IT CHAPTER TWO
With the Losers’ Club all grown up into the likes of Jessica Chastain and James McAvoy, and with darker themes, stronger scares and a pissed-off Pennywise, It Chapter Two promises adult content. Total Film quivers on set of the horror event of the decade.
Total Film goes on set of the most anticipated horror of the year to watch a man being barfed on. Mind your (clown-sized) shoes.
Agreat deal of work goes into ensuring a hobo vomits into a handsome leading man’s face in just the right way.
It’s day 77 of It Chapter Two’s mammoth 87-day shoot and Total Film stands on a soundstage at Pinewood Studios in Toronto, watching James Ransone, who plays germophobe Eddie Kaspbrak, get blasted with puke again and again and again. We’re talking a whole afternoon’s worth of takes.
“It’s getting gross!” chirps director Andrés ‘Andy’ Muschietti as he walks by, flashing TF a grin before returning to the monitor to call action on, you guessed it, a bucketload of barf smashing Ransone right in the fizzog. In between takes, DoP Checco Varese fusses to ensure everything is lit just perfectly – all the better to view every chunk of upchuck.
“Andy is an aestheticist,” he explains, “and every frame is adjusted at his will for its maximum effect. It’s fun, a lot of fun, creating the contamination of the character. Andy pushes us to our limit. We started and he said, ‘Can we do 120 frames?’ I said, ‘Ugh. Yes.’ He said, ‘Oh, if you said yes to 120, can we do 300?’ I’m like, ‘Yes we can. Of course.’”
So there you have it – viewers can expect to see a man spattered in spew at 300 frames per second for crystal clarity. But there’s more to this scene than merely putting punters off their popcorn. The set is the basement of the Keene pharmacy, where asthmatic Eddie (played by Shazam!’s Jack Dylan Grazer) picks up his medication in the 2017 movie and receives a nasty shock. In this sequel, Eddie returns to the Keene Pharmacy 27 years later, only to be traumatised once more.
“Eddie basically goes into his worst nightmare,” says Barbara Muschietti, co-writer, producer and, as she never fails to remind him, Andy’s big sister (“I was a fan of Stephen King before he was a fan – I’m 18 months older, so I would get first dibs with the books,” she laughs). “Eddie’s in the basement of the pharmacy, and he has a body-tobody fight with the hobo from the first film, who, like in the first movie, vomits on him. But – and I’m going to be very careful in telling you this – when he is an adult fighting the hobo, he notices something that is pivotal to the group finding out how to destroy Pennywise. It’s a funny, brutal scene, but at the same time it’s incredibly important because it’s a big clue.”
Varese is standing at the monitors scrutinising side-by-side comparisons of young Eddie and adult Eddie being drowned in sick. He seems satisfied.
TF wanders over and asks if the green lighting of the pharmacy is perhaps a nod to the lurid colour schemes of Italian horror maestro Mario Bava – it makes sense given Muschietti, an Argentinian, has Italian ancestry, and is a proud connoisseur of the horror genre. Varese shakes his head.
“No, but he said, ‘Remember the bathroom in Se7en? I think I like the style.’ But he’s not like Quentin [Tarantino], who puts the camera between the legs and it’s an homage to Sergio Leone. Andy takes an idea, and models it to his will. We don’t invent anything. He mainly communicates through drawing. He did a lot of illustrations, and the illustrations had colours. He communicates by saying, ‘This is what I want…’”
Watching Muschietti beam as he orders yet another hit of hurl, it’s clear he feels little pressure helming this supersized sequel, but is instead having a blast. Presumably the first movie’s bonanza box office has awarded him greater freedom for this second chapter?
‘It’s a funny, brutal scene, but at the same time it’s an incredibly important clue’ barbara musChIeTTI
“Well, the budget was pretty tight on the first one, and there were things I couldn’t do,” he says. “On this one, there’s a bigger budget. The studio is definitely more trusting. The executives hardly came, and we got very little notes. Also, I have more days to shoot…”
Which is his cue to wander off to supervise more takes. An aestheticist and a perfectionist, he won’t stop until he’s the captured the definitive shot of projectile vomit drenching a leading man’s face.
Doubling d own
Never mind It taking $700.4m at the worldwide box office, the highest total ever recorded by a horror film. All it took was the opening weekend – $123,403,419 – in early September 2017 for It Chapter Two to become an inevitability. It was great news for the Muschiettis, who had taken over the first film from Cary Fukunaga in early 2015 and, like him, always envisioned adapting the 1,116 pages of Stephen King’s 1986 source novel over two films: the first concentrating on seven kids fighting an ancient, cosmic, shapeshifting evil whose default setting is that of a friendly grinning clown in their hometown of Derry, Maine, in 1985; and the second zooming in on those same protagonists as they return to Derry 27 years later, now in their late thirties, to finish the job. Yes, a sequel was great news, but it came with one major problem.
“The [second] film was dated the day that we opened Chapter One,” shudders Barbara Muschietti. “We got a call from the studio saying, ‘Chapter Two is opening on 6 September 2019.’
Me and Andy were like, ‘OK!’ And suddenly, we were like, ‘Oh. The script.’”
Given the first chapter was announced by Warner Bros in 2009 and took eight years to make it to the screen, having precisely two years to finish the sequel was a serious challenge. To make matters worse, Andy and Barbara were already hard at work on Locke & Key, the 10-part Netflix adaptation of the comic series by Joe Hill (son of Stephen King), while their writer Gary Dauberman was immersed in various Conjuring spin-offs, including prepping for his directorial debut Annabelle Comes Home.
“We were all busy, but we were all working towards the script,” continues Barbara Muschietti. “The fact is, when we got to pre-production, we did not have the script where it should have been. So basically, we were preproducing without a finished script. It’s not rare. I’m not speaking about anything that’s terrible. Every producer has to do it at one point or another. And then when Gary had to go to start Annabelle Comes Home, we got Jason Fuchs to start working on the script. He did an amazing job. With Andy, he worked like a horse. He came to Toronto for a month, and every day, every day, every day…”
Also to take on board was Stephen King’s input. King was a big fan of the first movie, thus opening a communication channel between himself and the filmmakers for Chapter Two. The legendary author normally keeps his hands clean of adaptations, but this time he read the first draft, loved it, and made a few notes, including requesting one all-new scene be inserted (no spoilers here). Given the Muschiettis and Dauberman all grew up devouring King’s fiction, they were keen to oblige. In fact, Andy Muschietti still comes over all wide-eyed when recalling King’s benediction of the first film.
“It was absolutely huge,” he says. “For me, it would be unthinkable when I was 12 or 13. He was one of my biggest heroes. It’s incredible. Very rewarding. The way I understand stories was very much shaped by my experiences with his work. The way
I can combine tones has a lot to do with having a learning experience from reading his books, because, you know, he has all the elements.”
Adult viewing
Wrangling the script was just one of the hefty issues confronting the Muschiettis. Another was which actors to cast as the adult versions of Bill, Beverly, Ben, Richie, Eddie, Mike and Stan, played in the first movie, respectively, by Jaeden Martell, Sophia Lillis, Jeremy Ray Taylor, Finn Wolfhard, Jack Dylan Grazer, Chosen Jacobs and Wyatt Oleff. Together they form The Losers’ Club, and it is their chemistry and likeability that accounts for the huge appeal of
It as much, if not more, than evil clown Pennywise. Luckily, one of Andy Muschietti’s pet peeves made the casting somewhat easier for him…
‘On this one, there’s a bigger budget. The studio is definitely more trusting. Also, I have more days to shoot…’ andy musChIeTTI
“I get turned off by movies that have time jumps where the same character doesn’t look alike – the kid has a different nose or a different ear or whatever,” he says with palpable disdain. “For me, the physical appearance was important. And then, of course, the energy. Bill Hader was, for me, one of the first ones I thought of, because the personality of Richie Tozier [the group’s joker] is exactly what Bill Hader is, you know?”
One of the first that Muschietti thought of, yes, but not the first. That, naturally, was Jessica Chastain as Beverly – naturally because she’s both the spit of Sophia Lillis and a dear friend of the Muschiettis having been the star of their debut feature, Mama.
Cast ing calls
“It was even before releasing the first one,” confirms Andy Muschietti. “The tracking was good, so we started talking about doing the second one before it was released, and, in a vaguely unofficial manner, we screened the movie to Jessica. She liked it and she was in immediately. She spilled her wine at one of the scares, so it was a success!”
Chastain smiles at the memory. “I thought it was just going to be me going to the film, but Andy and Barbara are there, so they’re like, ‘Welcome.’ Barbara hands me a glass of red wine, and then I sit down, and Andy sits to my right, and Barbara sits to my left. I was like, “I really hope I like this movie!” But within the first five minutes, with that scary scene in the sewer, I jumped. The red wine went everywhere, and my fate was sealed.”
In reality, Chastain’s fate was sealed long before that, even. “Andy texted me a picture right after he cast Sophia as Beverly,” she recalls. “There was a side-by-side of Sophia and me. I think he just wrote, ‘What do you think?’”
So that was Beverly and Richie sorted. “Richie’s a very sarcastic, cynical guy; I enjoyed playing him,” says Hader, who’s one of the most sarcastic, cynical and hilarious people TF has ever met. Asked what his biggest fear is – that which It would exploit in real life – he replies, “Food poisoning. I saw an uncle go through that once, and I was like, ‘Fuck that.’ I watched him eat Indian food, and it came out of both ends.
So I guess I’m using Uncle Mike shitting himself [to get into Richie’s headspace].” For Ben, Eddie, Mike and Stanley, the Muschiettis cast, respectively, Jay Ryan, James Ransone (who spends much of the movie without vomit on his face), Isaiah Mustafa and Andy Bean. Which leaves the nominal leader of the Losers’ Club, Bill Denbrough.
Andy Muschietti’s eyes sparkle. “I’m a big fan of James McAvoy,” he says. “I think he’s one of the greatest actors of his generation. And there was a certain level of physical appearance with Jaeden – you know, the eyes, the nose, the neck.”
Total Film exits the cool, cavernous soundstage and walks across baking concrete under a white featureless sky to track down McAvoy in his trailer. The 40-year-old Scot is, as ever, relaxed, modest and charming. “I guess Bill is the leader, isn’t he?” he smiles. “I don’t know if I carry that off.” And how is it to take over a character from a kid? “I watched the movie and studied Jaeden’s acting,” he says, “I copied some stuff, and I didn’t copy other stuff. I think you can get a bit too obsessed with making everything the exact same, and most people don’t act anything like they did when they were 12 years old. But Jaeden is a beautifully open performer. He has a lot of vulnerability. And those are things I think I have as well – I’ve been trading off them for 20-odd years.” He ponders. “The driving force behind everything that happens to Bill, his Achilles’ heel, is to do with guilt.”
Guilt over the death of his younger brother Georgie – it’s the sewer incident that opens the first film and thus accounted for Chastain’s wayward wine – and guilt for being a hack writer (Bill is King’s avatar in the novel, just as Gordie Lachance is his avatar in novella The Body, adapted as Stand By Me, a story that shares much in common with It).
“It is a story about the greatness of childhood in comparison to adulthood, which is basically the death of fantasy, the death of imagination, the death of a lot of things you have as a child that you lose as an adult,” nods Andy Muschietti. “And on the other hand, it’s about trauma. I wanted to focus on that for the second movie: the traumas that we carry along as adults, that were generated in childhood. So what you see is that these characters are damaged in a way that we probably didn’t suspect in the first one.
james mCavoy ‘The driving force behind everything that happens to Bill, his Achilles’ heel, is to do with guilt’
There’s a pretty interesting palette of adult fears in this one. I think the grown-up audience will identify with this movie a little more. Not that it didn’t happen in the first one – everyone can relate to childhood fears; we were all children – but there are deeper layers in this one.”
He offers a small, sly smile. “And we are reopening events… we are opening a window to things that happened to them during the summer of 1989 that we didn’t see in the first movie. We didn’t see it because they repressed it.”
That’s right – not all of It Chapter Two is set in 2016, and will instead fluctuate between the two timelines, with all of the tremendous kid cast from the 2017 movie returning to shoot many new sequences. It Chapter Two aims to be the Godfather: Part II of killer clown movies, unspooling both forwards and backwards to deepen psychology and season scares.
“One of the things that I loved very much about the book was the dialogue between the timelines, which is something that we agreed not to do on the first movie,” says the director. “The purpose of the first movie was just focusing on the characters without slapping the audience with time jumps. But in the second one, I really wanted that to happen. But the way to do it was integrating those flashbacks into the main plot. They’re not just memories. So the challenge for us was trying to get those flashbacks organically into the story, so they’re part of the journey.”
All well and good, but two years, in real life, is a hell of a long time for kids hitting puberty. “Well, it’s better to shoot it two years later than five years later,” grins Muschietti. “But in those two years, they grew up quite a bit. Not all of them. Sophia looks exactly the same. Jaeden looks pretty much the same. Finn grew up quite a bit, and he’s a tall guy. But from the beginning, we knew that that would be part of the budget, the visual effects to address that. So we’re going to de-age the kids.”
For Pennywise, it was a question of going the other way, making slight modulations to his costumes and make-up (see boxout, page 58) to show that he’s 27 years older. A period just shy of three decades might seem like a nanosecond for a creature that is millions of years old, but it has, as returning actor Bill Skarsgård points out, been a tough few years for our grease-painted psycho.
“Pennywise has changed,” says the Swedish actor. “The first movie ended with him, for the first time, feeling fear himself. He is an entity that inflicts fear on people, and he feeds off of it. He’s obsessed with it. But now he’s feeling it and realising, ‘Oh, this is what I’ve been doing for this long.’ That changed him. I think it’s interesting. You know, maybe he’s craving to get back to the feeling – to feel alive again the way the kids made him feel alive. It might be subconscious. And then there’s been a more conscious approach to it, which is, ‘OK, they almost got me the first time. This time, I’m going to get them back, and I’m going to get them back hard.’ So he comes back obsessed with acting his revenge, which is…” Skarsgård stops himself before he gives too much away. “Well, if you know Pennywise, you know it will be a twisted, dark way of doing it.”
Fears of a clown
Skarsgård, of course, was a revelation in the first movie, offering a ghoulish new take on a character that Tim Curry had seemingly made his own in the otherwise rather wobbly 1990 miniseries. Both the actor and Andy Muschietti admit that, this time out, they feel far more confident about Pennywise as audiences so embraced him, which is to say feared him, in the first film.
In It Chapter Two, Pennywise’s mythology will come to light – his habitual attacks on Derry over the centuries and his true cosmic being. As fans of the book will know, to see his true shape is to go insane, much as H.P. Lovecraft’s otherworldly beasts reduced mere mortals to madness.
“First time out it was daunting,” winces Skarsgård of his portrayal of an iconic antagonist whom King rates as his finest, along with The Stand’s Randall Flagg. “We had to go with our gut feeling, and we had to explore what we thought was an interesting and fresh approach. So when people liked it and also got it – we did something different but still true to the source material; we captured an essence of the book in a sort of indie way – it meant, going into the second one, we were much more relaxed. So Andy and I were like, ‘OK, let’s play around with it…’”
Part of that “playing around with it” was to go darker, more frenzied, and with fiercer violence. “Everything’s bigger than in the first movie, and that goes for the gore too,” nods Skarsgård. “And Pennywise’s very twisted humour and weird comedic relationship to the horrible stuff that he does. Yeah, all of that.”
Andy Muschietti grins. “There is more blood!” he promises.
Most of which gets dumped on Chastain. In one scene. “This is why Andy and I are good partners,” she laughs. “Initially, when Andy talked to me about that scene, the blood was going to stop at a certain point, and basically my head would be fine. I was like, ‘No, we need to go all the way. This needs to be iconic for horror!’ He was like, ‘Really? You’re OK with that?’ And I was like, ‘Yes! Let’s do it!’ I mean, literally, I was pulling stuff out of my eyeballs. It was pretty intense.”
Much as Andy Muschietti is proud of the emotional pull of both It and It Chapter Two – these movies really do “combine tones”, as he mentioned earlier, just as King’s books “have all the elements” – he is overjoyed by the cascade of claret he’s unleashed.
“According to the special effects department, it’s the most blood that’s ever been used in a movie!” he gushes. “There was this huge tank on top of the set. The guys measured it and it was a few gallons more than The Shining.” He grins, as wide and red as any offered by Pennywise. “I’m really pleased.”
‘The first movie ended with Pennywise, for the first time, feeling fear himself. That changed him’ bill skarsgård