SPOILER WARNING: The following article contains minor spoilers for MaXXXine. If you have not yet seen the film, proceed at your own risk!
MaXXXine at its most basic is a horror film set in 1980s Hollywood, but the larger truth is that it’s a love letter to the art of cinema. Detail and inspiration from movie history can be found everywhere in the work, from costuming to production design to cinematography. One of its great highlights in this regard, of course, is the fact that it actually shoots in and around Norman Bates’ iconic home from Alfred Hitchcock’s Psycho (one of the greatest horror movies of all time) – and it turns out that filing at the location was a make-or-break detail that required key behind-the-scenes moves to pull off.
As captured in the video at the top of this article, I had the chance to speak with writer/director Ti West and stars Giancarlo Esposito and Moses Sumney recently during the Los Angeles press day for MaXXXine, and among the subjects brought up in our conversation was shooting scenes with the Psycho house. West explained that the idea was written into his script, and it basically had to work out because he didn’t have any kind of backup plan in mind. Said the filmmaker,
We were very fortunate that… Even today, I still think about that because we had to get Universal to say ok, which they did. And then we had to get the Hitchcock estate to say okay. And it was in the script. So I remember it was the first thing Jacob Jaffke, the producer, that was the first task because I was like, ‘I don’t have a backup plan. There’s not a better location that we could go to and talk about.’
In MaXXXine, the titular protagonist played by Mia Goth first gets to see the Psycho house while touring around the Universal Pictures backlot, but she uses the fake home as a place of refuge in the second act when she is being chased by slimy private detective John Labat (Kevin Bacon). It might be a place of terror in Alfred Hitchcock’s classic movie, but similar to how a lot of cinephiles feel about the medium of film, the location becomes representative of safety.
As Ti West noted, having the opportunity to shoot in and around the famous Bates house also meant that MaXXXine could loop back to the Psycho references and homages that are featured in X – the film that launched the trilogy that the new horror movie caps. West continued,
Because we referenced that in X, it was such a payoff to come all the way back around and be there. And, you know, credit to both of them. I mean, we got this really… and it was very surreal to shoot there and to photograph it and to not be making Psycho, but to be photographing it. It was very surreal.
Including the house from Psycho was one way that Ti West demonstrated a love of cinema in his script for MaXXXine, but it was far from the only example. I asked about his process of injecting the full breadth of cinematic history into his work, and he explained that most of the details came together during the writing process and in an effort to provide a capstone to his trilogy:
Most of it was probably in the script. I mean, I think to set the third movie in Hollywood and to take it as far as we took it in scope-wise… this trilogy is sort of about cinema in a way. It’s about a lot of things.
Continuing, West went as far as to break down how all three films – X, Pearl and MaXXXine – examine different perspectives and impacts of the art form, explaining,
In X, they’re trying to make a movie and it’s what it’s like to make a low budget movie and be outside of the system and outside of Hollywood, but still be able to try to carve your own path via movies. And then Pearl is someone who’s sort of looking to the screen as a hopeful thing and how her life could be different if only she had a life like in the movies and the glamour. And then now in Maxine, she’s actually here; she’s in the belly of the beast. And you know, I just wanted to embrace that to its fullest.
While X isn’t presently available to stream on any of the best streaming services, you can currently watch Pearl with a Hulu subscription, and MaXXXine is now exclusively playing in theaters.