Boxoffice Pro - September 2019

a plotline where the
wife of Losers Club
leader Bill Denbrough
(played in his adult
incarnation by James
McAvoy) and Beverly
Marsh’s (Jessica
Chastain) abusive
husband follow their
spouses to Derry.
“There are tangents
and repetitions” in
King’s book, Muschietti
explains.
“The book is a great
experience, but in a
movie, you can’t afford
repetition.” After establishing
that Bill has
married a woman who
reminds him of Beverly,
his first love, and
that Beverly herself is
locked in a pattern of
loving men who abuse
her (first her father,
then her husband),
“you don’t really need
[Bill’s wife or Beverly’s
husband]. With Bill,
I really wanted to
focus on the trauma
of guilt,” stemming
from his inability to
save his little brother Georgie. “I think you have
to pick your battles. You only have certain scenes
[with which to] explore and express the arc of the
characters, and you want to be concise and not
diffuse those arcs.”
Winnowing down the story to its essentials is
something Muschietti learned from the first It.
There, as if being hunted by a killer clown isn’t
bad enough, the Losers Club is also tormented by
local bully Henry Bowers (Nicholas Hamilton)
and his cronies. Test audiences “barely connected
with the Henry Bowers subplot,” Muschietti recalls.
“In my first version of It, we explored Henry
Bowers much more. We saw Henry at his house,
dealing with his own misery, with his own abuse,
his own trauma of being abused by his dad. We
see him lash out [because of that]. We screened
that, but people really wanted to cut to the chase.
That’s one of the symptoms of a movie where
there are a lot of secondary characters. I knew that
if we had that problem with Henry Bowers in It,
we would probably have that problem with Tom
[Beverly’s husband] and Audra [Bill’s wife] coming
back to Derry. In the book, they’re exciting. But
reading a book, it’s different. Watching a movie
stimulates a different part of the brain. The audience
doesn’t want to waste time with characters
who are accessories.”
Keeping the story
moving “forward
faster” was key for
It Chapter 2, which
in its final cut creeps
toward three hours.
“My first cut was four
hours, but that was
fresh from production,”
Muschietti
says. “I knew from
the beginning that
a four-hour movie
wasn’t feasible,
not only for studio
requirements, but you don’t want an audience sitting
there for four hours. I know from experience
that the faster the pace this movie has, the better.”
Even with its run time just shy of the behemoth
that was Avengers: Endgame, It Chapter 2
does march along quite swiftly, in part due to the
cutting back and forth between scenes with the
younger Losers Club and their adult counterparts.
Filming the former group required digital de-aging
to make the child actors look the same as they
did two years ago. This was particularly important,
Muschietti notes, because the flashback scenes
in It Chapter 2 are interspersed with scenes from
the first It; having actors look noticeably older
between one scene and the next would “throw
people out of the movie.”
Muschietti personally oversaw every part of the
de-aging process. “The first version of the aging
was good in a technical sense, but the proportions
weren’t quite right. I knew where the nose was two
years ago. I knew where the eyes were compared
to the mouth. I was a bit of a ballbreaker in that
sense!” The VFX team “was able to do a great
job”—and a particularly big one (or small one?)
in the case of Richie Tozier, played by “Stranger
Things”’ Finn Wolfhard, who hit a growth spurt
between filming It and Chapter 2. “Finn is a giant
In my first version of It, we explored
Henry Bowers much more. We saw
Henry at his house, dealing with his
own misery, with his own abuse, his
own trauma of being abused by his
dad. We see him lash out [because of
that]. We screened that, but people
really wanted to cut to the chase.
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