by Michael Gingold

“…And I am also in Pearl, I’ll have you know [laughs], though not as remarkably. I have one line; when Pearl goes into town, you can hear somebody saying, ‘It’s the end of the world!’ or something to that effect, so I got a voiceover in that one, too. I really think the trilogy is more about me than this Mia Goth character, quite honestly!”…

Read full reveal at Fangoria.com

By Ryan Bradley for the New York Times Magazine

Ryan Bradley is a writer in Los Angeles. Over the course of a few weeks, he interviewed Ti West several times, as well as many of West’s longtime friends and collaborators.

Martin Scorsese, a fan of West’s, wrote to me that he thought each film in the trilogy represented a “different type of horror, related to different eras in American moviemaking.” The first, “X,” is “the ’70s, the slasher era”; “Pearl” is “’50s melodrama in vivid saturated color; “MaXXXine” is “’80s Hollywood, rancid, desperate.” They are, Scorsese wrote, “three linked stories set within three different moments in movie culture, reflecting back on the greater culture.” By smuggling thoroughly modern ideas into films that were also steeped in the aesthetics of the past, Scorsese thought, West had done something bold and thoroughly cinematic.
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West grew up in the woodsy suburbs of Wilmington, Del., near the Bidens and a small private school called Tatnall, which he attended from kindergarten through 12th grade. The filmmaker and video-game writer Graham Reznick went there, too, and met West when they were in kindergarten. First they drew comics together; later they made the sorts of dumb films boys make, blowing up army men with firecrackers, recording it on a Hi8 camcorder. By their teens, they’d immersed themselves in their local video store, drawn to movies that seemed to them to exist in the same visual universe as what they had been getting up to in the woods — things like Peter Jackson’s “Bad Taste” or Sam Rami’s “Evil Dead,” scrappy films where you could practically see the guy holding the camera and deciding where to point it.
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In 1999, West and Reznick headed to New York City — Reznick to N.Y.U. and West to the School of Visual Arts, where he lucked into a class taught by the filmmaker Kelly Reichardt. She is, West says, “very much responsible in many ways for me having a career.” In high school, he saw a movie called “Habit,” made by and starring Reichardt’s friend and frequent producer Larry Fessenden. Reichardt floated the possibility of having Fessenden come in to talk to her class, but it kept not happening, and West kept bugging her about it, and finally, West says, “she was like, dude, here’s his number. Just go meet him.” West did. And when Fessenden needed an intern, Reichardt recommended West.

“Now, Larry will tell you the story that I used that internship to duplicate copies of my short film to send to film festivals, and he’s not wrong,” West told me, but when I asked Fessenden about this, he just laughed and said what he really remembered was taking West aside: “I said, ‘Listen, kid,’” — here he put on a mock showbiz voice — “‘when you finish with college, if you ever want to make a feature film, you come back to me, eh?’” In Fessenden’s telling, West showed up in his office something like three days after graduation. “And the thing that really shows you what’s so strategic and smart about Ti — he didn’t come in with one dream project. He came with, like, four different log lines.” One even had an environmental angle, which he knew Fessenden would be a sucker for. Fessenden greenlit the idea that day.
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West made several, often for very little money, and usually — in part because he is an only child and has trouble giving up control, but also because it’s cost-effective — he wrote and edited the movies too. One, about a trio of hunters who fear that they are being hunted, he made for about $10,000 in the Delaware woods. Another, about two friends investigating hauntings in a creepy old inn, was inspired in part by the creepy old inn he and the crew stayed in while making a different film entirely. The result, “The Innkeepers” (2011), was the first West film to catch Scorsese’s eye; after seeing it, he told me, “I thought: OK, I want to see everything this guy does.” The film reminded him of the work of Val Lewton, who was put in charge of RKO’s “horror unit” in the early 1940s and given a simple mandate: The films had to be under $150,000 and 70 minutes, and the studio heads would pick the titles; otherwise he could do what he wanted. The films he oversaw, starting with “Cat People” in 1942, were atmospheric and psychological, the tonal opposite of the screamy monster movies put out by Universal at the time. The amazing thing about “The Innkeepers,” Scorsese said, was that “you could eliminate the ghost story and the film would work without it, which echoes the way Val Lewton made his films: He always made sure that the core story had to stand on its own, apart from the supernatural elements.”

To Fessenden, it is an understanding of pacing — like West’s determination “to both frustrate the audience and then reward them” — that really ties together talent. “It’s also something you can only do if you’re defiantly independent,” he said. “Because, of course, in our blockbuster, Hollywood fare, everything is basically sort of commodified, and there are no challenging cinematic ideas because it’s all about the three-second cut.” I told him I was interested in what Reichardt made of West’s work, but he said she didn’t really watch new genre movies. He did, however, offer up a common thread between the two filmmakers, particularly in West’s early work. “I would argue — and this is maybe the whole point — they’re both interested in the texture and the timing, the slowing-down of time,” he said. “Now, Ti’s recent film is more bombastic, of course. But, at its core, the reason he’s known as a slow-burn guy is there’s a tremendous attention to everyday details. Ti’s build dread. Kelly’s, she builds maybe more like empathy. But there’s a similar thing going on.”

Read more at The New York Times Magazine

Ti West’s MAXXXINE opens TODAY

By Jeannette Catsoulis

With a framing device reminiscent of Tom Holland’s “Fright Night” and a hyperactive score, “The Roost” is a minimalist horror movie with more ambition than resources. Lovingly written and directed by Ti West, a novice filmmaker drunk on splatter and decomposing flesh, the movie treads a well-worn path as four friends (Karl Jacob, Sean Reid and real-life siblings Wil and Vanessa Horneff) find themselves stranded at a farmhouse in the middle of nowhere. There are bats in the barn, zombies under the floorboards and more agitated strings on the soundtrack than on a Celine Dion album. But the rules of the genre are clear: form a line and prepare to be slaughtered. Though the premise is rough, and the acting rougher — most members of the cast improve enormously as soon as gore is substituted for dialogue — “The Roost” proceeds with such youthful enthusiasm that its rawness is more charming than annoying. (Less appealing are the television-friendly breaks that halt the action at crucial moments.) Creatively shot and framed by the cinematographer Eric Robbins, who constructs gorgeously lighted centerpieces surrounded by strips of menacing black, the movie almost overcomes its low budget and threadbare plot. Almost.

Read at The New York Times

From the review by By Jeannette Catsoulis:

“MaXXXine” clearly demonstrates West’s boundless flair for a sleazy image and his commitment to depicting the insistent tug between puritanism and pornography. Wise to the sexism of the industry, he shows its consequence in the growing ruthlessness of Maxine’s ambition. As the soundtrack grinds out Frankie Goes to Hollywood and ZZ Top, West and his skilled cinematographer, Eliot Rockett, emulate the tacky aesthetics of the sexed-up ‘B’-thrillers that proliferated at the time, painting a classy glaze around the movie’s trashy heart. Making inspired use of a deglamorized Hollywood Boulevard and the back lot of Universal Studios, Rockett ensures that his cool tracking shots and throbbing, almost slimy blobs of neon and shadow are as essential to Maxine’s story as any line of dialogue.

Goth is, as usual, sublime. In “Pearl,” she played a fresh-faced ingénue whose dashed dreams curdle into insanity, and we wonder if Maxine is on the same path. Especially when we recall the Bette Davis quotation that West plants early in “MaXXXine”: “Until you’re known in my profession as a monster, you’re not a star.” Building on its predecessors, “MaXXXine” is telling us that the real monster is not a knife-wielding nutjob, but ambition itself.

read full review at The New York Times

From Bloody Disgusting: Chris Skotchdopole wrote and directed Crumb Catcher, with story by Skotchdopole, Larry Fessenden, Rigo Garay, and Doppelgänger Releasing will unleash the film in select theaters on July 19, 2024.

In Crumb Catcher, “Newlyweds Shane and Leah have their marriage tested when two weirdos with entrepreneurial zeal and a half-baked blackmail plot crash their honeymoon — they’re looking for investors for their latest invention and won’t take no for an answer.”

Rigo Garay, Ella Rae Peck, Lorraine Farris, and John Speredakos star in the home invasion horror movie that premiered at last year’s Fantastic Fest. Producers include Chadd Harbold, Larry Fessenden, Brian Devine, Bonnie Timmermann, and James W. Skotchdopole.

Go to Bloody Disgusting for the full scoop!

from the article by Amy Nicholson

…

“It’s a weird thing to point a camera at if you’re not making ‘Psycho,’” says West, 43, as he heads farther into the darkness, lighted only by a handful of eerie red lanterns. He calls his trilogy “movie-flavored movies” — artifice and dreams are the top notes. “X” is about scrappy strivers trying to break into the business; “Pearl,” about the dangers of buying into the fantasies onscreen. “MaXXXine,” the highest-profile film of West’s career, wrestles with accepting that Hollywood isn’t quite what one hopes.

“He was ready to deal with this kind of scale, and it’s definitely something he was hungry for,” Goth says, chiming in over Zoom. In addition to playing multiple roles across this mini-franchise, Goth co-wrote “Pearl” and executive-produced the last two films. “We just kind of manifested it,” she continues, “built this entire trilogy into existence. And it’s been incredible to see it unfold.”

West, however, tends to be scrupulously anti-hype. “It is not lost on me that there is a meta thing happening with these movies and me and Mia, and that’s gratifying and strange,” he says. “And it’s also something that we’ve never taken any time to stop and talk about. We were too busy making movies.”

While the marketing team at A24 is all in on “MaXXXine” — “I’ve never had a billboard before,” the director beams — West has been a legitimate filmmaker for well over a decade. His resume of well-regarded independent movies includes the 2016 cowboy vengeance drama “In a Valley of Violence” with Ethan Hawke and John Travolta, plus a string of festival hits like 2009’s “The House of the Devil,” which disposed of a pre-celeb Greta Gerwig early on in a marvelously nasty Hitchcock-esque shock.

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West spent his youth in Wilmington, Del., renting five VHS tapes for $5 on Fridays at his local video store. One weekend, he rented “Habit,” a grungy but brilliant microbudget vampire flick made by filmmaker Larry Fessenden. Shortly after, he moved to New York and took a film class taught by director Kelly Reichardt, who’d played a cameo in the film. Reichardt introduced the two and Fessenden became West’s mentor, eventually producing his debut feature, “The Roost,” shot exactly 20 years ago with more moxie than money.

Read full profile at The Los Angeles Times

MAXXINE (director Ti West) opens July 5
She’s a star. After Pearl‘s detour into the past, MaXXXine resumes the story of final girl Maxine Minx (Mia Goth) years after the bloody events of X. More dead-set (pun intended) on fame and fortune than ever, Maxine carves out a name for herself in the 1980s adult film industry. Simultaneously, the Night Stalker serial killer haunts Los Angeles. An all-star cast joins Goth for this third installment, including Emmy Award-winner Elizabeth Debicki, Moses Sumney, Kevin Bacon, Giancarlo Esposito, Michelle Monaghan, Lily Collins, and Grammy Award-nominee Halsey.

Created by numerous GEP alums Ti West, Jacob Jaffke, Peter Phok, Eliot Rocket, Neal Jonas; Featuring Fessenden as “the guard”

CRUMB CATCHER (director Chris Skotchdopole) opens July 19

CRUMB CATCHER (director Chris Skotchdopole) Opens July 19
What happens when your wedding isn’t the happiest day of your life? Ask newlyweds Shane (Rigo Garay) and Leah (Ella Rae Peck), who barely have time to enjoy their honeymoon before an elderly married couple, John (John Speredakos) and Rose (Lorraine Farris), invade their remote cabin. After decades of entrepreneurial failure, the latter pair plan to fund their dreams through blackmail. Crumb Catcher is director Chris Skotchdopole‘s debut, who co-wrote the screenplay with Larry Fessenden and star Garay.

a Glass Eye Pix production created by numerous GEP pals.

read full preview at Collider.com

CRUMB CATCHER features GEP stalwarts Rigo Garay and John Speredakos,
BLACKOUT’s Ella Rae Peck and Lorraine Farris.
A Gigantic Pictures presentation of a Glass Eye Pix production
distributed by Doppelganger.

COMING SOON!

First-time director Chris Skotchdopole is putting a new spin on the home invasion thrillerwith his debut feature Crumb Catcher. Premiered at Fantastic Fest last year, the film follows a pair of uneasy newlyweds whose honeymoon is crashed by two strangers hawking their latest invention, the titular Crumb Catcher. They have no intention of leaving until they get their money and quickly overstay their welcome in an uncomfortable and deeply troubling visit. Collider is excited to share the official trailer for the film, which teases their cringe-inducing attempts at selling the invention and the deeper horror behind their arrival…

Read More at Collider.com