Pearl was imagined as a Disney horror movie, says director Ti West

Since the very beginning, the trailer has been available for everyone. PearlIt was added to the final of Ti West’s stylish A24 horror movie XThe film was clearly satire about a large section of Hollywood history. Tyler Bates Tim Williams’ comically swoony score, the retro title treatments, and even the emphatic, exaggerated performances all conjure up images of canonized movies, from the 1930s classics The Wizard of Oz and Gone With the Wind to 1950s melodramas like Douglas Sirk’sImitate Life Heaven is All You Need.

However, in an interview before Pearl’s release, West told Polygon that there was another, less immediately obvious touchstone for Pearl’s visual style and story tone: classic Disney movies.

“I just felt like Pearl has this sort of naiveté that matches a Disney movie, except it’s much darker and more demented,” West says. “That became an interesting jumping-off point.”

All three films in the X trilogy — XPrequel PearlThe sequel has been announced. MaXXXine — are pastiches of Hollywood classics. XIt was set in 1970s, and draws narratively and visually from the 70s. Texas Chain Saw MassacreIts followers. MaXXXineAfter the revelations, West was revealed Pearl’s premiere at the Toronto International Film Festival, will be set in the 1980s and inspired by the ’80s VHS boom, as the grainy look and tracking lines on the first teaser trailer suggest.

Pearl, by contrast, is meant to evoke Disney’s early era and the age of classical musicals, although it isn’t a musical itself. But West says he and his team didn’t look to any one particular movie or era for visual inspiration, the way they did with X.

“It’s more general,” he says. “There may have been some specific movies I looked at with Eliot Rockett, the DP, or Tom [Hammock]The technical aspects of the design were handled by a production engineer. We could have looked at [the 1948 British ballet drama] The Red Shoes We wanted to achieve a certain level of red saturation. But we didn’t really watch them as movies [to copy].”

West says the trilogy as a whole is designed around “highlighting the craft of filmmaking,” which affects both the story — the protagonists of these films are obsessed with becoming movie stars, and the fame that comes with stardom — and the way West frames, designs, and shoots the work.

“X was really informed by a love of cinema, and people being affected by cinema,” he says. “In the case of that movie, it was about the exploitation era, and the auteur-ish, Americana, independent-film era. PearlThis has absolutely nothing to do. Pearl’s emotional state is much more about wonder and hope and ambition. This needed to look very different. X, because it wasn’t a gritty ’70s movie. It’s taking place 60 years earlier.”

West says the Disney stylings of the movie aren’t meant to reflect Pearl’s mental state so much as her fantasies about the life she thinks she’d lead if she makes it to Hollywood — a hope that leads her to the same kinds of brutal acts of murder and mayhem seen in X.

“My take is that the style of the movie, the aesthetic of the movie, is not the experience she’s having,” he says. “She’s not where she wants to be. The world [of the movie’s stylistic parody]It is where she feels it should feel. So it is a bit ironic, because of the contrast between this wondrous-looking world and the miserable life she’s living. […]Just making sure that we have lots of primary colors was the key. The process of getting it right became very complicated. It was great fun. It was great fun. XDo that. It’s as rich of an aesthetic as I’ve ever done, and it was a joy to do it.”

PearlOn September 16, the movie will be released in cinemas