Cranking up the emotions
Director Muschietti resumes story of King’s dangerous clown in It sequel
It Chapter Two director Andy Muschietti looks a little sheepish. The filmmaker is midway through shooting a scene for his sequel inside a library at the University of Toronto and someone has already spotted an Easter egg that links to Stephen King’s The Shining.
“There’s a lot,” he says when asked about the subtle nods he has placed to the master of horror in Chapter Two of his adaptation of King’s 1986 novel It. “Just take a look. In every corner there’s an Easter egg ... I wasn’t in an Easter egg mode when I made the first one. I just wanted to make a movie. Now, I’m more relaxed. There might be too many,” he adds with a chuckle.
As journalists from around the world made their way through Wycliffe College on an unseasonably hot afternoon last September, students milled around unbeknownst that the followup to the world’s highest-grossing horror film was shooting in their midst.
Muschietti, a lifelong King fan who directed the 1989-set original, announced his return to helm the sequel almost immediately after the first film opened in 2017.
It Chapter Two picks up 27 years after the first film and finds the shape-shifting Pennywise returning to wreak terror on the denizens of Derry, Maine. The adult version of the Losers’ club, who defeated the murderous dancing clown as youngsters, are back to do battle with him again.
Bill Skarsgård reprises his role as Pennywise. James McAvoy, Jessica Chastain, Bill Hader, James Ransone, Jay Ryan and Isaiah Mustafa are playing the adult version of the Losers’ club, originally portrayed by Jaeden Martell, Sophia Lillis, Finn Wolfhard, Jack Dylan Grazer, Jeremy Ray Taylor and Chosen Jacobs.
“It’s about adult fears,” Muschietti says. “And some of the adult fears in this second one are a little more surprising.”
If Skarsgård’s Pennywise was a thing of nightmares in the first film, Muschietti promises that this new incarnation, which also features deaged versions of the kids in newly shot scenes, will be even scarier.
“The new Pennywise is smarter,” Muschietti teases during Postmedia’s visit to the set. “He already has been beaten by the Losers in 1989, so he’s back looking for revenge. He’s angry and so he has to step up. He’s more perverse. You see him in situations where he’s eager to play more with his victims. He’s ultimately playing a bigger endgame and has a bigger plan than you think.”
When he made the first part, Muschietti admits he didn’t seek out advice from King. The book had already been turned into a much-loved TV miniseries that stars Tim Curry, Harry Anderson, John Ritter, Annette O’Toole and Tim Reid.
“I could have called him,” Muschietti says. “But I wanted to focus on my vision of the movie instead of asking Stephen King if it was OK. It’s an adaptation so you have to find what you reacted to emotionally from the story.”
But King, now 71, raved over Chapter One and they became pen pals. “That’s a term I haven’t heard in 30 years,” Muschietti jokes.
The two struck up a friendship, with the author helping the Argentinian director and screenwriter Gary Dauberman decide what to keep from his novel, and even offering up suggestions to give the film a fresh take.
King thought the scene in which Pennywise takes over a statue of Paul Bunyan and attacks Richie (Hader) was an important moment in the novel, so Muschietti made sure to keep it in.
If Muschietti showed restraint in his first film, he hints that Chapter Two will lean more into the book’s horrific elements.
Teach Grant, who plays the film’s sadistic secondary villain, Henry Bowers, is evidence of that as he’s seen stalking around the set covered in fake blood.
“From a cinematic point of view, there’s a little bit of a crank-up of all the emotions, including the horror,” Muschietti says. “But it’s a new perspective. The first part of the book is a metaphor for the end of childhood. The second part talks about the same theme, but from an adult point of view. It’s going to be scarier, but also more fun and more emotional.”
For now, Muschietti plans to stay in the Stephen King business. Along with his sister and producing partner Barbara, he plans to produce Roadwork, which King wrote under the pseudonym Richard Bachman, and adapt The Jaunt from King’s Skeleton Crew collection.
“That’s a story that I always loved. It’s about teleportation and it’s a family drama that’s just devastating. It’s one of my all-time favourites.”