MaXXXine's Mia Goth & Director Ti West Break Down a Scene

I quite liked being in there that day.

Sometimes it feels like a little hug,

Sometimes hug and sometimes it's horror.

Hi, I am Mia Goth and I play Maxine in Maxxxine.

I'm Ti West, I'm the writer director of Maxxxine,

and this is Notes on a Scene.

[intense music swells]

It is a pretty creepy, weird scene.

You in a special effects makeup workshop,

getting your head cast for a movie you're about to be in.

[Artist] So I'm gonna be making a life cast of your head

for the end of the movie.

Ever had one done before?

No.

There's nothing to it.

All you have to do is sit still for 10 minutes.

Remember stepping into this and just thinking

that they just did such a beautiful job with the whole set.

Our set decorator,

her sister works at a special effects makeup place,

so she was sneakily taking stuff from her job

to bring in here, 'cause we needed all this stuff

in the background, I guess for the X fans.

There is a little head of a guy with a cowboy hat

with his eyes poked out.

Oh!.

There was more of that to come.

That's a pretty bitching scar.

How'd you get it?

I got shot.

Dang, who shot you?

That's a long story.

It's the first scene after she finds out

that somebody knows about her past.

Really I don't think she ever fully processed

her experience, the trauma that she went through.

She's the only survivor of the massacre that took place,

and now she's forced to kind of sit on this chair in silence

with nothing but her thoughts, and it's too much.

Also a scene that I think you've done

multiple times in real life.

I did it for X, when I was getting ready,

when we were creating the mold for Old Pearl,

and that day I didn't have an issue with it at all.

I had my little green juice and I was just like, you know?

I think more than anything, how you are entering the room,

what's going on in your day, that has the biggest impact

as to how you can handle this.

Yeah, it's a strange thing to do.

All right, I'm gonna put this over your head now

to make the mold.

[goop sloshes]

This 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.

I quite liked being in there that day.

Sometimes it feels like a little hug.

Sometimes hug and sometimes it's horror.

[Artist] I'm gonna run, I'm gonna get more bandages.

[timer cranks]

Sit tight, remember to breathe.

I'll be right back.

This has someone who's been shot in the chest,

and this has a guy with his head missing.

And so those are all,

and there used to be an alligator right over here,

but I framed it out 'cause it became too much.

There's another one in here, maybe it's this one,

it's a girl with her face missing,

having been shot in the face.

So we made sure to get all of the little subtle nods to X

in there as much as we could.

This movie has an enormous amount of things like that

referencing the other movies,

and they're all really in the background

and really not meant for anyone to see

unless you have like a telestrator.

So 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.

That poor goose.

[clock ticks]

I just had to do another one of these for Frankenstein,

but rather than the mold.

Was it a scan?

It was a scan.

It's changing isn't it?

Yeah, digital.

It's a little bit sweet.

Doing it the old fashioned way is sort of

what everyone's become accustomed to.

But now, yeah, you stand in the big thing

and they do a 360 scan of you.

I think I prefer this.

Yeah.

[clock ticks] [intense music begins]

[sharp breaths begin]

Editing 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

and you have to kind of rearrange.

I think with this scene it was more about feeling

like the pace of the stillness of the scene.

And so when you hear the clock ticking,

should that cut go on a little too long,

and should that dolly that's pushing in towards you

take just a little too long

just to kind of feel the anxiety of being stuck in there.

And if it's too short then it just becomes information,

like, oh, she got this thing done, the end.

And if it's too long then you kind of check out of it.

So it's trying to find like the sweet spot

of making you feel like you're experiencing

what she's experiencing.

And that's kind of a feeling thing more than anything else.

[ticking continues]

[mold sloshes]

A lot of the shots in this scene

were really meant to be very simple,

and the goal was to just kind of put you in her perspective

as much as possible.

So 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 gonna do.

But everything else,

because that was such a stylistic thing,

we want everything else to be very still and very specific.

And the 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,

and hopefully it takes a little longer than you'd like

so that the audience feels the anxiety.

[intense music continues] [clock ticking continues]

This was a really cool shot to shoot though,

because when we were doing it,

I didn't really know what you would look like.

And 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?

And then we put it on a person just to test it

and I was like, oh no, I gotta come tell you

that there's no chance.

And then as soon as I saw you in it, I was like,

not only is it unmistakable that it's you,

whatever your reaction's gonna be under there is like,

there was no way to be like,

oh from that weird side angle fake it.

And so it was like, you're just gonna have to be

covered in this stuff all day.

Mm.

[ticking and music resume]

You'll end up just like me.

[intense music builds]

[dramatic music sting blares]

When I play it here, see this right here,

watch this key area.

It happened on one take and I was like, oh my god,

this is great, but we'll never get it again.

And somehow every single take this weird piece

just kept sliding off you.

There's a shot coming up that's a profile shot

and it still did it in that, 'cause I was like,

how are we gonna even fake it?

And it was too good and I was like, we need to use this

and then we're gonna have to match that.

[dramatic music swells]

Yeah, see, that's a different take, and it still did that.

So this is creepy.

Yeah, that was.

[Mia laughs] Yeah, yeah.

[intense music begins]

[dramatic music sting booms]

[Maxine whimpers muffled]

[goop sloshes] [intense music builds]

When we started working together,

initially that was just for the movie X.

I guess I kind of just brought to it

what I was going through at that time,

and that's kind of really how I always work.

I just try and find parallels,

and things that align and make sense

so I can root it in something that feels truthful.

Ti has created such distinct worlds in each,

and they're very much standalone films,

although they are enhanced if you watch them together.

That informs it a little bit and where you're at.

We also had a weird gap,

because we made X and Pearl back to back,

so there was no time in between.

And then this one we actually had like a proper

year and a half.

Yeah.

Between filming, which was a bit strange,

because not that going from X,

playing Maxine and Old Pearl, into Pearl

isn't its own challenge,

but we were isolated, and that was kind of our whole world

was being isolated in New Zealand

making these two movies.

And then we kind of came back to normal life

and those movies came out, people saw those movies,

and then we sort of started this new movie,

and we had to kinda like get back into that.

Yeah.

Which was, it is a different challenge.

With X for example, I remember I was so hungry

to prove myself, and I was like,

well they're gonna get the Daily,

so I really wanna make sure I make a good impression.

And I would say, Ti, cut, it's not working, it's not right.

Doesn't feel right.

You know?

So I think that Maxine at that stage has that energy.

So by the time we get to Pearl, I'm really comfy,

and it really is my home.

[Ti] Yeah.

[Mia] It really is my farm.

And I don't think that Pearl would've been

the performance it is without having that experience.

And then fast forward to Maxxxine

and that's kind of where I'm at that time.

You know we shoot in LA, I live in LA so I was also home.

Yeah.

And I had just had my baby,

and that was a really empowering experience,

and I felt really good about that.

And that also informed Maxxxine.

So it's been really beautiful to see how my life,

with my characters, have kind of had this

like really beautiful synchronicity.

I didn't want this to be propped up

where if you hadn't seen the other ones

it would be a problem for you.

In a few instances like this, it was always meant

to kind of reference back to the other movies,

but in a subtle way.

Even 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.

But if you've seen the other movies,

then it's a more enriched experience.

[Maxine struggles and whimpers]

[chair creaks] [dramatic music sting blares]

[clock ticking slows]

[Maxine thuds]

[Eerie music sting blares]

These surely got returned to whoever we borrowed them from.

Hopefully.

[intense music continues]

[goop sloshes]

[Maxine gasps]

These are really kind of my favorite scenes to shoot

because it's like doing a scene in the ocean or something,

you can kind of just be in it.

You don't have to worry about it not feeling right

or not feeling truthful enough.

She's gonna put it on your head

and you can kind of just surrender

to whatever it's gonna be.

Yeah, your performance in all the movies is such a,

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.

For me to try to make the movie stylish around you,

but not Kitch is a really tricky balance,

because it's like you want people to feel the world,

but you also don't want them to become

like self-aware of it.

People will always say that I make these slow burn movies

that sort of build and things like that.

I'm not like so unaware that I don't know what they mean,

but I never think of it.

But from a style standpoint, like these three movies,

they're very style forward.

They have some things that overlap,

but for the most part, like this movie is really trying

to put you in the 1980s,

but also in the style of filmmaking

so that it feels like movies of the eighties.

It's not like we just dressed the street to look eighties,

but made it move like this, like movies do now,

it's to really kind of put you in a time and place

in a way that you remember it.

If you've watched a bunch of movies from that era,

it feels like that.

I just like movies, so 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.

Hey are, are you okay?

[Maxine breathes rapidly]

Calm down, breathe, breathe, breathe.

[Maxine whimpers]

Breathe, breathe.

I also always knew I wanted to come out of this scene

into the next scene in kind of a punchy sort of way,

because we're about to meet new characters

in the next scene.

So that was another thing was to kind of have

the panic attack building and building and building,

and then kind of release into the next scene

where the second act really kicks off,

because someone knows about Maxine's past,

and something bad is happening around her,

and then she's dealing with it,

and then we meet these new characters

that are trying to get to the bottom of it.

So I think this scene is super effective.

I think it's one of the best scenes in the movie.

Do 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?

Or did it change quite a lot during that?

It always changes, but Pearl is probably

as close to what I was expecting as possible,

because we had so much time being there.

Like 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,

me and the whole crew and everything.

This movie, because we were moving locations every day,

you're also trying to just survive

the intensity of production.

It's rare that it's exactly as you hope,

but it's pretty close.

And so that was like a relief,

'cause it was such a big moment in the movie.

So that puts a lot of pressure

to just to try to get it right.

Hopefully it's like an iconic scene.

I mean that was kind of the goal.