Andy And Barbara Muschietti Set The Record Straight On 'IT: Welcome To Derry'
Image Source: Sunshine State Cineplex
The brother and sister duo behind the blockbuster 2017 movie adaptation of Stephen King’s terrifying novel, It, are back with a prequel series about the entity’s previous reign of terror. Andy and Barbara Muschietti’s take on the killer clown and its sequel are two of the highest-grossing R-rated movies of all time. Unlike the films, which were based on Stephen King’s novel, focusing mostly on the lives of the kids terrorized by the mysterious shape-shifting entity, IT: Welcome to Derry will attempt to unravel the origins of IT, who is better known to fans as Pennywise the Clown. In a new interview with The Hollywood Reporter, the Muschietti siblings explained the process of changing mediums from the big screen to television after their films were so well received. Andy Muschietti reveals they didn’t try to change anything, and their “whole approach was to build a story with the same style and tone as the movies. We know that people reacted, emotionally, very well to what we did in the movies. So it was just replicating the tone and the style with this new story.”
The show has several seasons planned, and an entirely new cast, except for Bill Skarsgård, who reprises his role after a gap of over 6 years. In the meantime, Skarsgård has played an arguably more terrifying character in Nosferatu, taking on the role of an ancient vampire named Count Orlok. With Skarsgård back for Welcome to Derry, many fans expect to see him right away in his clown getup. However, that’s not IT’s only persona that the series will explore. Firstly, you won’t see much of IT in the first four episodes. Andy Muschietti says they held back on showing Pennywise intentionally because “When and where the clown is going to appear was a game that I wanted to play with the audience.” Barbara Muschietti didn’t want the audience to get used to Pennywise because “If you dissect the movies, Pennywise is not in the movies that much, but people feel ‘It’ a lot when he is on camera. The last thing we want is to have an audience get comfortable with Pennywise. We don’t want anybody to get used to his image.” Fans of the movies should be familiar with how deceptive Pennywise is because of his ability to shapeshift. Not only has his presence in Derry made all the adults in town behave peculiarly, but even when he’s offscreen, the Muschiettis did a great job of throwing hints at the audience of Pennywise’s ominous presence. One of the biggest visual clues is the use of red balloons, which may be used again in the series.
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Image Source: Bloody Disgusting
Regardless of how popular and dreadful Pennywise is, Director Andy Muschietti thinks there’s a misconception that his only persona is as “Pennywise the Clown.” He says, “The misconception is that ‘It’ can only be one thing, one creature at a time. But it’s part of the canon, even in the book, that he creates hallucinations. He creates collective creatures — like when he became the piranha, right? That’s a flock of creatures.” For the series, the Muschiettis kept Stephen King in the loop, but King didn’t have any demands and was comfortable with Andy and Barbara’s interpretation of his material. The creators wished “to do a show that basically went backwards, where each season was a cycle of Pennywise and he loved that concept and gave us all the rope we needed.” IT: Welcome to Derry streams on October 26 on HBO Max.
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