Interview: Ti West on The House of the Devil, The Innkeepers, and More

There’s something both odd and reassuring that the most hyped young horror director in America today is a full-blown classicist, but that’s the case with Ti West, whose two major films, 2009’s The House of the Devil and The Innkeepers, which opens on Friday, operate on the decidedly old-school logic that things are occasionally scarier when they’re not seen, that a dolly down a hall can reach a level of visceral terror that 10,000 exploding CGI heads could never hope to achieve. Thankfully—like Carpenter, Craven, and Dante before him—West also has no issue with indulging in a little bad taste; as such, both films build to gleefully Id-iotic eruptions of genre goodness. Slant recently spoke with West about his new film, the end of celluloid, genre filmmaking, being fed up with America, and why everyone in the world should be talking about Louis C.K.

One of the most striking points of continuity between The Innkeepers and The House of the Devil was the degree to which they both come out of economic desperation—here it’s in the death of the small, family-owned business.

Kind of, I think it’s more existential, with where you fit in with things. Which made it to me a good parallel with ghosts who are just stuck somewhere. There’s the idea of, “Oh, what do you do?”…“I work at the hotel”…“No, what do you really do?”…“Well, I work at the hotel…is there something wrong with that?” Questioning yourself in that way, but yes, there’s certainly a theme of a place like the Yankee Pedlar going out of business because the Holiday Inn moved in.

There’s the joke about the Courtyard By Marriot. It seems like this is the kind of movie that couldn’t exist in a world without Yankee Pedlars, I couldn’t imagine this in a Courtyard By Marriot.

No, it wouldn’t work.

The Yankee Pedlar is where your crew stayed while you were shooting The House of the Devil.

When we were making The House of the Devil, we stayed here because it was cheap. We drove about 30 minutes to set everyday to make our satanic horror movie, and then weirder stuff would happen back at the hotel and it became more interesting. The whole town believes it’s haunted, the whole staff believes it’s haunted, the cast and crew believed it was haunted—all this weird stuff would happen. I only thought of it as funny stories, because we were making a horror movie, but when I wanted to make a ghost story a year and a half later I was trying to think of an idea and, well, we lived one. I know the location, so we could totally make that movie, and it would be a weird, personal movie to go back there and make it; fortunately they let us shoot there and we went back. So we went to this weird, tax-incentive state to make a movie in the middle of nowhere and then we went back again, which was so bizarre, to do two tours at the Yankee Pedlar.

So you weren’t thinking about it at all while you were working on The House of the Devil?

No, not at all. I was far too stressed out to be thinking about something like that. It popped into my head, and then I talked to Joe Swanberg and he thought it sounded like a funny movie so I thought, “I’m just going to go write it.” And I wrote, not even thinking that if the Peddler had said no it would have been a waste of time. Thankfully they said yes, so we went and made it. You can go to Connecticut right now and think you just walked into the movie.

Would you have found a way to make it if they had said no?

No. I would have had to rewrite it to be in a Courtyard By Marriot and then who cares? It was discussed, but there just wasn’t anywhere else.

You mentioned Joe Swanberg. What was the chronology of you making this and acting in You’re Next and Silver Bullets?

Silver Bullets started when I was doing sound on The House of the Devil and it finished when I was in post on The Innkeepers. We were going to shoot something on the set of The Innkeepers [Ti plays a horror director shooting a werewolf film starring Kate Lyn Sheil in Silver Bullets], where it would have been the movie within Joe’s movie, but it was too much; we had to say, “Get the fuck out, we’ve got a movie to make.” You’re Next was later; we were working on it last spring.

So this is the first film you’ve finished since acting in others where you weren’t the director. Do you think that had any influence on you as a filmmaker?

No, because Joe’s style is such its own entity, and I was also basically playing a parody of myself in his movie. I don’t think so, it could have subconsciously, but I never thought of it that way.

One of the defining traits of your movies so far has been their texture. What are your thoughts on continuing to shoot on film?

Well, film’s days are numbered and it is what it is. I shot this on 35mm, and I was reminded every day that it cost us an extra $150,000 to do that. But I never knew where that money would go. Where else am I going to spend it? Can I keep it? We made the movie in 17 days, which is nearly impossible, but we didn’t need another day; we even finished early every day, so it was a really effortless shoot in that regard. So I didn’t need more time. I guess I could have gotten some crane shots, but was that really worth not shooting on film? I couldn’t find a reason why it would have been better. This movie, shot on 35mm and released on 35mm, it’s got to be my last one; if not, it’s one of the last ones, at least as far as I’m concerned.

So you think whatever you make next will be shot digitally?

It’s getting so hard to make the argument. It was hard on this one, but on the next one it’s going to be incredibly hard. If I were to make a giant studio movie, it wouldn’t be that hard. I like the alchemy of it. I like the process of film better. Because I don’t like playback, I don’t like people huddling around the monitor. I don’t like that at all. That to me harshes the mellow. I prefer there to be this mystery to what we’re doing and we have to believe that we’re doing our jobs, and I think having an HD monitor and an Alexa, everyone has an opinion then and I just don’t care, I want to keep making the movie that we set out to make. I think the vibe just would not be there. But I try not to be so retro—like film, just for the sake of doing it. I do like it, I think it’s better, but the argument is getting tough.

Do you think shooting on film had any influence on the actors, or the freedom of the improvisation?

I’m not sure how the actors felt, but at the end of the shoot we almost ran out of film. So I was paranoid on the last day that we were going to run out of film, and I talked to Pat [Healy] and Sara [Paxton] and was like, “Let’s just try to be really, really serious today.” Of course, they think I’m being like, “You guys are terrible,” but I didn’t think anything of it, I just thought I was stressing out. So while we’re working I’m thinking to myself, “Okay, we can do two takes of that.” Literally, there would have been no more movie, when we ran out it was done. This was the whole scene in the basement with the contact with the ghost, which I would have loved to shoot a lot of footage of, and we just couldn’t. I think we finished with two rolls left, but there was a conversation where I asked if we could get more just in case, and it was just flat out, “No.”

It also impacted the scene where Pat goes outside in the rain. I would have covered it in a whole bunch of ways, but we just couldn’t because it suddenly started raining. So we just did that one shot, and ultimately it’s one of the best shots in the movie, but at the time we didn’t even know if it was in focus. We didn’t even get dailies of that until after we wrapped, and we knew we weren’t going to; that whole day was a toss up. If that footage had come back soft or fucked up, we were doomed. I don’t know what we would have done. I was really paranoid about that. So those are two things about film that are scary; it could have been a real problem twice, but it wasn’t, so let’s keep doing it.

You mentioned wanting to avoid a retro fetish for film earlier; The House of the Devil received so much praise for those elements, and they’re almost entirely absent here. Was that something you were looking to actively avoid?

Well, I accidentally got a lot of credit for The House of the Devil being retro. We were making a movie that took place in the ’80s, so I just looked at it as a period piece, and I didn’t want anybody to be able to pick on the movie for not being accurate—“You didn’t even do the period! It sucks! You don’t have any money!”—so I just tried really hard to make that not an issue, so that no one could poke holes in that. I wasn’t doing it to be Mr. Retro, I just did what anyone would do who was making an ’80s movie. But then it turned into this focal point where everyone is saying how amazingly we did it and we were kind of just like, I know. [laughs] So we worked really hard on that, but we just backdoored our way into the praise. I don’t want to do it again, but I do always like making movies in the ’70s or ’80s because of the props that I get to take home with me.

Whatever retro feeling is here seems like the product of the tension coming out of camera movements or stillness, rather than constantly relying on hard edits.

Camera movement and placement and framing are all really important to me, I try really hard there; it’s why I operate the camera myself. Those are the things that excite me about movies. If I tried to make something in that style, with jump cuts, I think it would stink, I don’t think I’d be able to do it nearly as well.

Certain scenes even seem like they were scripted around a specific camera movement.

Yeah, when I write it’s in my head, but the night before I sit down and make these color-coded, specific shot lists and I try to be very particular about that. But from writing it I always knew the kind of lenses and camera movements that I wanted to use, and the push-ins and weird things like that. In hindsight, I wish I had pushed it a little more. In the very beginning, I had Sara acting really ridiculous and there were so many takes that on their own were incredible, but in the movie they stuck out. Same things happened in the first days, where we were shooting these really kooky shots, kooky wide angles, and I wanted it to be what the movie was, and I could feel it being like, “No, dude, chill out a little bit.” So I think that while it’s aesthetically specific, I originally wanted it to be a little more, for lack of a better term, Gilliamish, or like Heavenly Creatures. But the movie, as you shoot it, just sort of dictates things like that. So I would do things like that and then think, “This is distracting and stupid and messing up the movie. It should just be her head, normally, instead of me trying to jazz that up.” So I backed off on those things. There are still some of them in there, but it didn’t make sense to have it in every short for what the story was.

There’s one low, fast tracking shot that turns a corner into a room—

Yeah, that scene with her in the laundry room was the very first thing we shot. So you can see where I was at the very beginning. It would have been that way anyway, because that’s what the scene called for, but it was extra that.

Here and in The House of the Devil there’s a sense that the camera, confined to a single location, is opening up that space with its movement.

I try to always play with the frame enough to not make it feel too claustrophobic, because really it’s just an issue of money with these single-location movies. If I had more money I’d make a movie that took place in a lot of locations, but I don’t. The next movie I’m going to make is in space, with people stuck on a space ship.

So that’s a sci-fi horror film?

Thriller, paranoia—but basically a horror movie in space.

So many directors who are identified as genre filmmakers early in their careers tend to stay there, whereas people who start off in more straight dramatic movies can make their occasional forays without being tied to it. Do you ever see yourself moving away from horror at any point?

I think The Innkeepers is a romantic comedy until the ghost shows up. But yes, I would like to. Right now I’m lucky enough that if I write a horror movie I can probably get it made on a low-budget scale, so it’s worth doing. The movies that I’ve written that aren’t horror are remarkably troubling to get made, because generally they need more money. They have more locations, more people. Horror, you can set it in one location and have it not be a problem at all. You can make a movie with three people in a hotel and people will think that that totally makes sense. It’s something I’m interested in. I don’t think of myself as totally a horror guy. And I think each of my movies has equal amounts that aren’t horror, so especially with this movie, a majority of it is this quirky romantic comedy.

What’s your process like in integrating those elements with the horror elements?

It’s a hard thing for me to articulate, because that’s just what the movie was, that’s what we made. If that’s how my films have turned out, it’s just because that’s something I’m better at than other things in my life. Everyone always asks if it’s hard to balance the humor and the horror, and it’s not; we try to make it funny sometimes and scary sometimes. It makes sense in my head that the two will meet. It could have been a disaster; I’m sure some people watch it and think it sucks, that it’s not funny and it’s not scary. But I think most people feel that it works—that it’s funny, and then it becomes scary—and I think the benefit of that is that when it’s funny you like the characters, you relate to them, and then when it gets scary it raises the stakes, because you’re invested in them.

Does one half of that equation come first when you’re writing?

No. I wrote the film in three days. I just ploughed through it. I don’t think I’ve ever taken more than 10 days to write a movie, but this one, because I didn’t have to imagine anything set-wise, since it was based on a particular place, the real writing was just about carving out the characters and their dialogue.

One of the film’s greatest strengths to me is its ability to get across a lot of what’s wrong with living in America right now without ever playing as an overtly political film.

I don’t think it’s so much about what’s shitty in America, but I think when people see things changing, and they don’t like it they should discuss it more than they do right now. Everybody sees independent film getting smaller, they see video stores going out of business, they see movie theaters going out of business, and I don’t know if we can stop that, but at the same time we can talk about it, and figure out why that is—figure out why people aren’t supporting movies that everyone agrees are good. Everyone says they like a movie, well, then why didn’t it make any money? Why didn’t you go see it? I don’t know the answer to that, but I think we’ve become very passive consumers in that we expect everything to come to us, because the things that have the most money do come to you. The smaller, esoteric things, which don’t have that—or the family-run business, as an analogy. You can buy a screwdriver at Walmart, or you can go to the hardware store with the dude you know, and maybe it’s out of your way, but it’s a good thing to do. Maybe that’s not always feasible, but at the same is it really not? You have to realize that it does make a difference when you do, and I’m not sure that people do. I think people just think that they’re at Walmart so they’ll just get it there. Everything has everything now, so the specialty things, whether it’s movies or businesses, are hurting. It’s something that people look back on and think, “I used to love when those places where around.” Well, you stopped going. If you didn’t stop going, it would still be around; they’ve been selling screwdrivers forever, go in and buy one.

So what do you think all of that says about the paths for distributing films going forward?

I think it depends on your fanbase. Any time you can create something and directly reach the people who are interested in it and cut out all the middlemen, that’s ideal. Everyone who should benefit benefits, and that’s great. It’s hard to do that though, and anything that’s hard people don’t like to do. I think the real beacon of hope is what happened with Louis C.K. I wish that was talked about everywhere at all times. It’s different, because it’s comedy, so people are already aware of him (I doubt many people bought that special because they just came across it online), but the people who are already interested heard about it and thought it was worth five bucks. But I think what he’s done with his show, and what he did with that, is gangster, and it should be what people are talking about all day, everyday. And good on him for showing the PayPal receipt, and saying here’s what I’m doing with this million dollars. Nobody does that, everybody is terrified to do that, and I think that’s really impressive.