Ti West

“To me, when you watch a Hitchcock movie and as soon as theBernard Hermannscore comes in, you're aware. You know it's there. The music is larger than life; it's a part of the movie's identity.”

“I get a lot of movie stars telling me they saw my movie and then I'm like, 'You know I offered that movie to you, you said no, now you love it.' That's just the name of the game.”

“I feel like a realist about Hollywood. To be cynical about it is to some degree fair, but I don't think it's useful.”

“If 'X' is a movie about someone who wants to get into the movie business from the outside, and 'Pearl' is about someone who looks at the movie business as hopeful, 'MaXXXine' is a movie where you're here now. What's it actually like?”

“Once I wrote 'Pearl,' it was clear this movie should be called 'Pearl.'”

“I grew up with Westerns and it's just always something I've wanted to do.”

“I've had every minimum-wage job known to man - and I don't want to go back to minimum-wage jobs, but I have a fondness for that. So I wanted to make a movie that encapsulated that feeling of being stuck at work, and the apathy that comes with it.”

“I always thought of 'X' as one era, and the characters in that era are being affected by the cinema of the era. 'Pearl' was a different era, and the characters were also affected by the cinema of the era.”

“I've always had this obsession with Satanic Panic and I like the idea of the mysticism, where, like, religion and horror meet. I think there is something very spooky about that.”

“Most of the time when you see movies with cults, they're the bad guys. And they're the bad guys from the moment they show up and they just get worse. They're always seen as these crazy nuts, these violent people. They're just seen as villains. To me, when you look at actual cults that's not really the case. They don't look like that.”

“I'm very proud of both movies, and I'm proud of how the movies are totally different in that you don't need to see 'X' to appreciate 'Pearl.' They enrich each other, but they are stand-alones.”

“I think, somewhat historically, for me, the people who like my movies the most are people that are on the fence about horror.”

“Much of the stuff I relate to is from the Eighties, at least cinematically.”

“It's important to let everybody understand where people are at in the movie, in the sense of the landscape. You need people to invest in this world, so you need to give a sense of who, what, and where things are.”

“Show business is an impersonal and relatively savage business, and it's always evolving. If you're lucky enough to have a day when you're lauded for something, you have to enjoy it while it's there.”

“I made short films, showed them to filmmaker Larry Fessenden who liked them enough to give me some money to make a feature. We pulled it off by the skin of our teeth and have been trying to keep the ball rolling ever since. It's a grind.”

“The thing is that the studio system's great, but it also sucks. There's really good people in the studio system, but there's way more worse people. So you have to find the good people. And the good people are busy, because they're generally doing good people stuff, so you gotta get in line to work with them.”

“Yeah, I think to make art and horror successful you need a strong contrast. Otherwise, it just becomes titillation and shock value. That's not interesting to me.”

“I don't know if I'm directly inspired, but I'm quite fond of Polanski's trilogy of 'Repulsion,' 'The Tenant,' and 'Rosemary's Baby.'”

“Personally, I like to settle into movies, and that's why I like long title sequences.”