How Andy Muschietti and team made It: Welcome to Derry

To make the world’s most haunted village, it takes… a village. Just ask Andy and Barbara Muschietti. When the sibling masterminds behind the hugely popular It film franchise decided to expand the Pennywise saga with a prequel series, they needed some help for what would be their first foray into television.

The Muschiettis recruited key collaborators from the films for It: Welcome to Derry to create a seamless extension across the eight-episode run — or, as Andy says, “basically eight movies” — of the HBO thrill ride. This included Oscar-winning production designer Paul Austerberry and Oscar- and Emmy-nominated costume designer Luis Sequeira.

As part of our Dream Team series, which unites creators and department heads to explore their award-worthy projects, Gold Derby assembled Andy Muschietti, Barbara Muschietti, Austerberry, and Sequeira for an exclusive deep-dive conversation into how they brought Derry to terrifying life for the small screen.

“Luis also did our first movie, Mama, so there’s a long history with both of these gentlemen, and we convinced them to join us in the TV world,” says Barbara. “We wanted Paul and Luis to be part of our team. We had great experiences working in the past. Both of them are extraordinary,” Andy continues. “Over the years, you gather your family over the work, over several projects, who you want to work with again, as with Luis and Paul. They are definitely part of that family.”

“It goes the other way, too, because we also enjoy working with you guys,” Austerberry agrees. “Exactly,” says Sequeira.

Watch our full Dream Team interview above and read on for how the team reimagined Derry for 1962, stocked the local supermarket with horrors, created the ill-fated Black Spot club, set up Pennywise the Dancing Clown’s backstory and changed his look, as well as a look ahead to what’s in store for Season 2.

Welcome to Derry

Doubling for the fictional Derry is the very real Port Hope, Ontario — the hamlet that also served as the setting for It and It: Chapter 2. Those films hopscotched across time, period-perfect 1989 and 2016, respectively. Since the first season of Welcome to Derry is primarily set in 1962, the production reskinned the Canadian town’s lovingly preserved 19th century bones to make everything feel as mid-century era-accurate as possible, and then meticulously crafted interior sets to match.

Barbara Muschietti:  Both Paul and Luis are research fanatics. Andy and I trust them wholeheartedly. So in that sense, these two gentlemen made our lives very, very easy.

Austerberry: Both Luis and I worked in 1962 before on The Shape of Water [for which Austerberry won an Oscar for Best Production Design and Sequeira was nominated for Best Costume Design]. So we’ve done some history and some research into that period. This is a different location, a different story, but more or less the same time period. Even though it’s set in 1962, a lot of stuff comes from before. A lot of our influences were from the ’50s, color palette, everything. We got to push a little bit more of the ’60s in the Hanlons’ house, for instance. And the Uris house. Other houses had older elements, from the 1940s and earlier.

Sequeira: For me, it really was about discerning our time and place. It was 1962, in Maine, but that is literally mid-century, 1955, or such. But there are elements from earlier. So we did a ton of research to understand the pre- and post-war eras.

It was a honey-dipped color palette, really ’50s, really warm. And we kind of cooled it down later in the season. We were quite precise in making sure that we were creating this world and controlling the palette.

The grocery store

Although Pennywise doesn’t emerge until the fifth episode, It’s presence is felt early on. One of the show’s stand-out moments comes in Episode 2, when Lilly Bainbridge (played by Clara Stack), still traumatized after witnessing her father mangled to death in the local pickle factory, goes on a shopping run in the seemingly most innocuous of places: Derry’s grocery store.

Andy Muschietti: Conceptually, it’s a very slow burn, a slow rise of tension that becomes catastrophic. It is using Lilly’s paranoia.

All the products are perfectly placed and there’s a lot of nefarious advertising in every single sign or can. … We’re playing with phobia of Americana, taken to 11. And that’s a lot that has a lot to do with, you know, with production design. When the shelf starts sliding behind Lily, it becomes supernatural and gets worse and worse. Everyone there seems wholesome and harmless, but there is actually something nefarious in their presence.

Sequeira: One thing I have to say about Andy is that he cares about every extra. And we handpicked these extras. They were all a little quirky. 

Andy Muschietti: Let’s talk about a specific curveball. I basically picked a guy from the background. I said, “Can you dance?” And he said, “No.” I said, “Well, you’re going to dance.” And he suddenly came to the foreground and he’s the guy that is chasing Lily [lurking in Slide 6 below]. Even though he was supposed to be in the background, Luis had him properly fit in costume that worked in the foreground.

Austerberry: That was one of the biggest graphic-design sets we had in the whole show. We had we had four people working on graphics for two months. Sometimes we’re just remaking existing graphics — we buy an old package or get photos of old packages. And other times we were creating specific ones for some of our characters. It all came from some legit reference that I pulled up. We were quite faithful to Americana from the ’50s. It was very mundane and then to set it off with such a horrific thing… that whole pickle monster [the tentacled creature dubbed Pickle Dad, which was created by VFX supervisor Daryl Sawchuk and team; for more on this scene, read our post-mortem interviews].

There’s a couple different pickle labels, but one of my set decorators’ last name is Melvin [Jeffrey Melvin], and it ended up being Melvin’s Pickles for our hero pickle jar [see Slide 8 above]. If you look at the show, you’ll see it pop up a few times. There’s even a [Melvin’s] truck that goes by a couple times in the background and people are loading them up here and there.

Sequeira: There’s even a pickle driver uniform.

The carnival

One of Andy Muschietti’s stated goals for Welcome to Derry was to offer an origin story for Pennywise. The first season introduces Bob Gray (Bill Skarsgård), a character mentioned in King’s novel, who performs as a dancing clown in the Derry carnival, circa 1908. We learn learn that It lures Bob to his doom and assumes the Pennywise persona. The team knew that the creepy carnival had to be one of the signature set pieces of the series — it’s also where Muschietti (“the tallest man in the world,” jokes Sequeira) makes a Hitchcockian cameo as an organ-grinder [Slides 2 and 3 below].

Austerberry: It was really fun to go back to the 1908 carnival scene. We all know from references what these carnivals look like, but we needed to figure out very specific things for this tale.

We had all the best artists in the city, hand painters and theatrical scenic background painters. We’re painting all the signs. The signage was all designed in-house from references and then hand-painted. But what was fun was working with Andy, trying to figure out the dance and what the backstory was for Pennywise, and what happened to his wife, Periwinkle, who was no longer around. It all had to be kind of explained in a lot of pantomime, in his theatrical performance for the children.

Andy had an idea about what he wanted it to be like: He comes from his house. He goes to the field to collect flowers for his dead wife…  We tell it through little details in the in the scenery. Then it was fun to figure out how to get the little pop-up gophers and animals for the scene. We had to devise old-school ways to create very simple mechanical carved wooden animals that would pop out of the ground and, that he would interact with.

Andy Muschietti: All I can say is my expectations were exceeded. I throw these ideas out and Paul creates the realism behind it. But also there’s always the touch of magic. When I saw this thing for the first time, I was like, “Wow, you guys really killed it.”

Austerberry: And then the kids loved it, too.

Sequeira: For me and my team, it really was about creating yet another world, and showing Bob Gray the man. And we made some interesting changes [to his Pennywise costume], a bit more floppy and not quite as fantastical.

The Black Spot

As briefly described in Stephen King’s It, the burning of the Black Spot is one of Derry’s defining tragedies. Andy Muschietti knew the fire would be the centerpiece of Season 1, but the novel left much unexplained.

The Black airmen from Derry’s Air Force base “wanted to create a hangout, because they couldn’t find a safe space in town,” Mushietti explains. “There was a lot of extrapolation and creation. … What were these guys doing? What did they use it for? They were hanging out there, but they have music, too, and they have a piano. There’s a bunch of musicians. Why not? And, in 1962, they said, ‘Let’s bring our instruments and get people dancing.’”

Austerberry: The architecture of the Black Spot was described as disused military storage. So I went with the archetypal Quonset hut. We had to create it twice on stage, once pre-burn and once post-burn, and recreate it on location.

And we had to go back again to make it pre-burn. Because of the schedule, we built it and [due to a delay from the Hollywood strikes] we had to remake it. So there was quite a lot of work. The architecture was quite a simple thing, but there was a lot of complicated elements going into it.

Sequeira:  Again, we did a ton of research to get the correct mood of this freeing spirit. There was a freedom to that space. But a lot of that research was black-and-white. I thought, “This is supposed to be their joyful time,” so we really amped up the color in that room.

And we had 50 people in there. I think we had 30 stunt people in there. We were shooting out of sequence. So we had clean clothes and burnt clothes and fire-protection elements as well. It was it was a good challenge, but it was a well-oiled machine. I mean, you guys practiced it for, what, several days? You rehearse everything before we rolled any kind of camera on it.

Austerberry: Practicing, practicing, practicing … starting from the music and then blending into the whole fight sequence. It’s pretty incredible — a one-take kind of thing. But it was a lot.

Andy Muschietti: Honestly, it was very well-coordinated. Apart from these guys, we had a great special effects team, stunt team. And my first AD was just phenomenal.

The evolution of Pennywise

As Sequeira noted above, his team had to create several variations of the Pennywise costume. In addition to the classic version from the films, there was also Bob Gray’s 1908 hand-made circus get-up. For the Season 1’s climactic battle, Andy Muschietti had something completely different in mind.

Andy Muschietti: I said, “Let’s offer the audience something that they haven’t seen, a Pennywise that, even though he’s a shapeshifter, he’s augmented in a different way. Something that people will not expect.”

Sequeira: He had the idea to do this red Pennywise. And we were like, “Oh, OK.”

Andy Muschietti: He has basically been sunken in this stew of guts and body parts and blood. I cannot imagine the alarms that sound in each department, like, “How are we going to keep this costume red, making it look like blood without getting it wet?” I imagine it was a it was a challenge for for Luis and his team.

Sequeira: I had done Carrie, with a bloody wet dress, and had figured that part out, but this was completely blood-drenched, and because It was an entity, [the dress] needed to remain that way. There was no drying of the blood. There was no shifting of color. That was the challenge of finding something that was so flexible and gave us the look.

Ultimately we went with a bright, crazy scarlet red, and then we did all the aging and bleaching and patina work on the costume. Then lots of testing of different wet-looking mediums, since we could obviously not have an actor be soaked for hours and hours. We presented to Andy and the DP as well, to make sure that we were going to actually see the discerning colors. And there you go. It was born, and we made a few of those. And I think we did well.

Austerberry: Genius, really, because if you think about what we’re seeing in Episode 8, I can’t imagine a white Pennywise in the white world of the snow storm. He would just disappear, you know? It’s fantastic that Andy came up with that idea.

Barbara Muschietti: It was out of necessity, of course. Because of the strikes [production was pushed back]. We went from being a summer show to being a deep-in-the-winter show. So we had to shift our ideas.

What’s next?

The Muschiettis conceived Welcome to Derry as a three-season arc based on the “Interludes” of King’s sprawling novel exploring catastrophes of Derry’s past. The completed first season looked at the torching of the Black Spot. Season 2 would spin backwards to the events of 1935 and the massacre of Bradley Gang. And the final season would revisit the carnival and other sights of 1908, culminating with the explosion of the Kitchener Ironworks. So where do those plans stand?

“The idea is still very much the same,” says Barbara. “We are very actively working on the scripts for Season 2, and we are crossing our fingers — and so is a studio — that we get there. We should know in a couple months, tops.”

And presuming the green light comes, Andy and Barbara are ready to get their dream team back together.

“Paul and I were talking about it earlier,” says Sequeira. “It’s 1935, so it’s a new challenge. It will be a great challenge.”

“The bottom line here,” says Barbara, “is that we always want them.”