“The past ain’t finished with you yet,” is a quote that portends looming trouble for the titular character in Director Ti West’s crime horror, MaXXXine.
In the third film of the trilogy that began with his film X and continued with Pearl, West’s MaXXXine finds adult film star Maxine Minx on the verge of breaking into legitimate films in 1980s Hollywood. But as a mysterious killer stalks the starlets of Hollywood, a trail of blood threatens to reveal her sinister past.
On July 16, after the DGA membership screening in Los Angeles, West discussed the making of MaXXXine during a Q&A moderated by Director Sean Baker (Anora).
During the conversation, West spoke about the challenges of also serving as the editor of the film.
“A lot of times that’s the hardest part because everybody has a great time on the movie and then they go home and you’re still sitting there with all the not good versions of the movie that you’re trying to build back into what it was meant to be. Everybody else is off on another movie with new friends having a great time and you’re trying to figure out why this thing that seems like it should work, didn’t work. It’s long and technical and in the end I’m always happy that I did it, but it can be grueling at times.”
He also revealed how he and cinematographer Eliot Rockett collaborated to bring his style to each of the three films of this trilogy.
“I think Eliot gets my aesthetic. When we did Pearl, we took such a big swing. I think that was a real turning point. When you’re making a movie, time is never on your side and sometimes you’re just frantic just to photograph anything to get this day and to get through the scene because you’re running out of time and you just need to make it exist. We always remind ourselves, even in those moments, try not to leave cinema on the table and try to find a shot that complements the movie or a specific stylistic thing that can be done in the scene to give a character because it’s so easy just to be trying to survive the day that you that you forget about that. And you get an edit room and you go, ‘Oh man! We could have done so much more here, and we just did it because we got stressed out.’”
West’s other directorial credits include the feature films X, Pearl, In a Valley of Violence, Cabin Fever 2: Spring Fever, The House of the Devil and The Roost; the mini-series Dead and Lonely; and episodes of the series Them, Tales from the Loop, Soundtrack, The Resident, Chambers, The Passage, Outcast, Wayward Pines, South of Hell and Scream: The TV Series. He has been a DGA member since 2014.