00:00I'm so excited to be here for It Welcome to Derry with director and executive producer Andy Muschietti and executive
00:07producer Barbara Muschietti.
00:10Thank you. Thank you.
00:13Let me tell you, watching the show in the daytime will still give you nightmares.
00:17But I'm so grateful for this show because you directed the two movies.
00:23And Barbara, we were kind of talking about it before.
00:25Like, what is it that attracts you to the It universe that keeps pulling you back to it?
00:32The book. I think we read the book at a very impressionable age.
00:38Andy and I are siblings. I'm 20 months older than he is.
00:43Not 20 years, as I normally say.
00:47He's so funny.
00:49But it's getting to a point where he's starting to look older than me.
00:54So I love it.
00:57Botox.
00:58Okay.
01:01Can I argue with that?
01:02No, but we read the book when we were 14 and 15.
01:06And we had read.
01:10We were avid readers as kids.
01:13And we had read other Stephen King books.
01:16But this one kind of did a number on us.
01:18And still to date, we're being pulled by the book.
01:24And by Stephen King.
01:27Andy, what about for you?
01:30It's also some sort of Bible.
01:32You know, it's like the movies don't really make justice to the richness that the book has.
01:40There's a whole, you know, thread of chapters they call the interludes.
01:47There are the writings and investigations of Mike Hanlon, one of the losers, the guy that's staying in town,
01:52that actually tried to figure out what it was.
01:55He interviewed all these people, elder people, members from the native community.
02:06And this extrapolation is a result of trying to get, to make sense of all those pieces of the puzzle
02:19that were intentionally unfinished by Stephen King for someone to pick up.
02:24And here we are.
02:26I love that.
02:27So this is a prequel.
02:29And, you know, it feels like it's an incomplete story.
02:33How do you keep that tied to everything that came beforehand?
02:41There's, you know, we love basically sowing bloodlines into the story.
02:51That's personally my favorite, see the story.
02:55And we're going to continue doing that, hopefully, both towards one side and towards the other.
03:02Because, you know, Pennywise experiences time differently than we do.
03:09So that is also a big part of the show.
03:13And we're very proud of the movies.
03:16And connecting the show to the movies was, you know, a very important goal for us.
03:23There's also a lot of creation.
03:25For people who know the movies and the book,
03:27they will realize that Welcome to Dairy has a lot of invented events.
03:35But we're very, we try to, we're gravitating around the big, big events,
03:41which is namely the burning of the Black Spot,
03:44the massacre of the Bradley Gang, and the explosion of the Easter egg hunt,
03:49which are the three main events depicted in the interludes in the book.
03:54And for me, it's so much fun to search into the potential lives and struggles of the people around this
04:07event
04:09and their struggle against the evil of it, Pennywise.
04:14And while we're at it, we go also into the history of America,
04:19which is something of a mystery to us.
04:23I mean, we're from South America.
04:25But the research of American history is something extraordinary for us in many ways,
04:32like the tragedies, the injustice, the achievements, everything, the things that were hidden.
04:42And Stephen King, you know, he really, really paints a picture of the idiosyncrasies of the American culture with it.
04:55And with every of his book, you know, there's not a single book where he doesn't call out themes that
05:01are very deep
05:02to what happened in America, including racism, homophobia, etc., etc., etc.
05:10The fog, clearly the fog that he mentions, which is like people turning away and looking away from what's going
05:18on.
05:18And it's a bit of an extrapolation of what our human behavior does when something, someone takes over.
05:33I don't know.
05:34Like for me, it wasn't very important to talk about the weaponization of fear,
05:40which is, I think, a relevant theme these days.
05:45Well, you talk about the black spot, which is the episode that we just saw a clip from.
05:49And, you know, it does deal with the race.
05:52There's also a lot of trauma and pain in that episode for so many reasons.
05:56Like talk about making that, that was the penultimate episode.
05:59Like it easily could have been the finale.
06:02Like why did you choose to place that there in the run?
06:21It has to do about, I think it has to do a lot about unpredictability.
06:26You know, there's a lot to be wrapped around.
06:29And the way, there's a lot to be wrapped up after the black spot.
06:35It's a pre-climatic moment.
06:38I mean, for us, the black spot was the big event where everything converges.
06:42All the storylines converge.
06:45And most of the characters find themselves in the same predicament, in the same tragedy.
06:53But things have to wrap up also.
06:55And we knew from the beginning that this being a prequel, we needed, you know, considering that everyone will expect
07:05that it lives at the end of it.
07:07Because, you know, this is a prequel.
07:12We needed to find a victory for our heroes.
07:16And the victory is, sorry, I'm going to spoil it for the ones who didn't see it, is they keep
07:21it in a cage.
07:23The cage was an invasion.
07:26Oh!
07:28Sorry about that.
07:31Well, you came too late to this.
07:33You should have seen it at this point.
07:35It's been months, man.
07:40So, yeah, we needed a victory, and we needed to build to that, to that final battle after this horrendous
07:47tragedy, the massacre.
07:52And give the audience a little hope.
07:54And for that, we needed one more episode, I think.
07:58Yes, and as you might know, another spoiler here, what seemed like a prequel ends up being a sequel.
08:06At the end, we realized that it has been there in the, this is the few, this is what we
08:15saw in the movies is the past for Pennywise,
08:18who experiences time in a different way.
08:21So, the realization that everything we've seen was altered events, it was rewriting history already.
08:33So, what we thought was the events that happened in 62, actually were the altered events of 62.
08:41Sorry, yeah, we should have announced that we were going to go full spoiler territory now.
08:47So, Bill Skarsgård returns, was there ever a case where he was not, like, what would have happened had he
08:54not been available to do this?
08:56That would have been a bummer, really.
09:01And, you know, going into this, I have to say that for some reason, you know, a lot of times
09:13we're not conscious about how lucky we got for getting the group together.
09:21It was Bill, but it was also our amazing production designer, Paul Osterberry, and Luis Cicada, our costume designer.
09:30And basically, most of our camera team, we got basically the people that had made the movies with us, Bill
09:40being, of course, the god.
09:44But I think our passion for it and people seeing that we were going to be there for the length
09:53of it, you know, allowed us for us to get Bill and the rest of the team.
10:01I want to come back to something you said earlier, Andy, about, like, fear and how the show explores fear
10:07as a unifying but also dividing force.
10:11How did you approach framing that and embedding that within the community's social fabric?
10:19So, I think it's a theme that was very much in the book, you know, it's a parable.
10:24I think it's a parable about that, fear-mongering.
10:29And, of course, you will find different things, different themes.
10:33So, I mean, it's a book that is like 1,200 pages and talks about a lot of things.
10:37To me, the theme that really resonated was that, how power uses fear to divide and to pit people against
10:47each other and to basically distract from the real things that are going on.
10:54Over the course, 10 years have passed now, and from the first movie to now, almost 10 years.
11:02And it seemed that that thing becomes more and more relevant in the world that we're living.
11:10So, I wanted to underline that subject with a little more emphasis to the point that the use of fear
11:23as a weapon is not just in the subtext, but it's quite clear, it's quite literal.
11:28If you see the show, you know what General Show is doing.
11:33It's trying to capture it.
11:36Spoiler alert.
11:39To use it against the Russians.
11:41But surprise, surprise.
11:43I'm not going to spoil it for you.
11:45You should see it.
11:47How many of you have seen the show?
11:51Thank you, guys.
11:55So, yeah.
11:56It's a big relevance, and I think that, yeah, the ones who are using fear, they play with that.
12:03They play with distraction, with numbing, too.
12:08And I think there's, in these days, people are very numb to what's going on because there's a lot of
12:12confusion, fear.
12:14And this is, you know, in the best cases, this is a reminder that what the power can try to
12:22do to keep us distracted and afraid and divided and resentful towards the wrong enemy.
12:36I will add one thing.
12:38You know, with this 10 years, of course, now we've been in the US for 12 years.
12:44What also happened to us, we, you know, we matured.
12:50But also we've been living here for 12 years, so there were things that we maybe didn't grasp completely when
13:01we just arrived and when we did the first movie that now, you know, we understand a lot more and
13:09we're able to feature and underline on the show.
13:14So, I love that.
13:15But also it was a lot of fun.
13:16Yeah.
13:18So I have to ask you, how's season two coming along?
13:21It's good.
13:24It's good.
13:24If you like the first one, you're going to have a lot of fun with the second one.
13:27The environment completely changes, you know, now that we understand that it is going a different direction and this is
13:35not a sequel but a prequel, we, you know, the table is open to things that are different from the
13:43book.
13:44Even though we are gravitating around the big event, which is the Bradley Gang, which is a gang of robbers
13:52that end up in Derry, 1935, Depression era, everything looks like shit in the best way possible.
14:02Very cinematic.
14:05But the kids, it would be very unexpected.
14:09Well, now I'm spoiling it for you but the kids, you know, we're very used to seeing kids in the
14:19comfort, within the comfort of suburbia, riding their bikes.
14:23So there is some deal of protection that these kids in 1935 don't have.
14:27So this group of losers are, some of them are orphans, some of them were neglected and ran away, but
14:37they regrouped in the barrens in some sort of hoverville that was created.
14:45I'm talking too much.
14:47I can see HBO at the back.
14:50And there's a dog.
14:50There's a dog.
14:52There's also a dog.
14:54For all of you who were missing an animal present.
14:57There's a dog.
14:58And the dog smokes.
15:02That's all I can say.
15:04We're getting all the spoilers.
15:06Okay, last question.
15:07Barbara, we were talking about this just before.
15:10You said, you know, once you send Pennywise off to college and you're done with this, you would like to
15:15do a musical.
15:16I'm curious, like, what were you thinking?
15:20We love musicals.
15:22And, you know, we shared so many things, so much IP during our childhood.
15:30And I remember my Annie cassette disappearing from my room and me finding it in Andy's room.
15:43Guilty as charged.
15:46It was an album.
15:48It wasn't a cassette.
15:50It was the LP.
15:51As far as I remember.
15:52It was the album, yeah.
15:52So we could read the lyrics.
15:54Because a big part of our journey of learning English was with lyrics.
16:00You know, so, yeah.
16:03And we'd love to do a musical, an original musical, actually.
16:08So, you know, we're working on that.
16:11And science fiction.
16:12And horror is our first child.
16:16And it will be forever our love.
16:19And we'll continue making horror movies.
16:23But, you know, there is science fiction.
16:26And there's musicals and so much more.
16:28So, yeah.
16:29Manifested right here.
16:31Well, I want to say thank you so much, Andy and Barbara, for that incredible conversation.
16:36Stay seated for our next panel.
16:38And you can watch It, Welcome to Derry on HBO Max.
16:41Thank you so much.
16:42Thank you, Jess.
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