'If you're pissing off the establishment, you must be doing something right'
Neil Davey caught up with Eli Roth, the director of Cabin Fever and Hostel I and II director and all-round horror connoisseur, to chat about gore, Members of Parliament, trailer trash and being pigeonholed.
How do you find the publicity thing?
I love it. I really do. I have a great time. All I do is sit around and talk about movies anyway so to sit around and talk about my own movie is great. For me, it's like I have very strong opinions, so I finally have the chance to get out and express myself. It's very satisfying.
That comes across in the various commentaries.
I'm from the first generation of laser disc users so I always appreciated it when there was a good commentary. When I found out on DVD that you could do more than one... I did five on Cabin Fever. Then four on Hostel and three on Hostel II. I love it, there's so much to say about making a film. The DVD, the Blu-ray, that's the record, this is what the film will be seen on, people will be watching it on those forever, so it's great when you can record all of that history, it's a historical document.
Has that changed the way you make films?
I have always planned my 'behind the scenes' from the time I wrote Cabin Fever. I was so into laser discs, and I thought ‘oh man, I can't wait to make this and do the laser disc’. And then by the time I made it, laser discs were out of date and we had DVD. I find that when I'm writing the movie and shooting the film, the rule used to be ‘don't shoot the violence, shoot the airline version’. You had to make sure you had the PG, the TV version, the airline version. Now they're saying ‘make sure you shoot extra gore, film all the violence!’ because they know it's all about the unrated DVD. When you're making horror films, it's so unbelievably satisfying to know you can shoot all the gore and all the violence, because even when you're dealing with the censors, the ratings boards, in any country, you know that you're going to have that available for the DVD.
If you have to make cuts for the theatrical release, it's less painful to do knowing that people are going to own it and watch it forever the way you originally intended. I'm all about the 'behind the scenes', I'm planning it, making sure it's fun. I hate it when it's boring and prepackaged. That's why I have my brother shoot it, to make it feel like a real documentary. The films are so dark and grim and violent that I really like to contrast that, so that the ‘behind the scenes’ is fun and light, which is really the atmosphere on set.
It has to be said, you don't look like evil incarnate.
Yeah. I know. People expect me to look like Marilyn Manson and they're shockingly disappointed. But you look at any of these horror people, David Lynch for example, they're often very sweet and harmless. It was Plato who said: ‘The good dream of what the bad do.’ If you're a good person you're very affected by the violence in the world. I just happen to have all these violent, dark stories to tell.
There's a satirical edge to the Hostel movies. Does that get overlooked by certain critics?
Oh, by certain critics of course. When you're making a movie like Hostel, there are so many critics that just get blinded by the violence. Vince Canby in the New York Times said of The Exorcist something like the violence was almost pornographic. When John Carpenter made The Thing, which is widely considered to be the greatest horror film of all time by many fans, he was called 'a pornographer of violence'. In fact, at the moment, this Member of Parliament, Charles Walker who invoked Hostel II last week and now wants to make it illegal to own stills from the movie, said that he hasn't even seen the film but people he trusts have seen it and assure him that it's misogynistic! It's like when parents got mad at punk rock and heavy metal. If you're pissing off the establishment and pissing off critics, then you must be doing something right.
I feel lucky that there are a lot of critics who have got it, who have got the social commentary. It's really DVD that's enabled that to happen. People watch movies over and over. I'm a horror fan and I can watch a movie 30, 40 times. I've seen The Wicker Man maybe 50 times. If you give the fans something more intelligent, that's smarter, that's got different layers, then the first time they watch it, they see the violence, the gore, and then they become numb to that and start to pick up on the more subtle things you put in there.
I write movies that are designed to be watched over and over and over and over. I feel lucky when people pick up on it. The European critics get it. In France, the lead critic there put Hostel as the best American movie of 2006, ahead of The Departed. Empire magazine, the fans voted it best horror... it's really great to be recognised in your own time. It's such a wonderful and rare thing. When people get upset about it, it actually helps. It makes people want to see it and go, 'Wow, what's so bad about this film?'
The crunch comes from a female reaction to the infamous C-Word...
I've seen that reaction. I've seen girls give that reaction when you use that word. You certainly don't want to use it when she has a pair of scissors in a certain place...
These attempts to ban the film are reminiscent of the Jamie Bulger, where again a horror film was blamed for society's failings.
It's ridiculous. When people say that violent movies cause violence? I just laugh at that. It's such an old argument and so stupid. I would like to ask those people, ‘How do you explain the 250 years of torture during the European witch trials which the popes decreed?’ With tortures the church created! Where 300,000 people were killed for being witches. Correct me if I'm wrong, but were those people watching movies? Was that what was going on? For 250 years?
Have you been in the Museum of Torture? Have you been to The London Dungeon? One of the tortures the church created was you'd be upside down and people would take a two-handed saw and slowly split you in half and keep you upside down specifically so you'd stay conscious longer! That's the kind of thing they came up with. Or the Judas Cradle, where you sat on a pyramid with weights on your ankles until the pyramid goes up into your ribs? That was stuff that the church created because the Bible says: ‘Thou shalt not suffer a witch to live’. So 300,000 people were being killed because of the Bible. Why don't we ban the Bible? Or religion? That seems to make the most sense. But one person kills someone it's a violent movie to blame. People don't want to take responsibility for anything. They're idiots.
No argument here...
Truly. Charles Walker, this Member of Parliament, is genuinely a moron. I mean, for someone to say, 'I've never seen this movie, but people I trust tell me it's obscene and misogynistic and therefore people should be put in prison for owning photgraphs of it'? I hate to break it to you, idiot, but it's not real. It's make-up. It's pretend. It's a magic trick. And it's one scene he's talking about. What about Halloween? There's triple the amount of naked women killed in that. I loved the remake, but why wouldn't you ban that first? What other laws is he proposing based around what people he know thinks? Who are these people? Hey, well, you elected him, have fun...
So, Hostel III: The Priests then?
No, there's no Hostel III. I wrote it as Hostel Part I and Hostel Part II, and unless there's a really great idea, that I think is better than the first two films, I really have no interest. I've said everything I want to say on the subject. If the fans demanded it and the studio said can we do this, I would certainly not block it, but as of right now, this is it. And with the Hostel II DVD we packed so much stuff on there, so many extras, these awesome ‘behind the scenes’ that my brother made, these commentaries, there's not going to be another issue of the DVD. We're not double dipping.
How important was the Tarantino endorsement?
For the first film, it was extremely important. A lot of people had seen Cabin Fever, but it helped break things out beyond that core audience I had and there were a lot of fans of Quentin's movies that also went to see it. For me, what's important is Quentin's contribution as producer, in terms of his story notes for me, coming to the editing room to help out, his support. I told him the idea I had for a sequel and he said go for it: sometimes you need someone to give you that push. But Quentin is someone whose opinion I really trust and value. He's such a smart guy that it's invaluable. But it's the same with the other producers. They're all very, very smart filmmakers and writers. I feel that the success of the Hostel movies is really due to everyone contributing.
The two main killers in Hostel II are two very recognisable faces from Desperate Housewives. Was that a deliberate casting decision?
It was a coincidence. I've never seen a single episode of Desperate Housewives. My television isn’t even hooked up, I only watch DVDs on it. I'm not against TV, I just don't have time to watch it. When Roger Bart came in, I recognised him from The Producers, and from other films, and Richard Bergi I knew from other films, but I didn't even know that either was on Desperate Housewives. They just came in and gave the best auditions. They hadn't actually worked together before. They'd met and were fans of each other’s work and they just got on instantly. They were so good in their auditions, and as soon as they met, we knew the chemistry was perfect.
I wanted the guys to be sympathetic and likeable. They're going to do this horrible, horrible thing and I thought okay, you'll never top the insane psycho of Rick Hoffman in the first one, or the creepiness of Jan Vlashk, the Dutch businessman, or the German surgeon... All those guys were so creepy in their own way, I just thought the guys in Hostel II needed to be a different kind of creepy, to make them likeable. If I can get the audience to understand where they're coming from and be entertained by them, then we can create a real sense of dread. I want people to be as nervous and as scared for the guys as they are for the girls.
Do you think that horror directors get pigeonholed more than other genre directors?
I made 20 animated shorts before I made Cabin Fever, so back then I was animation guy. Then I made Cabin Fever, so then it became 'oh, he's comedy horror' guy. Then I made Hostel and it's 'oh, no, he's violent horror guy'.
I look at the career path of Sam Raimi and Peter Jackson, who pushed the envelope of violence in their first movies and then went on to make great genre and fantasy films. People love to pigeonhole but you just answer them with your filmmaking. I don't think people get stuck in a certain pigeonhole because of a genre, I think it's because that's what they're good at. I think that the directors that do it have the talent to do it. I'm going to be breaking out into comedy and other things, and I have to prove myself in those arenas and it's nobody's fault but my own. The only way I'll stay in the horror genre is if I keep myself there. Whatever I do, I'm telling stories, making a film, and want to make the best film possible.
What is next for you?
Next I'm going to be doing television. [Laughs]. There's this spin-off of Heroes called Heroes Origins, where they're going to do these six mini-movies and they've already asked Kevin Smith to do one and me. I'm getting to write it, and create my own character, so I'm very excited about that. And I had so much fun shooting my fake trailer for Grindhouse, Thanksgiving, that I'm going to shoot a whole movie of fake trailers that will be totally silly and absurd, called Trailer Trash.