Ti West’s MaXXXine is now in cinemas and we chatted to the director himself about the film’s ending.
Warning! Spoilers for X and MaXXXine.
Ti West concludes his X trilogy with MaXXXine, a genre-bending, steely 80s thriller that brings Maxine Minx’s story to an end.
At the end of X, Pearl promised Maxine that she’s going to end up just like her: bitter and murderous, yearning for success that would never come.
Going into MaXXXine, you might think West was interested in exploring the similarities between Pearl and Maxine, both played by Mia Goth in the trilogy. Instead, MaXXXine takes a different route and gives Maxine a happy ending, at least in some ways. During a recent interview, Film Stories asked West if he ever considered exploring Pearl’s words from X in more detail, either in MaXXXine or a potential sequel.
“When making and writing MaXXXine, there was a fork in the road where the end of the movie could have gone [in] a different direction,” West explains.
“At the end of the day, one of the things that I think is appealing about X is that, as subversive as it may be, it’s not a nihilistic movie,” the director says.
Ultimately, West decided to move away from putting Maxine through a similar storyline to Pearl’s.
“To end this trilogy or to take Maxine into the future, and have her end up like Pearl is not really fair to the character and is also not really like an outlook that I’m that compelled by for her as a character. It would be so cynical [if] everyone ends up miserable. It’s not how I look at things.”
If MaXXXine had sent the character down the same path as Pearl, West describes that version as “too nihilistic” for him.
He adds: “With someone like Pearl who did not end up achieving her dreams and is quite resentful for it, quite envious, quite violent for it, that’s not necessarily what’s going to happen to everybody. It’s like a cautionary tale to some people.”
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