STACK #155 Sep 2017

FEATURE CINEMA

I've been a rabid Stephen King fan all my life, so it's a huge responsibility...

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

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

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.

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

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.”

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.

IT is in cinemas on September 7

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