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“You Don’t Have a Lot of Control Over a Head Exploding”: MaXXXine Cinematographer Eliot Rockett
MaXXXine After the 1970s grit of X and the Technicolor sheen of Pearl, Ti West and cinematographer Eliot Rockett turn to the 1980s with MaXXXine. Shot with the same combo of Sony Venice and Vantage MiniHawks, the L.A.-set story finds adult actress Maxine Minx’s big break into mainstream films curtailed by a series of giallo-esque murders.
With the movie freshly out on VOD, Rockett spoke to Filmmaker about the concluding chapter in the trilogy.
Filmmaker: Ti talked in an interview about how MaXXXine is his first film shot in L.A. despite living there for 20 years. X and Pearl were both made in New Zealand. Your early films together – The Innkeepers and The House of the Devil – were shot in Connecticut. I know you’re now based up in the Pacific Northwest, but had you shot much in L.A. before this new one?
Rockett: The first thing I shot in L.A. was this movie that had Emilio Estevez in it called Late Last Night (1999) that Steve Brill directed. I moved down there in about 2000, and I lived there for around 12 years. I definitely shot stuff in town, but even when I was living in L.A. I was shooting a lot of things in other places.
Filmmaker: With MaXXXine you’re really settling into the wheelhouse of my youth with 1980s horror. There’s some De Palma in there. There’s some giallo. There’s some of the distinctly 1980s seediness you’d find in a B-movie set in Times Square or on Hollywood Boulevard. What were some of the key ingredients to authentically recapture that era?
Rockett: The giallo stuff was super specific, from the wardrobing of the killer to the heavy use of colored lights. That was a very direct lift out of Italian horror. The De Palma thrillers weren’t as much of a specific picture reference. It was more just the vibe of the movie we were after. Once we put a bunch of period stuff in front of the camera and we developed some LUTs that seemed appropriate for the film look of the time, then it was just a matter of shooting the movie in a way that maybe was more reminiscent of a film made in that time as opposed to now.
Filmmaker: Back when we talked for X, you told me that you tried to use lighting fixtures available in the 1970s as much as possible. For MaXXXine, Ti has said he wanted to use period appropriate camera movement to recreate the feel of the 1980s. Did you have specific rules for moving the camera, like no drones or modern stabilizers?
Rockett: I don’t know that there were rules per se but trying to capture the appropriate aesthetic of that era of filmmaking definitely pointed to certain kinds of camera movement or coverage. We do actually have a couple drone shots, but they look more like classical helicopter shots. Most of the crane shots are very simple. We used some in-camera zooms. Things like that all add up to making the movie feel more like one from that time.
Filmmaker: In that era of De Palma movies, I think of both crazy long tracking shots and complexly edited crosscut sequences. Did you and Ti ever talk about having anything like that in MaXXXine?
Rockett: I don’t think that came up as a direct reference. A lot of what happens with Ti and myself is he’ll kind of lay out the parameters: “This is the thing I want to do. This is the era I want to do it in. This is the feeling I want it to have.” Then we pass back and forth examples and stills from movies of that time. After that, we proceed with those references kind of in the back of our minds more so than like, “We’ve got to do this exact thing that they did in this other movie.” I think you steep yourself in the aesthetic of what you’re going for and then when we’re on set it’s like, “It either feels like that or it doesn’t.”
Filmmaker: You used the Sony Venice and the MiniHawks again, as with X and Pearl.
Rockett: Yeah. The camera package essentially was the same for all three movies.
Filmmaker: The first two movies were shot back-to-back in New Zealand, so logistically it made sense to stay with that package. Did you consider switching it up for MaXXXine?
Rockett: There was a little bit of talk here and there about different lenses, but in the end it was like, “Well, why?” This is how we did the other two movies. They both successfully, I think, incorporated the feel and the look of their eras. There wasn’t really any reason to deviate from that.
Filmmaker: Some older Panavision anamorphics would have looked pretty cool though.
Rockett: I agree. I did the second season of Perry Mason on Panavision anamorphics on the Venice. They’re beautiful. They have these crazy aberrations. They’re just wonderful, but I was confident that we could make MaXXXine look the way we wanted it to look using basically the same package as before.
Filmmaker: MaXXXine opens with a push-in through a soundstage door as Mia Goth’s character walks in for a horror movie audition. Was it difficult to light that cavernous space?
Rockett: Yeah, it was enormous. We had a balloon in there over the actors. We used a dimmer effect when she walks in to bring the balloon up so we could keep her in silhouette as long as possible. Then we had a light on the floor – maybe a 2K – that was flagged off of her until she got to the point where we wanted to see her. I was worried about the difference between how dark it was in this giant sound stage and how bright it was through the door when you see outside into the parking lot. I knew that it was going to be a challenge and then on the day we got a new challenge – instead of being too bright, we started losing the light, and it was too dark out there. We had to shift gears and put up a greenscreen outside and turn it into a plate shot.
Filmmaker: The movie has this great chase sequence where Kevin Bacon’s private detective pursues Mia across the Universal lot. The lot was open for tours when you were shooting, right, with trams of sightseers going by?
Rockett: Yeah, we’d have to stop every now and then, especially when we were up near the Western town. The trams were going like 30 feet away from the edge of the frame. That was pretty fun. (laughs) What was great was Ti and I got to go over there during prep on like a Saturday or Sunday and nothing was shooting during that time. So, we had the run of the place for a day to just walk around and look at all of the different spaces. He had a vague idea of like, “I want to go from here to here. I want to include this and this. In Western town I want it to be this face off.” We just kind of started looking around and going, “Okay, they could start here. She could run there. We could come around this corner and cut to her running over here” Because it’s all separate places. They don’t actually connect physically in reality.
Filmmaker: One of my favorite shots in the film is at the end of that chase, when Mia’s character is hiding inside the Bates house from Psycho. Bacon’s detective comes up to the frosted window on the front door in silhouette.
Rockett: It was remarkable to get to shoot at the Bates Motel and Psycho house. That shot you’re talking about actually turned into kind of a project. The door already had a piece of frosted Plexiglass, and we just left what they had in there. It turned into this thing to get the right kind of silhouette because we were going through both frosted Plexiglass and curtains. We had to put a big silk out in front of the porch and light that all up just so you could get the feel of the silhouette coming in, but in the end it was pretty successful.
Filmmaker: Let’s talk about the Hollywood Boulevard night sequences. You were able to shut down a few blocks over four nights.
Rockett: A lot of that was just about turning things off. We shot the whole movie on the Venice at 3200 ASA. Everything — day, night, inside, outside. I tend to think it just looks better. It’s a little less contrasty. So, the challenge often became getting rid of lights because [the camera is] so sensitive at that ASA. We only had two or three blocks, and then our control ended. It was a challenge to make sure there was a shallow enough depth of field so that by the time the background faded into the modern things that we couldn’t control, it was just soft enough that it didn’t matter. I went down there at night a couple of times before we shot and tried to look at what we were going to be dealing with. At the end of the alley where Mia gets confronted by the Buster Keaton lookalike, there’s Hollywood Boulevard and then 150 yards away there was this parking lot with all these incredibly bright lights, and they were all these funky colors. We didn’t have 100 percent control even within our blocks over every light and every facade. So, it was a matter of trying to be judicious about where to put our energies and figuring out what was going to have to be dealt with in post.
Filmmaker: You said earlier that on set you would just kind of know by looking at a shot whether the period vibe was right. That alleyway scene with Maxine and Buster Keaton certainly had that vibe to me. You’ve got the smoke in the background and this red and blue light pouring in. There’s a shot where Maxine is in the background and then you rack to the foreground as a switchblade comes into frame and pops open. It felt like it came out of some long lost 1980s B-movie that New World or Embassy would’ve released.
Rockett: Definitely. There was another influence that we didn’t really talk about before, which was these, for lack of a better term, B-movies like Angel. Those definitely influenced that sequence with the very self-conscious use of smoke coming in the frame and the backlight. It’s borderline ridiculous because the person coming in the alley after her is dressed up like Buster Keaton. You’re mixing all these things together, and that’s a very Ti thing to do.
Filmmaker: I did laugh when Mia says, “Hold it right there Buster.” I don’t even know how many people these days will get that reference.
Rockett: That’s just Ti’s sense of humor. I don’t think he’s really concerned with, “Are people going to get this?” It’s more like, “This makes me laugh.”
Filmmaker: There’s a shot where Maxine is getting a life cast done for the horror movie she’s set to appear in, and she freaks out when her face is covered. She falls backward in her chair and the camera falls over with her. What rig did you use for that?
Rockett: That was a bodymount, like a Doggicam kind of thing. I can’t remember if we did that with the Sony in Rialto mode, where it’s just the sensor with a cable coming out, or if we did that with a Blackmagic Pocket Camera. It’s been like a year and a half since we shot, but it was one or the other.
Filmmaker: There was this 1980s/early 1990s trope in genre movies where characters would get crushed in cars in scrapyards. I’m not going to say which character because I don’t want to spoil it, but you have a great practical shot of someone getting squished in a car compactor. There’s no visible cut – you see the actor squirming and then roof gets caved in on them. How did you do that?
Rockett: It’s just an old-school lock off. You put them in there and they do all the acting. Then you get them out, leave the camera where it is, and squish the car. Then you put the two pieces together in post.
Filmmaker: The movie that Maxine is hired for is a horror sequel called The Puritan II. You get to create one scene from that fictitious film on a soundstage involving a poison apple.
Rockett: We had very limited time in that soundstage, and we had to shoot things from very different parts of the movie – the very beginning, that Puritan bit and then the very end of the movie, all of which needed completely different dressing. Shooting that sequence, we just had to come up with a look that seemed appropriate for a movie made at that time. We had to keep it a little bit simple because of the limited time. I remember we had a silked backlight for that, and then we used either Lightning Strikes of Fiilex units for the lightning business. Ti very much wanted a very straight crane-down move. He didn’t want to come down and tilt into the apple. He wanted to come down and land perfectly on it. That was actually the most difficult part, getting that move the way he wanted it.
Filmmaker: The finale is set at the Hollywood Sign, which was rebuilt for the movie. The entire shoot was only 30 days, and you had a single night to get that scene.
Rockett: Yeah, we had a very limited amount of time out there. We shot that at one of those movie ranches up north. First, we scouted the actual Hollywood Sign. There was some idea that maybe we would be able to do it there, but it became very apparent after like 15 minutes that it was never going to work. We looked around at a couple different places, like Griffith Park, but it became obvious that what we needed was just not going to work at any of those other locations. So, we ended up at the ranch, where we could basically do what we wanted on this hillside. There was a lot of discussion about how much of the structure we needed to build and what could be extended later by VFX. Almost every letter ended up having at least some part of it created physically. It’s not the actual size of the Hollywood Sign. It’s like two thirds or three quarters scale. We had to decide how big we needed to make it so that it would feel convincing. There was all this engineering that had to go into it as well because the letters were basically giant sails out there, and it needed to be resistant to a certain amount of wind.
Filmmaker: The 1980s were the halcyon days for practical head explosions and you have a pretty good one there at the Hollywood Sign.
Rockett: We ended up doing that shot on stage on a little piece of ground. It was one of the very last shots we did on the movie. We did all the location work first and then we went up to Quixote stages and finished up there with all of the sets that were built. We did that gag a number of times. They had a bunch of heads and for me it was just about replicating the light. It was a locked off camera looking down and then it’s just like, “Three. Two. One. Boom!” and it explodes. It had an air cannon attached to it. You don’t have a lot of control over a head exploding. You just do it, and then you decide if it looks right or not. Then if you have another head, you can try it again. It was kind of the same thing with Pearl’s head getting run over with the truck (in X). You stick the head in there and roll the truck over it and then it’s just a question of, “Did it look right or not” and “Do we have another head stick in there to try it again?”
