Director Ti West breaks down an eery scene from 'MaXXXine' alongside star Mia Goth, where her character Maxine Minx gets her head cast for a movie. Ti provides an elaborate explanation of the intentional nods to the previous movies 'X' and 'Pearl,' details he incorporated to achieve the '80s Hollywood feel and so much more.
Director: Kristen White
Director of Photography: AJ Young
Editor: Cory Stevens
Talent: Ti West; Mia Goth
Producer: Funmi Sunmonu; Noel Jean
Associate Producer: Emebeit Beyene
Production Manager: Andressa Pelachi
Production Coordinator: Elizabeth Hymes
Talent Booker: Lauren Mendoza
Camera Operator: Shay Eberle-Gunst
Sound Mixer: Gloria Hernandez
Post Production Supervisor: Christian Olguin
Post Production Coordinator: Scout Alter
Supervising Editor: Doug Larsen
Assistant Editor: Justin Symonds
Director: Kristen White
Director of Photography: AJ Young
Editor: Cory Stevens
Talent: Ti West; Mia Goth
Producer: Funmi Sunmonu; Noel Jean
Associate Producer: Emebeit Beyene
Production Manager: Andressa Pelachi
Production Coordinator: Elizabeth Hymes
Talent Booker: Lauren Mendoza
Camera Operator: Shay Eberle-Gunst
Sound Mixer: Gloria Hernandez
Post Production Supervisor: Christian Olguin
Post Production Coordinator: Scout Alter
Supervising Editor: Doug Larsen
Assistant Editor: Justin Symonds
Category
🛠️
LifestyleTranscript
00:00I quite liked being in there that day.
00:03Sometimes it feels like a little hug.
00:05Sometimes hug and sometimes it's horror.
00:08Hi, I'm Mia Goth and I play Maxine in Maxine.
00:11I'm Ty West, I'm the writer-director of Maxine and this is Notes on a Scene.
00:15It's a pretty creepy weird scene.
00:30You in a special effects makeup workshop getting your head cast for a movie you're about to be in.
00:36So I'm going to be making a life cast of your head for the end of the movie.
00:40Ever had one done before?
00:42Uh, no.
00:46There's nothing to it. All you have to do is sit still for ten minutes.
00:50I remember stepping into this and just thinking that they just did such a beautiful job with the whole set.
00:55Our set decorator, her sister works at a special effects makeup place.
00:58So she was sneakily taking stuff from her job to bring in here because we needed all this stuff in the background.
01:04I guess for the ex-fans, there is a little head of a guy with a cowboy hat with his eyes poked out.
01:10Oh!
01:12There's more of that to come.
01:16That's a pretty bitchin' scar.
01:18How'd you get it?
01:20I got shot.
01:22Dang.
01:24Who shot you?
01:28It's a long story.
01:30It's the first scene after she finds out that somebody knows about her past.
01:34Really, I don't think she ever fully processed her experience, the trauma that she went through.
01:39She's the only survivor of the massacre that took place.
01:42And now she's forced to kind of sit on this chair in silence with nothing but her thoughts and it's too much.
01:48Also a scene that I think you've done multiple times in real life.
01:51I did it for X when I was getting ready when we were creating the mold for Old Pearl.
01:56And that day I didn't have an issue with it at all.
01:59I had my little green juice and I was just like, you know.
02:01I think more than anything, how you're entering the room, what's going on in your day,
02:05that has the biggest impact as to how you can handle this.
02:08Yeah, it's a strange thing to do.
02:10All right.
02:13I'm going to put this over your head now to make the mold.
02:24This was very fun to sound design, to muffle her voice and so that it really felt like the audience would be in there as well.
02:30I quite liked being in there that day.
02:32Sometimes it feels like a little hug.
02:34Sometimes hug and sometimes it's horror.
02:37I'm going to run.
02:38I'm going to get more bandages.
02:41Sit tight.
02:43Remember to breathe.
02:45I'll be right back.
02:47This has someone who's been shot in the chest.
02:51And this has a guy with his head missing.
02:54And so those are also, and there used to be an alligator right over here, but I framed it out because it became too much.
02:59There's another one in here.
03:00Maybe it's this one.
03:01It's a girl with her face missing, having been shot in the face.
03:04So we made sure to get all of the little subtle nods to X in there as much as we could.
03:09This movie has an enormous amount of things like that referencing the other movies.
03:13And they're all really in the background and really not meant for anyone to see unless you have like a telestrator.
03:17So it'll be cool to see people once the movie comes out being like, oh, that's why she's wearing a nurse outfit or that's why the cocaine is in a duck.
03:23That poor goose.
03:30I just had to do another one of these for Frankenstein.
03:34But rather than the mold.
03:36Was it a scan?
03:37It was a scan.
03:38Yeah.
03:39It's changing, isn't it?
03:40Yeah, digital.
03:41And it's a little bit sweet.
03:42Doing it the old fashioned way is sort of what everyone's become accustomed to.
03:45But now, yeah, you stand in the big thing and they do a 360 scan of you.
03:48I think I prefer this.
03:49Yeah.
04:00Editing is funny because I usually have a sense of how I think it should go and sometimes it works and then sometimes it doesn't.
04:16And you have to kind of rearrange.
04:18I think with this scene, it was more about feeling like the pace of the stillness of the scene.
04:21And so when you hear the clock ticking, should that cut go on a little too long?
04:25And should that dolly that's pushing in towards you take just a little too long?
04:28Just to kind of feel the anxiety of being stuck in there.
04:31And if it's too short, then it just becomes information like, oh, she got this thing done.
04:35The end.
04:36And if it's too long, then you kind of check out of it.
04:38So it's trying to find like the sweet spot of making you feel like you're experiencing what she's experiencing.
04:42And that's kind of a feeling thing more than anything else.
04:54A lot of the shots in this scene were really meant to be very simple.
04:57And the goal was to just kind of put you in her perspective as much as possible.
05:01So the big POV shot where we had a piece of glass and Sophie put the goop over the glass, that was a very particular thing that we knew we were going to do.
05:08But everything else, because that was such a stylistic thing, we want everything else to be very still and very specific.
05:14And the one shot that like Dolly's in that we just watched, that was always meant to be the kind of like hero shot of it is that we put you in the perspective of Maxine and then we just like slowly creep in.
05:23And hopefully it takes a little longer than you'd like so that the audience feels the anxiety.
05:37This was a really cool shot to shoot, though, because when we were doing it, I didn't really know what you would look like.
05:41And I remember at one point I thought maybe we would have a stunt double do it, because once we put all this stuff over, if we can't tell it's you, why put you through that?
05:47And then we put it on a person just to test it. And I was like, oh, no, I got to come tell you that there's no chance.
05:52And then as soon as I saw you in it, I was like, not only is it unmistakable that it's you, whatever your reaction is going to be under there is like there was no way to be like, oh, from that weird side angle, fake it.
06:00And so it was like, you're just going to have to be covered in this stuff all day.
06:11When I play it here, see this right here, watch this key area.
06:22It happened on one take and I was like, oh, my God, this is great, but we'll never get it again.
06:25And somehow every single take, this weird piece just kept sliding off you.
06:31There's a shot coming up that's a profile shot and it still did it next. I was like, how are we going to even fake it?
06:35And it was too good. But I was like, we need to use this and then we're going to have to match that.
06:47Yeah, see, that's a different take and it still did that. So this is creepy.
06:51Yeah.
07:05When we started working together initially, that was just for the movie X.
07:09I guess I kind of just brought to it what I was going through at that time.
07:13And that's kind of really how I always work.
07:15I just, you know, try and find parallels and things that align and make sense so I can root it in something that feels truthful.
07:22Ty has created such distinct roles in each and they are very much standalone films, although they are enhanced if you watch them together.
07:29That informs it a little bit and where you're at.
07:32We also had a weird gap because we made X and Pearl back to back.
07:35So there was no time in between. And then this one, we actually had like a proper like a year and a half between filming, which was a bit strange.
07:42Because not that going from X playing Maxine in Old Pearl into Pearl is in its own challenge.
07:46But we were isolated and that was kind of our whole world was being isolated in New Zealand, making these two movies.
07:51And then we kind of came back to normal life and those movies came out.
07:54People saw those movies and then we sort of started this new movie and we had to kind of like get back into that.
07:59Yeah.
08:00Which is a different challenge.
08:02With X, for example, I remember I was so hungry to prove myself and I was like, well, they're going to get the daily.
08:07So I really want to make a good impression. And I would say, Ty, cut. It's not working. It's not right. Doesn't feel right.
08:14You know, so I think that Maxine at that stage has that energy.
08:17So by the time we get to Pearl, I'm really comfy and it really is my home.
08:21It really is my farm. And I don't think that Pearl would have been the performance it is without having that experience.
08:28And then fast forward to Maxine and that's kind of where I am at that time.
08:32You know, we shoot in L.A., I live in L.A., so I'm also home.
08:35And I had just had my baby and that was a really empowering experience and I felt really good about that.
08:41And that also informed Maxine.
08:43So it's been really beautiful to see how my life with my characters have kind of had this really beautiful synchronicity.
08:51I didn't want this to be propped up where if you hadn't seen the other ones, it would be a problem for you.
08:55In a few instances like this, it was always like meant to kind of reference back to the other movies, but in a subtle way.
08:59Even if I hadn't seen the other movie, I get something bad happened, so I can carry on with this and not need to know all the details.
09:06But if you've seen the other movies, then it's a more enriched experience.
09:19These surely got returned to whoever we borrowed them from. Hopefully.
09:26These are really kind of my favorite scenes to shoot because it's like doing a scene in the ocean or something.
09:37You can kind of just be in it. You don't have to worry about it not feeling right or not feeling truthful enough.
09:42She's going to put it on your head and you can kind of just surrender to whatever it's going to be.
09:46Yeah, your performance in all the movies is such, as you're saying, like you're trying to be so truthful and it's trying to be such a grounded, intense performance at times.
09:53For me to try to make the movie stylish around you but not kitsch is a really tricky balance.
09:58Because it's like you want people to feel the world, but you also don't want them to become self-aware of it.
10:03People will always say that I make these slow burn movies that sort of build and things like that.
10:07I'm not so unaware that I don't know what they mean, but I never think of it.
10:10But from a style standpoint, these three movies, they're very style forward.
10:14They have some things that overlap, but for the most part, this movie is really trying to put you in the 1980s.
10:19But also in the style of filmmaking so that it feels like movies of the 80s.
10:22That it's not like we just dressed the street to look 80s but made it move like this like movies do now.
10:26It's to really kind of put you in a time and place in a way that you remember it.
10:30If you've watched a bunch of movies from that era, it feels like that.
10:33I just like movies.
10:34So to me, it's fun to make movies in different eras because then I don't end up doing the same thing over and over again.
10:41Hey, are you okay?
10:45Breathe.
10:46Calm down.
10:47Breathe.
10:48Breathe.
10:50Breathe.
10:53I also always knew I wanted to come out of this scene into the next scene in kind of a punchy sort of way.
10:58Because we're about to meet new characters in the next scene.
11:00So that was another thing is to kind of have the panic attack building and building and building.
11:03And then kind of release it into the next scene where the second act really kicks off.
11:07Because someone knows about Maxine's past and something bad is happening around her.
11:11And then she's dealing with it.
11:12And then we meet these new characters that are trying to get to the bottom of it.
11:15So I think this scene is super effective.
11:16I think it's one of the best scenes in the movie.
11:17Do you find that with the three movies that what you envisioned and what you wrote in the script actually translated pretty much to what you envisioned initially?
11:26Or did it change quite a lot?
11:28It always changes.
11:30But Pearl is probably as close to what I was expecting as possible because we had so much time being there.
11:34Like we had so much time on that farm that if I had an idea for a scene and what it should look like and what it should feel like, we could just stand in that space and talk about it.
11:42Me and the whole crew and everything.
11:43This movie, because we were moving locations every day, you're also trying to just survive the intensity of production.
11:48It's rare that it's exactly as you hoped, but it's pretty close.
11:51And so that was like a relief because it was such a big moment in the movie.
11:54So that puts a lot of pressure, you know, just to try to get it right.
11:57Hopefully it's like an iconic scene.
11:58I mean, that was kind of the goal.