One place you should never, ever go in Derry, Maine is into the sewers. And yet when I had the opportunity to do just that, I was pretty much ecstatic to do so.

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Jack Dylan Grazer ("Eddie"), Jaeden Lieberher ("Bill"), Chosen Jacobs ("Mike"), Wyatt Oleff ("Stan"), Sophia Lillis ("Beverly"), Jeremy Ray Taylor ("Ben"), and Finn Wolfhard ("Richie") in It.

Moving the Story to the 1980s

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Finding Pennywise

Bill Skarsgard as Pennywise in It.

An Ancient Evil

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In Stephen King's 1986 novel, It , the popular 1990 miniseries based on the novel, and now in the new film adaptation, there is something very old and very evil in the town of Derry, and it has mercilessly targeted the local children. Most often taking the form of a clown called Pennywise, It's lair is within the sewers, which allows It access to pretty much any and everywhere. In junior high, when I first read It, I became absolutely captivated with King's excellent, incredibly immersive and freaky novel (I've probably read it a half a dozen times at this point), and to see Pennywise's domain brought to life for the new feature film version of the story -- and to actually set foot inside it --- was a pretty amazing feeling.It was a warm September day in Toronto when I was among a group of journalists paying a visit to the set of It. And while we saw other parts of the set -- including the bathroom where one of the film's seven kid characters has a very bloody experience -- it was Pennywise's lair and the surrounding sewer that was the jaw-dropper. The centerpiece was a huge pyramid of discarded children's clothing, toys and knickknacks - some of it decades, if not centuries, old. Pennywise has taken many victims and this is his macabre trophy room. There's a rickety old circus wagon as well, with Pennywise's name on the side. And when you go see the movie, that aforementioned pyramid will be even bigger than it was on set, digitally expanded to stretch far up, with the bodies of non-responsive children (are they dead? are they in a coma-like state?) all floating through the air near the top.Jaeden Lieberher, who plays Bill Denbrough, the leader of the group of kids known as “the Losers Club” at the center of the story, described the sewer as, “A crazy set. That's basically Pennywise's liar and that's where we fight him and try to defeat him… It's kind of amazing being there with all the toys and you kind of feel like there is a monster living in there.”In the novel It, the sequences with the children are set in the 1950s, while their older counterparts -- the book jumps back and forth between both eras -- live in the 1980s. The film only focuses on the characters as children, with a second movie intended to focus on the adults.Asked why the film shifts this and has the kids living in the '80s, producer Barbara Muschietti replied, “I’m going to be very candid. When we got into the project, that’s how it was and we agreed with it completely for two reasons. Try to film what you know. [Stephen] King writes what he knows, we try to film what we know. We grew up in the '80s. We wanted to do a very rounded '80s and not a caricaturesque '80s, and we can do that because we know the period very well. Also, I think the fears in the '50s from the book, they’re absolutely wonderful, but we wanted less tangible fears and more internal. I think part of the adaptation in the '80s is that we could do that without destroying the characters in the '50s. It’s a blank slate for fears, with winks to the '50s fears but a little less naive.”For the kids in the cast, the 1980s are ancient history, but many of them did their research. Explained Wyatt Oleff (“Stanley Uris”), “My mom and dad definitely helped. They told me a lot about the '80s and what music. I've been listening to a lot of '80s music recently. That's helped me get into character. I made a playlist of what I think Stanley would listen to in the '80s.”Of course, the kids sometimes had some trouble with how different things were back then, with Jeremy Ray Taylor (“Ben Hanscom”) recalling, “During one scene, we had to do some ad-lib, and they were like ‘We should totally enter in for this thing!’ ‘Well, how are we going to send in our audition?’ “Through email!’”Said Oleff, with a grin, “Here's the thing, I say ‘mail’ [in the scene], but for some reason that take I said ‘email.’ Then I said, ‘Email? What's email?’ Then we turn around because we have to turn around to Bill and we all turn around and our faces are cracking up. We just burst out laughing.”Finding the right Pennywise was key of course, and hundreds of actors were considered, of various ages and styles – both male and female -- before Bill Skarsgard (Hemlock Grove) was cast in the role. When a journalist jokingly asked if Tilda Swinton was considered, Barbara Muschietti surprisingly replied that Swinton was in fact someone they were interested in for the role.Said Muschietti, “We had a slot to shoot the movie and she wasn’t available so she didn’t even audition. But of course, we all thought about it. But Bill came in and blew our socks off. Because he was doing his very own interpretation of Pennywise.”She added that Skarsgard’s take evoked, “Pennywise in the novel, which for us was a huge help. Because we went in the casting process with the book in mind. We read the novel when we were teens. We saw the miniseries much later in the game, so Tim Curry’s performance is extraordinary, but that is not necessarily what we link to Pennywise immediately. For us, the Pennywise is the Pennywise in the book, which is quite different. I think Bill went for that and he did an amazing, amazing performance and we gave him several tests. Again, because he’s a shape shifter, we wanted to make sure that he could play in different grades, right? And he did. He’s amazing. And what’s even more amazing is that he kept the character very unpredictable, and that’s what scares us the most, when you don’t know what way he’s going to go.”Director Andres Muschietti (Mama), Barbara's brother, explained, “I was basically hoping for someone who would surprise me in any way. I had a pre-existing criteria of someone who looked childlike, and that’s where Bill came in. And I remember I was sort of interested in Will Poulter. He was part of a previous approach, and I had a meeting with him. He wasn’t very interested in doing it at that time. And also his career was starting to take off and I think he got a little scared. So to be honest, I saw a lot of people, but there was very few, a small short list, and Bill was on top of it.”On the day we visited the set, Skarsgard’s busy schedule made him unavailable for an interview, though we did watch him film green screen footage -- creepily reaching forward and yelling out -- that would be incorporated into a key sequence in which Pennywise comes to life inside images from a slide projector (an update on the photo album scene from the novel).In a follow up phone call a few months later, Skarsgard said, of his excitement for It, “Being an actor, especially in my age, like mid-20's, there's not a lot of truly character performances or parts out there, in terms of weird, creepy, disgusting, or full-on characters, in terms of what Pennywise is. Most auditions that you go up for are much more based in reality and young guys, coming of age stories, love stories, and so forth. …It’s kinda rare that you get an audition that you're this excited about. For me, I worked really hard to do my version of what this character might be like and I had a lot of fun doing that. Then people responded to it, so I think I read for it, one, two, three, or maybe even four times before eventually getting the job. The character changed even in those depths of auditioning. I started having a conversation with Andy and he said things that he wanted to be true with the character and so I started working even during the casting process working with playing around with versions of what this character might be like and then eventually booking the job, that was when the real work began in terms of exploring the characters and the different ways of playing him. “When the first photos of Pennywise were released, some were surprised by his look, which includes very old clothing that is nothing like the type of clown popularized in the 20th century, in the manner Tim Curry looked like in the miniseries. Said Andres Muschietti, “The fact that this entity has been around for thousands of years… Aesthetically, I don’t dig the 20th century clown. I think it looks cheap, and it’s too related to social events and stuff and circus and stuff. Circus is fine, but I’m more aesthetically attracted to the old time, like the 19th century clown. And given that this guy has been around for centuries, I wondered myself why, why not, having an upgrade that was 1800s?”As for Skarsgard’s performance and the voice of Pennywise, the director said, “It’s a different approach… He’s not sticking to one voice. He has different personas. Because it’s a character that is based also on unpredictability, so he has this stagey persona, the more clowny appearance, but then in certain scenes when he turns into this other, which is harder to grasp, and that’s the ‘other” - you know, the ‘It.’ And he has a different tone, he has a deeper voice, and a different feel to it.”Said Skarsgard, of how he saw the character, “There's this potential backstory that we were possibly thinking about, which was the Bob Gray aspect of it - that Pennywise, the clown, is somewhat based on a real person. Then It has taken that person that actually existed and made him into his own Pennywise, essentially. We did play around with that aspect but, to me, that wasn't the important aspect of it. Regardless if the Pennywise or Bob Gray character actually existed, the one that I'm playing is It and the entity that's taking the shape of someone's fear.”The actor added, “There's somewhere in the book where it says the clown, Pennywise, is It’s favorite form. It enjoys taking that shape. So, why does he like to take that shape? What does he enjoy about it? All these different things that I had to answer myself in terms of embodying the character. I wanted IT, the entity or whatever that is, to really shine through in the performance. So, there's almost imperfections that this clown... There's something more awfully wrong with him. There's an entity behind it that is not a clown at all and doesn't look like a clown and has just taken the shape of a clown. So, that was something I explored a lot and, kind of, played up the creepiness and absurdity of the character, that there's glitches and things that are not completely solid, in terms of who the character is. That was important. I think that was really worth exploring in this version of Pennywise and it's something I find kind of cool and interesting.”

Continue on to learn more about the making of It.