Ti West

Well, I think that being a star is such a hard thing to articulate or define. Certainly, in Hollywood, in showbusiness, there's this really bizarre, artifice thing that's very hard to also nail down.

Joe Swanberg, the Duplass Brothers - we all came up the same time, in 2005, and all became friends and aligned ourselves as kids making movies, and I just happened to have zombies in mine.

Trigger Man' is sort of an experimental movie, but I don't think 'House of the Devil' is an experimental movie at all. It has some long takes, and there's not a lot of talking and it's about one girl. But it's weird when I see this resistance to it, like it's this weird, arty movie.

I've always had this obsession with Satanic Panic and I like the idea of the mysticism, where, like, religion and horror meet. I think there is something very spooky about that.

I've messed with Ouija boards. And I've snuck into the basement of an abandoned mental hospital that's supposed to be haunted, that kind of stuff. That was just in my childhood.

If I was sort of attached to someone else's work, and doing a horror movie as a career move... I don't know. I tried it, I couldn't really do it.

I really like the horror genre - it's not the only thing I like, but as long as I can do what I want with it and work on my own material, then great.

I have plenty of scripts and ideas and all that that are not horror films.

I feel like the choices you make when you write, when you shoot and when you edit are all connected. I don't see it as compartmentalized.

To me, when you watch a Hitchcock movie and as soon as theBernard Hermannscore comes in, you're aware. You know it's there. The music is larger than life; it's a part of the movie's identity.

It's important to let everybody understand where people are at in the movie, in the sense of the landscape. You need people to invest in this world, so you need to give a sense of who, what, and where things are.

Because everybody is so ADD and everybody is trying to move the plot so fast, there's very little sense of geography in movies anymore. I think that's a disservice to the movie. When you know where everybody is, it creates suspense and a larger scale for the movie.

Personally, I like to settle into movies, and that's why I like long title sequences.

I think everybody relates to wishing you had a life different to the one you have.

Well, I'd say my teenage years were certainly in the '90s. But as for the later 80s... I'm an only child, and I grew up in the video store consuming as much TV and everything as possible, so I've always had a fondness for it.

I always thought of 'X' as one era, and the characters in that era are being affected by the cinema of the era. 'Pearl' was a different era, and the characters were also affected by the cinema of the era.

I wrote a movie called 'X' that I sent to A24. They said they would make it, and then Covid happened, and we went to New Zealand to make it. We were the only people in the world - well, some of the only people in the world - making a movie at the time.

If you look at any of my movies I write, direct, edit, and produce them.

I can be by myself and my imagination and I'm comfortable in that place. I don't feel uncomfortable there.

I have that willpower to keep pushing forward mentality.

I'm an only child, so I am a very self-motivated and driven person.

A lot of the times characters in horror movies are almost like born and bred to be in horror movies. I always find that to be a letdown, because they do all that you expect them to do.

I've only had minimum wage jobs or directed movies.

Throughout my career, I would not be surprised if it has dramas and romcoms in it, just because I like movies. But if I want to make a romcom, I'd have to get past a few confused looks. It'd be a long conversation of: 'Why is this the thing you want to do?'

For me, the goal of directing is to feel like you're experiencing what the character is going through, whether they're slowly walking or running.

I get a little off-put when people see 'The House of the Devil' as an homage to the Eighties because I consider 'homage' to be sort of like parody.

As a filmmaker it's a dream to make a western.

I love when you see a movie and you go, 'That's a movie by so-and-so,' because I can just feel it.

I don't go to the movies for escapism, so I don't make movies for it either. And it's totally fine that people do, I get it, but I love to be challenged in a movie, I love thinking about a movie afterwards and I love seeing a movie twice and seeing other elements, and I love to see movies where a filmmaker is in control.

I think a good horror movie, like anything else, should be a movie first, a horror movie second and it should treat the movie like a movie and you treat it with respect and you treat the characters like people and like characters that people should care about.

I think sound is a huge part of my filmmaking process and it's a part of the narrative for me.

Cabin Fever 2' could have been this totally unique crazy type of cult movie but, unfortunately, it's not the movie that I made.

Well, I'll take comparisons to Lars Von Trier all day long.

Yeah, I think to make art and horror successful you need a strong contrast. Otherwise, it just becomes titillation and shock value. That's not interesting to me.

Once I wrote 'Pearl,' it was clear this movie should be called 'Pearl.'

If 'X' is a movie about someone who wants to get into the movie business from the outside, and 'Pearl' is about someone who looks at the movie business as hopeful, 'MaXXXine' is a movie where you're here now. What's it actually like?

People always ask what makes a good horror movie and it's essentially one big thing-contrast. All of the stuff in the film that's not horror is what makes all of the horror stuff work.

The Eighties were the last decade where the actual filmmaking was still treated with some respect, even if it was horror.

The 'slow-burn' thing is something I get labelled with, I think mostly affectionately. I know what people mean, but they don't seem slow-burn to me. It's strange that it's as defining for people as it is. Maybe it's because I can't see my own situation.

Much of the stuff I relate to is from the Eighties, at least cinematically.

I made short films, showed them to filmmaker Larry Fessenden who liked them enough to give me some money to make a feature. We pulled it off by the skin of our teeth and have been trying to keep the ball rolling ever since. It's a grind.

I am desperately trying to come up with a film project that is related to mixed martial arts. In fact, I would probably take a job for the UFC if they offered. Even if it was just cleaning the mats.

I have been fortunate to work with some great people.

Mary Woronov was a real treat. She is someone I always wanted to work with, so it was awesome to actually get to do it.

I get a lot of movie stars telling me they saw my movie and then I'm like, 'You know I offered that movie to you, you said no, now you love it.' That's just the name of the game.

The thing is that the studio system's great, but it also sucks. There's really good people in the studio system, but there's way more worse people. So you have to find the good people. And the good people are busy, because they're generally doing good people stuff, so you gotta get in line to work with them.

I think the gangster way to do it is to go out on your own, build up your own thing, and then have people want to come to you.

Hollywood is one of those places where people feel like you could go there and be discovered at any moment and change your life. That's untrue for 99.9% of them - but for 0.1% of people it has happened, so it keeps the dream alive. There's something kind of magical about that.

Show business is an impersonal and relatively savage business, and it's always evolving. If you're lucky enough to have a day when you're lauded for something, you have to enjoy it while it's there.

I feel like a realist about Hollywood. To be cynical about it is to some degree fair, but I don't think it's useful.