West initially planned to shoot a single film, X, and conceived the notion of making a prequel just before he flew to New Zealand for the shoot at the end of October 2020, a time he calls "peak pandemic."
"I had the idea right before I got on the plane," says the director, whose previous horror films include 2009's The House of the Devil and 2011's The Innkeepers. "I knew we were going to a place that you could make a movie when no one else could make a movie, and I knew that we were going to have all of this cast and crew and equipment and everything there, ready to do it. We were going to spend a lot of money building locations, barns, and boarding houses, and things like that. It just occurred to me that if we made two in a row, we would amortize all these costs. So the second movie could just be on sale, compared to the first movie, and that to me seemed like it could maybe be convincing to someone who was going to pay for it. Then I asked Mia. I said, 'If we pull this off, would you stay and do two movies back to back?' And she said, 'Yes.'"
"I received a text message from Ti saying something along the lines of, 'I want to make a second film with you,'" recalls Goth. "I was immediately incredibly interested but I didn't really know what it involved. He started to explain in a little bit more detail and it just snowballed."
West and Goth worked on the script for Pearl while they were quarantining for two weeks after arriving in New Zealand.
"You had to sit in a hotel for two weeks in New Zealand before they would let you into the country," says West. "We would Facetime probably once a day, something like that, and come up with some ideas."
"Ti liked the idea of us collaborating and me helping to write scripts with him," says the actress. "I'd never written anything before, so I was very naïve to the whole process, really, but he was a great role model. He's been doing this for so long and at such a high level that he really kind of shepherded me along. It was difficult at first, just understanding the format and structure and page count and so on, but eventually I just started to write. [I would] put the timer on my phone for 30 or 45 minutes at a time, and then I would just write whatever it is that I felt might be of value to the movie. I would send that over to Ti and he would then incorporate it into the script."
The pair were deep into writing the script for Pearl before they were sure that the film would get produced.
"We didn't know for a long while whether or not we were actually ever going to make this," says Goth. "We always said to each other, at the very least it would serve as an amazing backstory to Pearl. It was more than halfway through the shooting of X that we found out that A24 [had] greenlit it."
After shooting had wrapped on X in the early spring of 2021, West's crew set about redressing the location sets, transforming the shabby buildings seen in the '70s film into brighter and more pristine edifices.
"It was incredibly odd, because we spent months on that farm, where it looked like [it did in] X," says West. "I was there a couple of times a week, so I saw it gradually turning into [the sets for Pearl], but for the rest of the crew, they had three weeks off, so when they came back for the first tech scout on the farm, it was like a lucid dream for them. They had just spent a month, mostly at night, doing this '70s, gritty, gory porn-horror movie, and now they're standing in the same place, with bright green cut grass, a bright red barn that was blinding, all this wallpaper. They were walking into rooms they had spent twelve hours a day in and they didn't recognize them. It was very very surreal and a once-in-a-lifetime experience."
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