With October fast on September’s heels, the horror genre has been churning out some fantastic, all-new original films, as well as prequels, sequels and everything in between. One such prequel is filmmaker Ti West‘s second part of his recently-announced X trilogy Pearl, starring Mia Goth. In the film, Goth portrays a young girl, Pearl, in the early 1900s whose only driving force in life is to become a star and escape her family’s farm. Naive, ambitious and a bit unhinged, Pearl is willing to go to great, horrific lengths to obtain the lifestyle she wants. In an interview with Bloody Disgusting, West spoke on the movie’s culmination in the form of a nearly 10-minute monologue, on Goth’s incredible performance, and how it was all captured on film.
On a rural farm in 1918, the movie follows Pearl, the daughter of German immigrants struggling to make a living during World War I, amid the spread of the Spanish flu. Rather than inheriting the farm and the laborious life that comes with it (and contending with the possibility of ending up like her mother), Pearl yearns to become a star like the girls she sees on the silver screen. In order to avoid letting this iconic character play out as a flat, soulless killer, West and Goth let the climax of their story manifest as a lengthy monologue performed by Goth. In one intimate and vulnerable moment, Pearl pours her heart out to her sister-in-law Mitsy (Emma Jenkins-Purro), and the camera zeroes in on Goth. The monologue is delivered in a stream of dissociation, with tracks of mascara bleeding down Pearl’s face, as she exposes every fear, anxiety and guilt that has been plaguing her. She divulges all of this to Misty and says, “I’m worried there may be something real wrong with me.”
On the decision to give Pearl a quieter, simmering climax, West said:
“Well, the goal is always to take a relatively flashy, showy movie and have the climax be something not that. The climax of this movie should be about her psychological and emotional state, not about something blowing up or some crazy thing like that. That’s where the idea initially came from; a monologue where she says how she feels felt like the appropriate climax. Easier said than done.”
As far as bringing that moment to the screen and allowing it the build-up necessary to have audiences both sympathize with and fear Pearl, West said, “I didn’t have to do that much other than get out of the way.” The scene, he went on to say, was filmed in one shot, from the moment Pearl walks into the room and sits down to deliver that monologue, to when the two girls leave the room. With the pressure to achieve the emotional range that Pearl goes through during that scene, Goth had a lot riding on her performance, especially considering the fact that she acted her heart out “…maybe six or seven times…and she nailed it every time.”
Each take, Goth went into it knowing that there was “a six-minute chunk in the middle that, once she said a certain string of words,” West would not be cutting from. To get that perfect shot, one even Pearl herself would be proud of, everything had to go smoothly from cast and crew. West described filming that scene as similar to filming a dangerous stunt, where all the pieces had to be in place just so or the shot would be killed. At the end of the monologue, without his direction, Goth also had to stick it with that final look to the camera, the one where her eyes meet the audience. That she captured that moment wholeheartedly is undeniable, and West had high praise for the actress, saying:
“She’s on another planet for all that. This is just a complete tour de force and credit to Mia, who A, could do it six times in a row in a day, and B, all of them were good, and she didn’t mess it up. She came in so ready and prepared that we just got out of her way.”
Don’t miss Mia Goth’s performance in Pearl, in theaters now, ahead of the trilogy’s final installment, MaXXXine, coming soon. You can watch the trailer for Pearl below:
