INT: Eli Roth

Last Updated on July 27, 2021

There
is no doubt that writer-director Eli Roth is on fire! He is
extremely entertaining, animated, passionate, driven and handsome to
boot. Chasing his
childhood dreams all the way to Hollywood

via NYU film school, Roth’s impressive perseverance paid off when
his first low-budget horror flick CABIN FEVER, got picked up by
Lionsgate and hit the big screen in 2003. Newfound success and great acclaim led the way to the
powerful and influential Tarantino who went on to executive produce
Roth’s 2005-twisted thriller, HOSTEL.

It
would be easy to dismiss or overlook Roth’s contagious enthusiasm
for horror as pure consumption with unfathomable perversion.
However, in his elaboration on making the sequel
HOSTEL:
PART II, he justified his spine-chilling thought process while presenting
a good argument for all the delirium culminating in a desirable,
dreadful, outrageous, entertaining horror movie in an attempt to
outshine, if not do justice to part I.
Going a mile a minute, Roth was an adrenaline boost as he sat
with us last week at the NY Comic Con, to divulge some horrifying
tidbits about the upcoming sequel HOSTEL: PART II, working with
Tarantino, what makes him tick (or rather give him a boner) and much
more. Check out what
Roth had to say.

Eli
Roth

Does
Hostel: Part II pick up from where the last one left off?

Yes,
Hostel: Part II picks up literally the next cut, where the first one
left off. I think Friday
the 13th part 2 did that, I believe Porky’s 2: The Next
Day may have done something similar although Porky’s 2 is a bit of
a comeback. Porky’s
Forever is a film I’d love to one-day tackle but I don’t think
I’m quite there yet. Yeah,
I love movies to pick up literally the next cut that you could
actually chop out the credits from Hostel 1 and watch 1 and 2 back
to back.

How
different is the structure of Hostel: Part II?

There won’t be as much slosh buckling as there was [in part 1].
There’s some gallivanting.
Structurally in the first movie, the fun of it was using the
structure as almost a sex comedy; taking the first half of the movie
and then just completely pulling the rug out from under everyone.
It starts off safe and colorful and then once Josh gets
killed, suddenly your main character is gone, the color is drained
away, the lenses get tighter, more handheld.

Then you actually see later that it’s more parallel; kind
of mirror image of each other. The
guy’s making fun of the hookers and they become the hookers.
So the fun of Hostel 1 was taking people on that ride and
doing the tonal switch but you can’t do that again. You can’t sort of reset and then have Hostel: Part II start
off like a fun, safe comedy and then switch.
So what I decided was that tonally I wanted the movie to pick
up exactly where the last one left off.

I
watched the movie with audiences around the world and I tried to
watch what stuff I thought worked and what didn’t work and what I
could’ve done better and there’s a lot of stuff.
There were certain things like the kids I thought were great
but generally my favorite section of the movie was when he was in
the pub with the girls and the girls were all f**ked up and then all
sort of leading up into the factory into the scene with the American
business man where he’s in the locker room with Rick Hoffman.

More often than any other scene, audiences around the world
tell me that that was the scene that disturbed them the most.
I realize that you can have the gore and the eyes getting cut
out but this dialogue scene with these two people in the locker
room, with just the look on his face talking about killing; that was
the tone that I wanted. So
I really tried to make a movie that was much more…even Cabin Fever
and Hostel are inconsistent in a weird way which I liked but Hostel:
Part II, I really tried to make it starting off in that creepy place
and staying there.

In
the first one we’re really with the characters having fun; we’re
kind of with them in Amsterdam and with them in the Brothel.
But in this one, when you see the girls that are studying in
Italy and you’re seeing these guys in America that are paid to
kill them, everyone who’s heading towards this thing; you just
feel horrible. I just
wanted this sense of dread throughout this whole thing.

Are
you interested at all in partaking in the remake of Wes Craven’s
Shocker?

He
should remake Shocker because it deserves it.
But I remember Shocker was the movie that Wes Craven said the
ratings killed him on. So
I think that maybe he should just go back and do a director’s cut
of the original movie and show us what he originally intended.
It’s different though.
I think the term Shocker just has a different social context
now. In 1980’s it was
a Shocker but now what’s the tagline going to say?
“Two in the pink, on in the stink?”
How can I get so vulgar at two in the afternoon? I mean,
it’s three questions and I’m already making…how does that
happen? I apologize.
I’m so sorry. You seem like decent people…thwart your
point, leave it to me.

How
extreme is this movie going to be?

Here’s
the thing. I think that I just really honestly want to tell a good
story and make it scary and interesting.
I want everything to be about the next level.
We’ll see the next level of the organization.
The movie is about the next level of depravity; if sex
doesn’t get you off, the violence is a substitute for that.
There are certainly scenes where you have to be the next
level of shocking in the serving but at a certain point it’s like,
I don’t want the whole movie to just become about that. I just
want to tell a really good scary story but if you’re just trying
to make it the most shocking serving…it’s been done before and
it’s been done better. I
love Cannibal Holocaust, I love movies like that and you’re never
going to be more shocking in the serving than those films.
I just want to tell a good scary story from start to finish.

I
was looking at the sequels that I love like [Mad Max 2: The] Road
Warrior, Aliens, [Star Wars: Episode V-The] Empire Strikes Back and
Devil’s Rejects and you came out of those movies thinking that was
actually better than the first one.
I thought [in] Aliens, they showed you the Queen Mother and
you went so much deeper into the world and [Mad Max 2: The] Road
Warrior just took the best parts of Mad Max and it was like that
adrenaline rush for 90 minutes.
That’s what I was really going for.

Let’s take the things that I thought worked best for
Hostel. I really dove on
that for the story on the sequel but it was a really difficult
challenge because in the first one you don’t know what’s going
to happen and it’s scary learning about everything as it unfolds
and what these kids have gotten into.
So the challenge was, how do you make it scary and have
surprises and twists when everybody kind of knows what’s going to
happen? And if you don’t have that happen, then people will feel
they got ripped off…but I feel great about it.
I’m really, really excited about the film.

Do
you ever get tired of it?

Yeah,
I’m exhausted. I’m sick of it, you kidding me? No, I‘m tired. I
went from Hostel 1 to Hostel: Part II without a break.
I literally have been doing just press for the film. The DVD came out on April
18th and the 19th, I was writing the sequel. In
June I was scouting and September I was shooting.
So my head has been in that torture house for about two and a
half years.

I
spent two days shooting the trailer for Grindhouse; this fake
trailer for a Tarantino and Rodriguez film and it was so much fun.
It was two days of just money shots.
Every shot was just gore, nudity, no continuity, bad acting.
Who cares if there’s a light in the shot?
It’s Grindhouse. So
it was so freeing to do something so much fun and I thought I really
have to do something like this next.
I have to do something that’s going to be nuts and insane
and fun. Almost like an
old Woody Allen movie just to kind of switch it up a little bit.

What
about a Hostel III?

I
don’t know. Sure the
answer is it depends on how Hostel: Part II does. For right now, I
don’t want to make a bad Hostel III and I don’t want to force
it. I feel like the
story ends in Hostel: Part II and let’s just leave it at that
right now.

There’s
a dark ending to Hostel where Paxton goes and gets the daughter and
kills her. Is that the kind of dark headspace he’s in when we
begin Hostel: Part II?

Yeah,
I mean the original ending in the script is that when Paxton sees
the business man with his daughter, you think he’s going to kill
the business man and he slits the daughter’s throat and throws her
in the dumpster (imitates a cartoon sound effect like bada bump
badump bump BUMP!). Even
Tarantino said to me “Eli, this is REALLY sick.
I know you’re going for sick but this is like
we’ve-just-been-kicked-in-the-balls kind of sick. We want to have
our asses kicked but we don’t want to get kicked in the balls.

There’s a difference.” So I thought all right; so we shot an
ending where he kidnaps the girl because I thought that’s got to
be worse than killing this guy which is to have his daughter taken.
Then we showed it to an audience and the first hand went up
and some guy yelled, “He should have slit that bitches throat!”
Then someone else goes “No, no, no, no, no, no…because
that’s worse than death. I
have a question, how’s he going to speak Dutch?”
So I’m like f**k! Then
others were saying, “Yeah, I want to see that guy get killed.”

So
we went back and reshot an ending and the audience went crazy.
They loved it. Somebody
else came up to me and said, “What disturbed me is that I was so
shocked and upset by the violence but at the end I was cheering for
violence.” It made me
really think how I had the capacity to want to see that happen to
someone else and that’s what scared me more and I opened up a
whole other door of things I can bullshit about and make it seem
like it was the original ending.
Then in Part II, I said that Jay [Hernandez] is going to
start off in that headspace. You’re
not going to recover quickly from an incident like that.
He’s a little messed up.
He’s not happy.

Did
you meet you with Stephen King yet?

No,
not yet. He’s pretty
swamped but we’re trying to link up.
There is a plan for us to meet in the future if not today.

Did
you hear about the movie The Signal at Sundance, which is very
similar to Cell?

I
heard about it and I haven’t seen The Signal but … (At this
point, actress Heather Matarazzo briefly stops by the table to say
hello and then Roth turns to us and says: ‘People don’t realize how
sexy she is. They’re like, ‘You had Heather naked in your movie.’
And, I was, like, ‘Hell yeah!'”)
Going
back to The Signal, I know it has a similar premise to the Cell but
it’s also like…what are you going to do?
I think that where I’m going with Cell is so far different
that what they’ve done in The Signal.
In Hostel and Saw, there were similar things but there’s
just nothing you can do about it.
What can you do? You
just go out and make the best film you can.
If they are films that are similar territory; as long as
they’re both good films, people will go out and see them.

I’m
not thinking anything else but Hostel: Part II right now… and if
I’m working on Cell, I’d probably would see the film at some
point. Like with the Saw
guys, we check in with each other.
They call me and [tell me about a scene they are shooting] so
that we don’t repeat the same gags but there’s just [so much you
can do to avoid these things]. I
noticed there was this same plastic sheeting in Saw 3 that there is
in Hostel: Part II, but we didn’t know.
So it’s like ok, Jigsaw and our factory all go through the
same torture people. We
call each other and check in after each kill.
There’s a real good Splat Pack line of communication.

Splat
Pack?

Yeah
it’s hilarious. It’s
good for now but it’ll be over in about ten minutes.

Will
you be mentoring other filmmakers?

Oh
yeah. [There are short
films that I’ve helped new filmmakers with: with their scripts and
films]. I helped
with 2001 Maniacs…I think that I’m still kind of finding my own
style and finding my own voice and planting my flag in the film
world. And I‘m going
to spend the next few years doing that but honestly I always thought
what I would do is make a bunch of movies and stop and teach for a
while. I would love to
do that and then just teach at a film school.

I
was a camp counselor for three years at a day camp and I love kids.
Honestly, that was better experience for directing that film
school. The three years
I was a camp counselor and all my babysitting skills have come into
play so much more. That
is 98% directing. The
whole job is [saying things like] “Look, I know he’s in your
chair, and I know it says your name on that piece of paper on it,
but I’m going to make you sit on my chair.”

Or “I know he got three cookies but I promise you I’m
going to get you a special cookie but it’s got to be our secret
and you can’t tell them but if you’re going to do that then you
have to go do this scene and NO F**KING ARGUING ABOUT IT!”
It’s all about controlling your temper.
I feel like I have a lot of knowledge coming from no film
background and a kid growing up in Boston, and going to NYU film
school, then a PA at Central Park West in Tompkin’s Square Park.

I feel like there’s just a lot of crazy stories that I
have, having done that as a young filmmaker so I’m probably going
to write a book just really targeted at film students…telling them
how I went from fan to filmmaker; sort of knowing that Robert
Rodriguez read that book. I
just feel that there’s a lot of knowledge I have that they don’t
teach you in school that filmmakers should know.

How
did you end up directing the trailer Thanksgiving for Grindhouse for
Tarantino?

Well
he comes to me and says (in Tarantino’s voice) “Man, we need
this f**king thing alright. It’s going to be so cool right and
it’s going to be f**king Grindhouse.
We’re going to have big f**king fake trailers all right.
F**king Robert [Rodriguez] already shot it.
You’re shooting the lobby card alright.”
I’m like Robert? It’s
like they talked about it but Robert literally went and shot it
while they were on the phone. They
needed f**king lobby cards and I was like this guy is unbelievable.
How did he do this? Literally
the lobby cards are what got everybody talking:
they were so funny and I thought all right I got to do one of
these.

I thought about a
slasher movie my friend Jeff and I had been dreaming about growing
up in Massachusetts. Thanksgiving
is the biggest f*king deal…and every year there was a new slasher
movie about every given holiday…My Bloody Valentine, April
Fool’s Day, Friday the 13^th, Halloween, Silent Night,
Deadly Night…but how could they have not done Thanksgiving yet?
I mean, what are they encircling Passover Massacre
(laughter). So
then I said we got to do Thanksgiving and we had all the gags worked
out. So Tarantino asked when I was going to do a trailer and I said
Thanksgiving. It’s my 1981 slasher movie; I’ve been dying to do
it for years. So first
he put me in Grindhouse, which was a whole other weird experience,
and then I went from Hostel: Part II to writing the trailer and then
just added on two days after. We
recycled everything we had and threw it into this trailer.
It was fun. Had a
great time doing it.

You’re
in Death Proof?

Yes,
that was really fun. During
pre-production Quentin Tarantino’s Assistant called me who I’m
friends with to say (in professional voice) ‘Mr. Tarantino would
like you to audition for Death Proof.’
She’s like he really wants me to read for this role and
I’m like “Is he aware I’m not an actor?” I did this one
little thing in Cabin Fever kind of as a joke and Quentin thought it
was funny and so I thought fine, I’ll do it.
So I go to the audition and on the sign in sheet, the person
ahead of me is Derek Richardson from Hostel who played Josh.
He sees me and he’s like “What the hell are you doing
here?” I was like (in
an ashamed voice) “I’m auditioning for Quentin’s movie.”
He’s like “Aren’t you a big director now?”
I’m like “Shut up.”
I was actually casting for Hostel: Part II at the time and
had to leave my own auditions to audition for Quentin’s movie.

Then
his assistant calls and says I have a call back.
Then I have to go to his house and it’s so weird because
I’ve been to his house a million times to hang out and watch
movies, and then I have to read for Quentin and act for him which
was so weird. Here’s
what’s even weirder. After
the audition he goes: ‘Great I got 35mm print of Sergio
Martino’s sex comedy, Sex With A Smile sex tape.
Do you want to come over and watch it later?’
Sure. So I had to
leave his house at 4:15, then go back there about 8 and it was just
the two of us sitting there watching a movie.
But, I couldn’t mention anything that happened that
afternoon because it would have been too weird.

Then
they call me and say Quentin really wants you to do it.
We’re both shooting at the same time.
How am I going to be in Prague prepping a movie when he’s
shooting the same time in Texas?
Quentin said it was a bar scene so I gave him a week. I told
everyone I would be leaving during pre-production for one week to go
to Texas and be in Quentin’s movie.
So I get there and find out I have to do two parts now.
They tell me that one of the actors dropped out and they
merged two parts. Now
I’m thinking aww Jesus, now I have to really study lines but the
part was a dorky Jewish guy at a bar trying to pick up Jordan Ladd
and failing miserably. So
I thought all right, that is something I have practiced for like
five years, so I can handle it.
I was trying to be cool and humiliate myself over and over;
just being a total idiot so it was perfect.
It was great.

It
was like a master class. It
was taking an intensive master class in directing right before I
went to shoot my film: watching
Quentin and how he worked. So
now I could tell my crew, “well this is how Quentin does it
guys.” I pulled that
card out. I was like
“look I know you do it this way but now we do things Quentin’s
way.” It was great.

What
about casting Roger Bart? Is
there a singing role for him?

Don’t
think that Roger Bart didn’t have Hostel: Part II the musical
already [thought out]. He
actually had a full musical version of every one of his scenes.
He and the actors performed it for me and it was f**king
weird.

Roger
Bart is so funny. He was
in the Producers and Desperate Housewives and I was so happy when he
came do audition. The other audition I was so happy about was
Richard Burgi. They were
both on Desperate Housewives but they had never worked together.
They had separate storylines and I had so much fun working
with those guys. I felt
so lucky with the cast I got. In
fact, what was so great is that the studio read the script and
thought that no one would ever [want those roles].
They thought it was so sick that no one would ever want to be
in this movie. They
dared me. They thought I
would get no girls to be in this movie because it was too sick.
The first person to respond was Heather Matarazzo and Bijou
Phillips. So then the
studio thought that maybe it was all right.

How
does your My Space account and the Internet help you?

The Internet has been particularly helpful to me because with Cabin
Fever, nobody would have known about the film if it weren’t for
the Internet and the website. I
think the fans on the website know me.
It’s really changed in that filmmakers and filmmaking used
to be so separated from them and it was this whole other world but I
think that with me I try to give as much information as possible.
I do way more commentaries than anyone would listen too.
What I try to do is the fifteen-year-old version of myself
for some guy who wants to make horror movies but has no connections
and no way of doing it. The Internet is also a great way to bring
you closer and in touch with the fans.
The truth is that now with Lionsgate I have the best
marketing people in the world. The
poster with Bijou, no matter what I do on the Internet, they get the
movies and know how to sell them and go for it.

Talk
about Guillermo del Toro’s advice that he gave you last year.

Yes, whatever gives you the biggest boner.
100% correct and I’ve talked about that to other directors
too. Guillermo del Toro, when I was asking about Cabin Fever if I
should do a big budget movie or low budget movie, he just goes (in
Toro’s voice): ‘Whatever
gives you the biggest boner man.
You have to wake up with a f**king rager.
If you don’t have a boner, you can’t work.’ And I
thought, ‘He’s right.’ You have to be that excited about the project
you’re doing … and that was Hostel II.

I was so excited to do it, and I thought about that even
with the Grindhouse trailer. I mean, I know people who are doing
movies, and they are getting paid big paychecks to do them, and they
are miserable. They have to think about this stuff.
They don’t want to do it and no matter how much money they
get paid, they’re still unhappy people. On Hostel, I think my salary
was $10,000, and I didn’t care. I was just going to do it and have
fun. The Thanksgiving
for Grindhouse trailer I did for free and it was still the most fun
I’ve ever had shooting anything. The truth is, if you do what you
love; the money, none of that matters.”

Hostel:
Part II hits theaters on June 5.