“I’d always want to work with Mia.” Ti West on MaXXXine and his horror trilogy

Get those leg warmers ready because we’re heading to the bright lights and dark alleys of Eighties Hollywood for Ti West’s horror sequel, MaXXXine, the final movie in the X series. Mia Goth is back teaming up with West for MaXXXine, where she plays Maxine Minx, who we saw in 2022’s X as the adult film star who sees her pornography-shooting friends violently murdered in Texas. X was followed by Pearl, which saw Goth play a younger version of Pearl, the villain from the first movie.

The latest movie sees Maxine continue her journey towards fame after the bloody events of X and trying to make it as as an actress in 1985 Los Angeles. MaXXXine sees the mysterious ‘Night Stalker ‘serial killer murdering the starlets of Hollywood and who leaves a trail of blood which threatens to reveal Maxine’s sinister past.

We spoke to Ti West (pictured above) about MaXXXine, his favourite kill from the X movies, working with Mia Goth and whether we’ll be seeing any more movies from his horror franchise…

Were all three stories in the X franchise planned out before you started shooting the first movie?

No, it’s evolved over the last four years. I had written X as just a movie to go and make, and then this global pandemic happened. So we went to New Zealand to make it, and that spawned making Pearl.

The idea for MaXXXine had come up then, but we made the two movies, and then we released them and wanted to see if anybody would like them. Then they did. So then we went into MaXXXine with anticipation, which was a different experience.

So it’s evolved organically over the last several years, just kind of going with the flow really well.

The three movies take place in three different decades – what has been your favorite decade to play in?

It’s hard to choose because part of the reason for picking the three decades is because I like them so much aesthetically. At the moment, MaXXXine is the most relevant to me because I’ve just finished it.

I’ve been working on it so much so it’s very rich in my mind. But, I found making Pearl to be really satisfying, very rarely as a filmmaker would you get an opportunity to make a movie set then.

Then the 1970s is one of my favourite time periods ever in American cinema, and so it’s hard to pick one over the other, but at this moment, because I’m so in it with MaXXXine, I would say probably MaXXXine.

Mia Goth starred in the first movie and then became a producer on the subsequent movies, what has that working relationship been like?

We met on Zoom for X, and we got along very well. She understood the movie and what I was trying to convey in it. And she had a real desire to really have a challenge with movies like X, MaXXXine and Pearl.

So I just responded to that fierce desire that she had to be seen as… I don’t want to say more than she thought she was seen as, but she had a bit of a chip on her shoulder to be like, ‘I’m ready. I’m ready to be in the lead role. I’m ready to play two roles in the same movie. I’m ready to show everybody what I’m capable of.’

That obviously connected to the character of Maxine in such a specific way that I felt like she was just perfect for it. Then we got along very well, and we’ve now made three movies together. She has such autonomy over the character at this point because she’s played it for so long. It’s great.

We’re like partners in crime. It’s been a really unique experience to do this for the past four years. Most people probably would not have a working relationship like that. So I’m very grateful to have had that opportunity.

Would you ever want to work with Mia Goth again on another project?

Yeah, for sure. I’d always want to work with Mia. She’s great!

We know that MaXXXine is the final movie of the X trilogy but would you ever be tempted to create another movie in the X world? Perhaps a Jaws-style horror with the alligator?!

Maybe, yeah! It’s been four and a half years of non-stop work on these movies. In two weeks, I am finally done, and I will wake up in the morning and not have any responsibility for this trilogy of movies. That’s going to be a really strange feeling that I’m going to have to go through in real-time.

Maybe that means that, yes, I have to desperately make a movie about an alligator, or maybe I want to do something totally different. I’m not sure. I’m nearing the end of this journey, and then I’ll take a minute and figure out what’s next.

All three movies have brilliant kills in them – do you have a favourite?

I don’t know if I have a favourite. Each movie has maybe one that stands out to me. The alligator with Britney Snow is quite charming in a way, in X. And then Mitzi and Pearl… I think that’s pretty memorable.

MaXXXine has quite a few… I don’t want to spoil it, but MaXXXine is definitely the kind of movie that’s worth seeing with a crowd for more than just the kills. But if that’s all you’re into, I think that we deliver in a very satisfying way.

How does MaXXXine stand out from the other two movies?

You don’t need to see the other two to be able to follow this movie. The other movies enrich this movie, and there’s a lot of connective tissue, but this movie is a standalone movie, just like Pearl is a standalone movie.

That was always the goal – to create a trilogy of movies in which it was not a bar to entry that you see the other movies, but if you did and you like the other ones, that would enrich the experience.

MaXXXine is really just the story of somebody who’s trying to make it in Hollywood and who has dreams to become a star and to change their life, and they’re very close to that happening, and that could be taken away from them. I think that’s relatable to anybody, regardless of if you’ve seen the other movies or not.

What are your horror touchpoints? Alfred Hitchcock’s Psycho is referenced a few times in MaXXXine…

It’s hard to distill it down to that because I’m sort of a cinephile in that way, and in particular with genre movies and horror movies. I’ve seen so many – so many – that it’s not as simple as saying ‘oh, it’s just this or just tha’t.

There are so many that I can return to, and so many great franchises (for lack of a better term) from the Eighties all the way through to now.

Psycho is always a good movie to revisit because it’s just as good as you would ever remember it being.

Are you a fan of Psycho II?

It’s a cool movie. It’s a very different movie. You can’t really compare them but it’s a very cool movie, and the ending of it is pretty memorable as well!

What is it about horror that attracts you as a filmmaker?

I’ve always liked the genre, and it’s a good audience. They are good movies to see with an audience, the communal theatrical experience. I’ve always liked that, but really I come to movies visually, and from an aesthetic standpoint, horror offers the ability to tell different kinds of stories in very, borderline experimental ways.

You can get as weird or as not-weird as you want. You can stay really focused on realism in the horror genre, or you can get completely abstract and surreal, and the audience and the fans like both, and are sort of desperate for both, and are enthusiastic for both. So that, just as a filmmaker, makes the canvas much bigger than it would in a movie that you feel like you’re responsible for something other than the cinematic experience,

If you’re telling a true story about something in the news, you really need to be responsible for the facts of that and the specific reality of that. Or if you’re making a rom-com and it gets too weird, it would check people out of it, because they’re not prepared for the movie to be as cinematic, for lack of a better term, because they’re there for a very particular kind of love story.

With horror, people come in much more open-minded, and that for me as a filmmaker, is very satisfying.

What are you hoping audiences will feel and take away when they walk out of cinemas after watching MaXXXine?

Well, for this movie, if you see it in the theatre, it’s the summer. I’m just hoping you have a good time. It’s an interesting time to get people back in the movie theatre to really embrace the theatrical experience.

So if people can leave this movie feeling like they had a great time at the movies, and that they want to tell their friends like ‘I don’t want to tell you what happens, but you need to see it’, that would be really satisfying, because that’s a big part of the conclusion of this trilogy.

It’s not just the conclusion of the story and of the themes and of the character, but also to really feel like… I wouldn’t say a victory lap… but like a celebration of the three movies. Hopefully that will translate to the theatrical experience.

MaXXXine will be released in cinemas on 5 July