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FEATURE
CINEMA
IT
is in cinemas on September 7
Then on my last day, I step outside and find
a pair of white women’s shoes with red tips
on my doorstep. They looked like tiny clown
shoes.”
Meeting with Skarsgård in West Hollywood,
STACK
can’t help but wonder why this
ridiculously handsome actor would want to play
a scary clown in the first place?
“I was just really passionate about the role,”
says Skarsgård, who wasn’t even born when
the original TV mini-series aired.
“Bill can make that handsome face look
not so handsome,” adds co-producer David
Katzenberg. “Even while we were shooting,
I kept forgetting that there’s this very lovely,
handsome Swede under all that makeup. I’m
still astonished that it’s the same person.”
For director Andy Muschietti, Skarsgård
stood out for one distinct reason. “Bill has this
thing where one of his eyes sometimes goes
out, so he has this really extravagant look which
we might have had to use CG to create. But
he can actually do it on cue – he is one in ten
million humans that can do that!” he laughs.
“He saved us a lot of money on CG effects.”
Skarsgård made a point of shunning the
cast of kids so they would never lose their fear
of him. “Not only does Pennywise scare and
eat children, he
hates
them too, so it got pretty
dark for me fast. It feels weird after you’ve
done a full day of terrorising children and you
come home and you’re like, ‘phew’,” recalls the
actor whose clown make-up originally took five
hours, later whittling down the process to half
the time.
One of Stephen King’s scariest books,
IT
is a shape-shifter who takes on the form of a
demonic clown, scaring the socks off a group
of school kids
whose outsider
status leads
them to befriend
one another.
With the
film set in the
1980s, Muschietti
confiscated all
iPhones on set.
“It was important
that the kids jell very
quickly, so we brought
them to Canada three
weeks earlier and did all
these bonding exercises
to learn how to be kids in
the ‘80s, which is different
than being kids with iPhones – a
couple of them didn’t even know
how to ride bikes. Kids nowadays
don’t even climb trees,” says the director,
whose hit horror movie
Mama
served as his
calling card to Horrorwood.
“My main interest in making horror movies
is to reconnect to childhood fears because
the strongest impressions are from when you
are six or seven, watching horror movies or
reading scary stories. You don’t get that level of
intensity again in your life.”
King fans will understand the significance
of this film being released 27 years after the
original aired on TV, although co-producer
Seth Grahame-Green says it was serendipity.
“We’ve actually been working on this for six
years. I only wish we were smart enough to
plan exactly for the 27 years since 1990. I’ve
been a rabid Stephen King fan my whole adult
life so its a huge responsibility to Stephen
King, his fans, the legacy of the book, and
even honouring the mini-series that came
before us, to find things to do differently
while using the advantage of us having a
movie – and not a primetime TV show. Our
[US] R-rating means we could go to more
intense dark places than in 1990.”
The cherry on the top came when King
saw an early screening, and tweeted his
approval.
What’s scarier than the prospect of
The Waltons
’ John-Boy (Richard Thomas) and
Three’s
Company
’s John Ritter together in the same mini-series? How about
Rocky Horror
's Tim Curry
as the eponymous, shapeshifting creature of Stephen King’s chunky bestseller?
As
Legend
will attest, Curry’s hammy performances are directly proportionate to the
amount of latex and makeup he’s buried under at the time. But as the malevolent, child-
snatching clown Pennywise, the actor delivered perhaps his finest performance since
the tour de force that was Frankenfurter. Oozing malevolence (and let’s face it, what
clown doesn’t), Curry got all the best lines –”I am immortal child. I am the eater
of worlds and of children, and you are next” – making him the undisputed
highlight of the tele-version of King’s epic.
Refusing to lean on Curry’s original 1990 performance, movie
Pennywise Bill Skarsgård says, “It was important for people who
are big fans of the original and Tim Curry’s Pennywise to go
see [the film] and say: ‘Oh, I also like this’. It’s apples
and oranges. Two different takes and two
different versions – I think you can
appreciate both.”
I've been a rabid Stephen King fan all my life,
so it's a huge responsibility...