X far exceeded any expectations that I had. X is your first film in six years and your first horror movie in almost a decade. What took so long, and where did X appear on that timeline?

Ti West: I’d made a lot of horror movies in a row, and I had a great time doing so. Making a movie is a two-year and somewhat traumatic experience, so you have to really want to do it. I didn’t want to repeat myself because then you’re spending two years going, ‘I know how to do this thing when someone pops out. I know how to do it technically, and it just feels boring to do it.’ I wanted to take a break from horror movies because I felt like I didn’t have anything new to offer, so someone like yourself would go see a movie, and you would know what to expect. That would be pretty boring, so I took a break from that. I had made In a Valley of Violence, a western, and after I made that, I got a few calls to come to television, just directing. With a movie, you have to come up with an idea, then you have to write it and find the money, then it falls through, and you have to fix that, then you have to make the movie, and it’s two years of trauma. TV is like, ‘Can you be on a plane on Monday?’ That’s the whole process. Production does not intimidate me because I had made all these movies myself for so long and done everything myself, including writing, directing, editing, and producing. So, dropping into TV, even though I had no experience, I was like, ‘I can make your days, and I can shoot twice as much as many people.’

Thompson: So you took one invaluable set of skills and learned a whole new set too?

West: Absolutely. I had this good run of doing 17 episodes in a couple of years and had a great time, and I think I got to be a better filmmaker. Because in TV, my goal is to try to help them make the show they want to make rather than make it my own. You get to do your own thing there, but I look at it like, ‘How can I help?’ Technically I had something new to offer a movie, and I would know how to bring a lot to a small film that I hadn’t done previously. I started to feel like horror movies were a little soft. Because I have a great reverence for the craft of cinema, I wanted to make a movie that was cinema and craft-focused. I wanted to make a movie about people making a movie to let people who are ignorant to the process in on it a little bit, hopefully, in a charming way. I also wanted to make them hip to what it’s like to make a movie so that they would maybe be aware of the things I was doing in the film, not in a meta way, but a crash course educational way so you could kind of have an appreciation for some of the craft I was trying to bring to X. That craft extended to not just the directing, but to what I wanted to do with the music and the production design, the costume design, with the performance, so I wanted to do something that got a bunch of people together to ambitiously make a craft-focused genre movie.

Thompson: How did it feel to return to horror having felt like you were creatively spent in that genre? So much has changed in the last few years, from horror films in Hollywood to streaming and theatrical.

West: I didn’t think about it too much. I agree with what you’re saying, but when you’re making a movie, you’re like, ‘I could think about that but with all the problems I have, let’s not add that to the pile.’ It had been long enough that I had an idea that felt fresh to me. There are plenty of examples that would contradict what I just said, but on the whole, my general feeling every time a new horror movie came out was like, ‘Okay.’ It felt like time to try to make a slasher movie, which I’d never done before, and to try to take something like the historically low brow sex and violence exploitation genre then try to do something a bit crafty with it. As far as the landscape changes, the most significant landscape change is that when I was young watching horror movies, they were one step above porn. Now are made mainly, but not exclusively, by corporations in a very big, safe way and a very big, economic driven model. I’m not against that, but it’s a difference from the video store with weird, VHS horror movies to now where horror movies are often the number one movie in America. That’s just a big difference over 20 or 30 years. Horror used to be like, ‘Oh, you’re into that? That’s weird,’ and now it’s like, ‘Of course. Everyone’s going to see horror movies every weekend.’

Thompson: It’s refreshing to hear you talk honestly about the genre you love. Some will unquestionably and blindly support the things they love.

West: Things change and go in waves. If there’s a moment that I’m not that interested, someone else will be very interested, and we could switch places in five or ten years. I don’t know that the drive coming out of the industry is to do what you described, but I wish it were. I think the drive is generally at what will hit the biggest, and that’s fair enough because that is an industry, and what you are trying to do is keep the industry going, so it does make sense. You can only be so subversive until you’re out of business. There are plenty of like really amazing filmmakers now that are still making really interesting stuff, but for me as someone who’s a cinephile kind of person, when a movie comes out that I feel like I know how they did it, I may like it but when a movie comes out that I’m like, ‘Whoa! How do they do that?’ then that inspires me. There are fewer of those than there used to be.

Thompson: You talk about horror movies being number one at the box office, and X has Jenna Ortega, who was in Scream earlier this year. Did you even know she had a key role in what has turned out to be one of the year’s top-grossing movies?

West: It’s pure coincidence that she’s in both. She had auditioned, and we had a Zoom meeting after that, and I thought she was great. I know the guys who made Scream because we did V/H/S together, so I texted them and said, ‘Hey, is Jenna in your movie?’ I think she Zoomed me while they were shooting, but I didn’t know I didn’t even know what they were doing. They raved about her. I had already pretty much made the decision anyway, but that sealed the deal without hesitation. I didn’t know anything about who she played in Scream, but she implied to me that X would be a different kind of role for her, not specifically to Scream but just in general, and that was really exciting. For me, because the characters in the movie are sort of ambitiously trying to do something, I was interested in everyone in the cast, whether it was on purpose or coincidentally, were challenging themselves and doing something a little different or outside of the box compared to what they were used to. That felt aligned with the characters, and what Jenna said via Zoom without me saying anything was something I found to be charming and inspiring.

Thompson: You set X on a piece of land near a small town, and it’s about a movie coming to a small town in Texas. We know how the locals in the film react, but how did the real locals react to having you in their midst?

West: And then you add the all the weirdness of Covid, so it was just an odd soup of the thing. The making of the movie was part of the charm of even the crew on the film. We were making a movie about making a movie, and we’re making a movie about why movies are fun, so I think there was a really good spirit to it. The people in the town were either mildly amused, didn’t care, or didn’t even know we were there. Once you’re on that plot of land, people were like, ‘Oh, I heard there’s some movie shooting here.’ We were not up in everyone’s business other than the people that live there. There were two sisters who were probably in their late 80s and lived on the farm, who were very amused by us and what we were doing. We had a little interaction with Joan and Spin every day, which was always pretty fun. Because they were working farmers, they thought what we were doing was silly, but by the end, they were like, ‘Actually, that might be real work after all.’ We had a great experience. It was weird because the whole world was locked down, but we went to New Zealand, which allowed us to make the movie in a safe environment and without Covid. X could not have been made with social distancing. We needed to make this movie in the traditional sense. To make this through a series of protocols that would keep people apart would have just been too complex for a film that is very much a close contact movie. We had this ability to do that.

Thompson: There is some secrecy about a particular casting aspect of X. I’m guessing you want that to stay a secret as long as possible for people?

West: It’s not on IMDB, and that is on purpose because I think that would be a bummer, but it does appear in the end crawl. It’s not advertised, but it’s there. I feel that it’s better if you don’t know because then you have a moment, whether it’s during the movie or afterward, where you’re like, ‘Oh s**t. That’s cool.’ You rarely get that, so I would like to preserve that. I’m not trying to go out of my way that no one ever knows, or it is some big secret, but I’m interested to see what people will do. Will they keep it a secret, or will they tell others? If we tell everybody, they might appreciate it, but we won’t get that reaction. I would hope that audiences get to have the experience and surprise as much as possible.

Thompson: X is set in the 70s, a very pivotal time in cinema. You haven’t done sequels previously, so would you want to do one that’s similar set somewhere else in the 80s, then the 90s, maybe one in the 2000s, effectively following the change in cinema and styles and perhaps make it a franchise for yourself?

West: Let’s see how it does. I have some ideas.

Thompson: I would really love it if you did.

West: You and me both. I have some relatively formulated ideas, so let’s see what we can do.

X lands in theaters on Friday, March 18, 2022.