If releasing two movies in six months is already considered a success, also imagine that one of them was a surprise hit of the season and the other was an award-winning one. praise Martin Scorsese. The class of 2022 is alive WestHe is a distinguished member of that generation of American independent directors (others, Adam Wingard, Simon Barrett or the Radio Silence collective) who ten and a half years ago taught us how to achieve maximum terror with minimum budget.
The “sleeper” mentioned above was “X”, his personal tribute to the “exploitation” cinema of the seventies. mia gothic flaunting a double role: a preacher’s daughter turns into a porn actress and an old murderer. The second focuses ‘Pearl’ (The Official Fantàstic Contest) is, as West explains, the story of “a young woman who wants a life different from the one she’s been given and will do whatever it takes to get it.” They A mix of fifties melodrama style with ‘slasher’ theme or slashing fascinated the aforementioned Scorsese, who described the film as such. “wild, fascinating, and deeply – but profoundly – disturbing”.
West found an ideal collaborator in Goth to expand the universe. “During the filming of ‘X’ we worked side by side on the creation of Pearl. You didn’t learn much from her in that first movie; she was the mysterious villain. But for Mia to know who she was, she needed to know her past. She was acting, we formed the character little by little. Without those conversations, Pearl wouldn’t have been who she was, so it was only natural for Mia to join as the scriptwriter for the second movie.” Soon there will be a third ‘MaXXXine’, a direct sequel to ‘X’.
the value of marketing
Hollywood’s Golden Age is not the most common reference site in the West. His revelation at a critical level, ‘devil’s house’‘X’, from 2009, was like ‘X’, a thinly veiled tribute to the flavors of 1970s horror movies: “I thought about things I liked and hadn’t seen in a long time, stories about ‘babysitters,’ some demonic threats, and the like”. ‘Seed of the devil’ or, looking further back, ‘Thriller!’ they reappeared ‘guests’, the first in a series of (remarkable) films that didn’t get the repercussions it deserved. “The only way to achieve success, let’s say ‘mainstream’ is spending money on you. You have to spend it on advertising. Those movies were small and didn’t have the backing of a distributor like ‘X’. A24, which can spend a good amount of money on marketing and advertising. I wouldn’t be here without his support.”
Series director and very honored
After embracing the western in ‘Valley of Vengeance’, West focused on directing episodic television, almost always of the fantasy genre, for six years (2015-2021). Is it out of necessity or to enjoy working like an old craftsman and changing challenges? “I had a lot of fun and will continue to make television,” he affirmed, emphatically. “There’s something so exciting about sneaking into someone else’s drama almost overnight and helping them find what they’re looking for. You also learn a lot. After making fifteen episodes in five years, there’s not a single movie set that I don’t know about.”
Of those ten and a half episodes, it remains above all his contribution to the poetic sci-fi series Historias del Loop: “My contribution, and the series in general. Nathaniel Halpern, the show’s ‘showrunner,’ has great talent and wrote every episode. The scripts and the actors were great. Much more People should have seen it.”