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It Chapter 2: Andy Muschietti & the Losers talk blood, growing up & more - SciFiNow

It Chapter 2: Andy Muschietti & the Losers talk blood, growing up & more

Go behind the screams of It Chapter 2 with director Andy Muschietti and the cast

IT Chapter Two brings the adult Losers’ Club home to face with everything they were ever afraid of. We talk to the cast and director about how Pennywise is taking things up a notch… 

‘And one more. This one, like the last, is a definition of haunt as a noun, and it’s the one that really scares me. ‘A feeding place for animals.’

What’s feeding in Derry? What’s feeding on Derry?’

27 years ago, the Losers made a pact. That if the creature that was lurking under Derry ever did come back, that they would all return to stop it once and for all.

It may be just two years since we last saw Pennywise the Dancing Clown feed on the poor souls of Stephen King’s nightmare town, but for Bill Denbrough, Beverly Marsh, Richie Tozier, Eddie Kaspbrak, Mike Hanlon, Ben Hanscom and Stan Uris, aka the Losers’ Club, it’s felt like forever. Time has passed, memories have faded, and life has moved on…But the cycle has come around once again. In those 27 years that ancient evil has grown stronger and hungrier, and it’s reached back out from the sewers to snatch the its innocent victims and feed on their fear. Can the Losers succeed where they failed? Do they have the strength to put an end to It once and for all? They may have allowed themselves to forget It, but Pennywise certainly hasn’t forgotten about them…

“[Pennywise] comes back a little smarter, a little more ahead of the Losers in the game with a sense of revenge that he didn’t have in the first one,” grins director Andy Muschietti. “When the Losers are together they are his worst enemy so you have to be prepared for that. And he expresses that in a more twisted way.”

“Pennywise has a component of ‘Fuck these little bastards, they almost got me and they’re not going to get me this time!’ in a very animalistic way,” adds producer Barbara Muschietti with glee. “There’s a very strange page two thirds into the book in which you hear Pennywise’s voice and it’s so peculiar because you think you know that this is just the personification of evil, but then you’re reading this page and he’s like a kid that wants to sleep and eat. So he’s pissed off because these kids almost destroyed him the last time. We allowed him to be smarter, this time you see him taunting more, he’s more of an evil little shit because he is going for these assholes that gave him a rough time 27 years ago.”

Before the first film was released, so much of the discussion around the film was focused on Pennywise. Surely, we all thought, there was no way that Bill Skarsgård could hope to create something as nightmarish, as memorable as Tim Curry. But this was no imitation. Instead, we all watched as Skarsgård gave us a Pennywise that was very different but unmistakably Stephen King’s nightmare clown. A whole new generation of moviegoers was scared witless by his blend of uncanny physicality, unpredictable threat and that voice…

James McAvoy as Bill Denborough

“The first time I saw him, I was like, ‘Oh that’s cool. That’s Pennywise. It looks impressive,’” remembers James McAvoy. “But the first time he did a little bit of acting on camera where he fully let go and committed physically, emotionally and psychologically, he was really freaky. I was like, ‘Oh I don’t like this. I don’t like being around you when you’re like this.’ It was very easy to give a scared reaction to him. The voice that he has… Everybody goes like, ‘Oh it’s so cool and interesting and scary as fuck.’ But he’s ripping his throat apart to give you that voice. So that amount of attack, the tension in his body. I mean he is fucking racking himself. And it’s just a bit freaky!”

McAvoy leads the cast of adult Losers as Bill Denbrough, the grieving, stuttering young boy who led the charge against Pennywise and who has since grown into a successful writer. It won’t be long before he starts seeing the spectre of his poor brother Georgie lurking in dark corners and he’s far from the only one with buried trauma just waiting to burst free.

Much of this movie’s hype has used buzzwords like “darker”, “scarier” and “the most blood used in a scene ever” (we’ll get to that last one in a little bit). But this isn’t a case of simply upping the ante. Forget the cash-in sequels and shared universes, this is the second part of the story. As fans of the novel will tell you, King’s book weaves pretty freely between childhood and adulthood, and the heartbreak and horror facing the Losers this time around is, as Muschietti puts it, “a conclusion” rather than a sequel. “It’s all about the characters and the love you have for these characters,” he explains.

“They’re the same characters that we met in the first one but they come back 27 years later, 40 years old, with baggage. They all have some level of brokenness that they carry from that summer of ‘89,” he continues. “They all have their own trauma and that’s what makes the movie maybe relatable to grown up audiences because there’s a deepness to the fear as adults.”

“Except for Mike, who stayed there, they’ve all been affected by the creepy magic of Derry which makes you forget, and that’s why the cycle has gone on and on, and that’s human nature really,” adds Barbara Muschietti. “How we allow things to happen again and again even when they’re terrible. So they come back after Mike’s call and first you see that in five minutes it’s like they’ve gone back to being kids, and they start remembering things that they had pushed down so deep that they are shocked. When you see the movie you’ll see that this a theme, that they keep remembering and remembering and peeling this demonic onion that has been their lives in a way.”

The Losers on set with Andy Muschietti

“Yeah, this one hit on the trauma of it,” enthuses Bill Hader. “They have lived with the trauma of what happened in that first movie, I liked that aspect of it. It’s a very emotional story of this group trauma. I think it’s darker, it definitely is also just bigger.”

Hader stars as Richie Tozier, the fast-talking goofball who, in the book at least, has achieved his dream of making a name for himself as an entertainer. The brilliant comedian and impressionist who broke out on Saturday Night Live before co-creating and starring in HBO’s awards-machine Barry was astutely picked by Finn Wolfhard as the ideal actor to play the adult version of Trashmouth.

“I had a friend send me a video of Finn saying he wanted me to play him in the movie, and I thought ‘Oh, that’s sweet,’ and then ‘My agent called me and said ‘No, he’s the most powerful guy in Hollywood right now! So whatever he says, people are going to make it happen!’” he laughs. “I’m joking, but it was very sweet, so I went to have lunch with Andy and we talked about it, and Andy and I bonded over our mutual love of John Carpenter’s The Thing, and stuff like that. We just talked about movies and he said ‘You wanna do this, and I was like are you kidding? Yeah?’”

Hader may have found it hard to watch the film when it first came out (“I actually had a bit of a panic attack, I had a hard time, I got to the point where I had to look at my shoes for a while,” he remembers) but he, and all the cast, knew they had to go back and study it to make sure that they nailed the characterisation.

“The horror, the scares and all that are great but people want to see the Losers back together and those kids did such an incredible job,” enthuses James Ransone (The Wire, Sinister), who is picking up the baton of Eddie Kaspbrak, played by Jack Dylan Grazer. “You just have to remember that the first movie is not the book or the miniseries and people love those kids in those roles so much, so for me I was like ‘How can I serve what Jack did in the first one.’”

“The really fortunate thing for me where it just feels like hand of God, winning the Powerball is I look very similar to Jack Dylan Grazer,” he continues. “We have a very similar cadence and when I watched [the first film] I thought ‘Oh man, this is going to be easy and pretty awesome because he is so good and so fast,’ and faster than I am to a certain extent where I was worried! ‘I don’t know if I’m going to be able to go as fast as this kid did!’”

Jessica Chastain as Sophia

“Andy is incredibly visual,” adds Jessica Chastain. “So none of us would have been cast unless we matched in his head.”

Chastain, of course, plays Beverly, picking up from Sophia Lillis. She was the first actor confirmed after being rumoured for the role from the outset (after all, she worked with the Muschiettis on their first feature Mama), and she tells us that observing Lillis’ performance was crucial.

“That was a huge inspiration for me,” she enthuses. “I think Sophia did such an incredible job with Beverly and she had this fearless quality to her. Because in reality Beverly’s worst nightmare is at home. And so because of that, she has this drive. This fearlessness that she can go into the unknown and I wanted to capture that. I also wanted to capture these little things she does. Like maybe the way she smiles, sometimes how she’d hold her hand, or how she would handle the postcard, winking. I’m not really much of a winker but I may wink in this movie! Because Andy is so visual, sometimes I’d do something with my hand and he’d catch it and go, ‘You did the hand thing! Sophia does the hand thing!’ Which would make me feel good.”

“I studied Jeremy Ray Taylor’s performance before I did the casting, over and over again,” adds Jay Ryan (Beauty And The Beast), who plays the adult Ben Hanscom. Of all the Losers, Ben is the one who’s changed the most physically, and he’s also the one who comes the closest to a sweet dramatic storyline as an adult. But although he may look very different, Ryan tells us that he was determined to preserve that core of the character which Taylor brought to life.

“I took on little pieces that he did so well in the film,” Ryan explains. “It was a beautiful vulnerability and sensitivity that he had. The script I had [for the audition] was very far away from the movie we made, Ben was very macho and masculine with the dialogue. So I kind of infused this more sensitive kind of…I think I even cried in the audition a little bit, and I think it probably was very different to what a lot of actors would have done. So, yeah, hats off to Jeremy for giving a beautiful performance.”

Muschietti on directing duties

As you’ve gathered, the entire cast is very clear on is the fact that the first film was more of a touchstone than the book, but unlike their younger counterparts, IT was something that they were already very much aware of. “I watched the miniseries when I was a kid, and Tim Curry was so scary,” marvels Ransone. “I had gotten a copy of the book with a picture of Tim Curry on, and I photocopied that book and I blew it up bigger and bigger and then I coloured it in and then I taped it next to my brother’s bed, and he said for years he wanted to kill me because of it. He’s got a 30-year-old resentment about me doing that to him. He said he saw the first movie and he was like ‘Oh my god, my brother looks so much like Jack,’ and his position was me doing the movie was his revenge on me.”

“I read IT in high school and it was one of those things that it was so long that you could like brag about,” adds Hader. “I told my buddy I was auditioning for it, and he was like ‘Yeah, man, you were afraid of that in high school!’” laughs Isiah Mustafa, who takes on the role of Mike, the one who stayed behind to remember and chronicle, and the one who has to make the call to bring everyone back together again. “I was like ‘No, I wasn’t!’ But yeah, stay away from the drain…”

“I read it when I was about 15,” McAvoy tells us. “And I loved it. I didn’t find it scary. I found it fascinating. I loved the multidimensional, multi-verse aspect to it and all that. [“The turtle couldn’t help us.”] One of the things that sometimes is a criticism of Stephen’s writing, and I think it’s a virtue, is that he’s an expert storyteller and he’s going hard after the narrative… And then he goes and he talks about how little David down the road likes to eat a burger with knife and fork instead of with his hands. You can be with that for 25 pages sometimes, and in the book he really does that a lot. Because he’s exploring the town of Derry as a character, as a person, as an entity in itself. Because fucking up inside Derry is It, with its hands all fucking inside Derry. The whole character of Derry is twisted and perverted by this puppet master, holding it in its grip. You don’t know that when you’re reading it and I do remember at times going, ‘Where the fuck are we going here?’ But I loved it.”

Given the sheer size of the book, it’s not a surprise that some material from IT Chapter Two will end up on the cutting room floor. “It’s a big epic, the first edit was four hours,” Muschietti tells us before gauging the final cut at “a little less than three hours long.”

“We did discuss the idea of making two more films,” reveals Barbara Muschietti. “Because it’s such a big story. But we ended up making it into one. And I think it was the right decision…I think what was essential for Andy and me as well was to keep very emotional aspect of the ending. And I think that that is reflected perfectly. A few elements change. But you know you will have every single emotion in the last half hour of the film.”

While Muschietti tells us that he doesn’t feel the pressure of trying to one up himself following the first film’s success (“No, I’m quite irresponsible with that!” he laughs), one word that keeps coming up during our interviews is “bigger.” This isn’t James Ransone’s first horror film, but there’s an undisguised awe in his voice when he describes stepping onto the set. “Do you ever have this experience where you look at a picture from Return Of The Jedi or something like that, behind the scenes, and thinking ‘Oh my god, everything that went into this, how big that is?’” he marvels. “And to be able to work on something at these levels of set pieces with its cultural icons I thought man, I’m going to look back at this moment and be like ‘That was crazy that we did that!’”

Bill Skarsgård’s Pennywise is back

“I thought like ‘Wow this is an epic horror movie,’” agrees Hader. “In the way that you would consider an epic film, the scope of it, the amount of characters in it and the amount of time given to those characters and their backstories and their histories and all that, it just felt epic.” As you may have noticed, that “bigger”-ness is absolutely reflected in the incredible cast. “I remember seeing Jessica’s first close-up and I was like ‘Oh man, that’s Jessica Chastain!’” grins Mustafa. “Oh man she nailed it; she didn’t even say anything…” “She didn’t say shit but that was great,” laughs Hader. “Isn’t it weird that you can do a whole movie and it isn’t until week three that you’re like, ‘Oh, that’s James McAvoy.’”

Naturally, a horror movie of this size and intensity isn’t without its challenges. Although Hader is quick to downplay the suffering (“We’re fucking Hollywood actors, we weren’t mining coal or delivering the mail, it’s a pretty great job!”), there were long days and nights spent exploring the sewers under Derry and, as Mustafa puts it, “Just being wet and soggy and dirty.” “We spent a good couple of weeks in the sewers,” Ryan explains. “you would be in water for 15, 16 hours a day. And when you got out… You know what happens when your body is in water for too long. It’s not pretty. So that was kind of hard, to just stay in the right frame of mind as well as being in this world of Pennywise.”

However, all of the cast cedes “toughest day’s shoot” to Chastain, as Beverly gets a horrifying reminder of her blood-drenched bathroom encounter with Pennywise turned up to 11. “It looks amazing,” she tells us. “I didn’t track in my head that that would mean it tracks through the whole movie. So every time, right before action, I’m with all the guys and everyone’s fine. And then I would have two women come up to me. And just like shhhhh… Like spray me with water. And then like putting blood… I remember Bill [Hader] would do impressions of us. And my impression was [shivering]!”

Blood, emotional trauma and confronting childhood fears brought back on an epic scale…Pennywise is back, and he’s taking no prisoners. “He will definitely surprise you, that’s for sure, you’re not relaxing through this film,” grins Barbara Muschietti. “It’s constant and also if you’ve seen the trailer, he shows up in ways that are just very unexpected. So again, you’re not going to relax through the film. You’re going to laugh, you’re going to cry, you’re going to scream and finally you’re going to leave the theatre in great spirits.”

IT Chapter Two is released on 6 September 2019. Get all the latest horror news with every issue of SciFiNow.