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| Interview: Eli Roth Reopens The "Hostel" |
by Peter Sobczynski
If you ever want to start a brawl amidst a group of horror film fans–and who doesn’t want to do just that from time to time?–all that you need to do is mention the name “Eli Roth” and stand back to watch the fur fly (fur if you are lucky). On the basis of only two spectacularly bloody feature films–his 2003 debut “Cabin Fever” and his 2006 commercial breakthrough “Hostel–he has thoroughly divided this crowd into two warring camps. On one side, there are those that considers him the future of horror filmmaking for his willingness to push the limits of good taste with his blend of weirdo humor and gory setpieces. On the other side of the divide, there are those that consider him a relentlessly self-promoting frat-boy gore-hound who stuffs his films with repellent imagery because he lacks the talent to jolt viewers in any other way than by grossing them out.
His latest film, “Hostel: Part II,” seems unlikely to bridge the gap anytime soon and has already inspired many an Internet flame war. It is, as you may have guessed from the title, a continuation of “Hostel”–in fact, it is essentially a revision of that earlier film in that he has taken the same basic premise–a group of American college kids abroad are lured to a youth hostel in Slovakia that serves as a front for an international murder ring in which rich people pay enormous sums of money to gruesomely torture and kill people just to experience the rush of taking a human life–and tweaks some of the elements seen the first time around (instead of the drunken, horny guys from the previous chapter, the future victims here are a trio of likable girls played by Lauren German, Bijou Phillips and Heather Matarazzo) while expanding on others that has only been hinted at before (such as a fuller glimpse of the whole torture organization through the eyes of two wanna-be alpha males, played by “Desperate Housewives” refugess Richard Burgi and Roger Bart). As for the grisly torture scenes, I won’t give any details away except to say that those who relished the bloodshed in “Hostel” will no doubt be satisfied with what occurs here while those who were appalled by the excesses of the previous film should stay as far away from this one as humanly possible.
After jetting into Chicago for a screening and Q&A of “Hostel: Part II,” Roth sat down to speak at length about the film, the controversies that his work has inspired and some thoughts on his future plans that include hints on his next project, an adaptation of the Stephen King best-seller “Cell,” and the possibility of a feature version of “Thanksgiving,” the hilarious fake slasher-movie trailer that he contributed to “Grindhouse.” Before going into the interviews, I should mention a couple of things. First, the following discussion may contain some spoilers regarding plot details of “Hostel: Part II,” so those wanting to go in completely fresh may want to hold off on reading it until after seeing the film. Second, there are no questions involving either the intense Internet debates about his work and imagery that I alluded to earlier or the bootleg video of the film that has made its way online in the last few days since neither of them had occurred at the time that I spoke to him last week.
One of the interesting things about the first “Hostel” is that, unlike a lot of contemporary horror films, which always seem to be laying the groundwork for potential sequels, it was a movie that felt as though it were specifically designed to be a self-contained story. After all, much of the impact of the film depended on the shock and surprise viewers felt as the premise unfolded, feelings that obviously couldn’t be replicated in a sequel, and the evil at its center was more of a cultural attitude instead of a more conventional boogeyman that could be carried on in future installments. Other than the obvious financial considerations, can you talk about why you decided to do “Hostel: Part II” and explain how you came to the particular approach you chose this time around?
You are correct in that “Hostel” was meant to be a one-off that was supposed to be a little movie that I did in between movies. I had a couple of studio projects that were in development that I was waiting for the scripts to come in to get greenlighted. The average budget for a movie these days–the average budget–is about $80 million and when we shot “Hostel,” we did it for $3.8 million so even if it only came out in a few cities and done $8-10 million at the box-office, it would have been a home run. We didn’t even know if it would come out in theaters. I wanted to make a movie that took the Takashi Miike/Chan-wook Park sensibility and violence and bring it to American horror because I thought that was the most exciting film stuff happening in the world–films like “Audition” and “Battle Royale” and “Sympathy for Mr. Vengeance”–and that is where I felt that horror was headed. Then when it opened at $20 million and knocked out “King Kong” and “Narnia,” it was a complete shock to everyone–we had no idea that the appetite for this was so strong and so mainstream.
After the film, I got offered big movies because once you have a film that opens to that kind of success, they offer you everything because you are now on the list. I was offered a lot of money to do other franchise films but I just wasn’t that interested in doing those because I was most excited about watching people respond to my ideas–to have very strong ideas about the world and to be disgusted by the war and these images from Iraq and to feel that other people feel the same way that you do. We were talking about that on Fox News and I was saying that the Bush administration was causing horror films–obviously you are provoking them because it is Fox News but just to have these political discussions come up as a result of “Hostel,” I wanted to continue with it and explore it further but if I was going to do it, I had to do it right now. I think that part of what made “Hostel” work is that it feels very of the moment–this is where America and its fears are at.
I thought that if I am going to make a sequel, I have to make “Aliens” or “The Road Warrior” or “The Empire Strikes Back”–how am I going to make a movie that takes the best elements of the first film and continues them in order to give fans what they want but has them coming out thinking that it was a better, scarier and smarter film than the first one? I’m not just going to repeat myself and redo all the big gags. I took a look at “Saw II”–that film gave you the experience of seeing the people caught in all the traps but it really expanded its mythology and even though you were looking for a twist and you still didn’t see it coming. “The Devils Rejects” was fucking amazing–I though Rob Zombie took “House of 1000 Corpses” to a whole other level. There are so many bad horror sequels around that there is a stigma to them but at the time that “Cabin Fever” came out, there was a stigma to horror films in general that things like “Hostel” and “Saw” helped eliminate. Now I want to eliminate the stigma of horror sequels by making a great movie.
I had the benefit of sitting and watching the movie with a lot of audiences. I must have watched it 100 times with audiences around the world–50 times in the U.S. alone and then places like Berlin and Italy and France and I took the opportunity to watch the movie play to see what worked and what didn’t work, what had them checking their text messages and what had them on the edge of their seats. What worked? The kids–everybody loved the kids because nobody can control them. The police, the organization–no one could control them because they don’t give a fuck, they don’t listen to anybody and they do what they want. They are like these little mice that gum up the works and fuck things up for everybody. I think people loved the idea that you had these people that were so terrifying and yet these street kids are not afraid of them and I decided to expand on that. Before, they were the bubblegum gang but now they have figured that dollars will get you bubblegum and so they too have become little capitalists as well. The gore–stuff like the eyegasm–people loved that and so we had to have more of that. The scene where I really think that “Hostel” kick in is where Jay Hernandez goes to the pub and sees the girls and it is like seeing Oz behind the curtain. Suddenly, everything that once seemed so beautiful and fun is now sinister and creepy. The ride to the factory–that whole sequence where she asks him if he wants gum and you realize that she is telling him that he is finished and that he may as well enjoy the gum because pretty soon, he isn’t going to have his teeth for much longer.
The scene that universally scared people the most in the film was the part in the locker room with Rick Hoffman as the American businessman. People got so freaked out by him and were saying “I want to see a movie about that guy!” I wanted to see a movie with that guy too–if there was one area that I wanted to see more of in “Hostel,” it is that guy. Well, I killed him, so I couldn’t do that but I can explore the psychology of the people who are going to do this parallel to the girls going through all of it–seeing the girls checking into the hostel while the guys are going to their five-star hotel and getting their tattoos and going through the other minutiae of the organization. I think that if I can get people to care about the guys, even though you may not like them, because they aren’t evil and sick guys as much as they are disturbed–you can see how unhappy Stewart is in his home life and how his wife has essentially cut his balls off and what his life must be like. If we can get people to like the guys and feel a kind of dread for them as they go to this place, then we will have this unbelievable climax that is the show-stopper and the end-all, be-all of horror films. I wanted to have a great kill and one of the best endings ever in a horror film.
Where do the ideas for the things that are seen in your films come from?
It comes from whatever scares me. With the first film, it was images from Iraq but when we were recording the music for that film, we were in Prague and when I turned on CNN International, Hurricane Katrina had hit and it was like “Dawn of the Dead”–bodies floating down the street and no police and the next morning, there was nobody there but the National Guard on the bridge with rifles pointed at people. It all collapsed so fast and people went right to a primal state of raping and looting and the army didn’t fucking show up for five days! That terrified me. Then there were those shootings in the Amish country–this was someone who had never committed a crime and now he was doing this horrible thing because of the kind of deep-seated sickness that makes me afraid of the guy standing in line next to me at the grocery store. Everything in the film comes from something that scares me. That is why Todd uses New Orleans as a justification for what he is doing–as long as there is no one looking and no law, people go to killing and so he is normal because this is something in human nature. That is what frightens me–that people do go to that place, that anybody can become a killer and that when no one is looking, people have that need to torture and control other people.
If you want to make a scene more gory, that is easy–just add another tool and add another body part. What is more challenging is to make something smarter and scarier and more interesting. I think that if you had a whole movie that was non-stop gore, people would be bored–I would be bored. Something like “The Hills Have Eyes 2"–you have gore moment after gore moment and you don’t give a shit and you know they are just trying to shock you. To get people to really care about the characters and story and get them invested and make a smarter movie that goes beyond the category of a horror movie that people can watch for years and years and find new levels–that is the challenge. That is what I wanted to do–something very rich and textured.
Clearly, you know you have to top the first movie but every scene has its own level of violence that is appropriate. Take the scene in the woods with the kids and the gun. Sasha raising the gun to the kid’s head is horrifying and you don’t need to see brain matter flying around. It would be easy to do it with graphic violence but I don’t want to see that. When we were shooting that scene, it felt more like something out of an Italian neo-realist film–something sad and creepy that could be upsetting without being graphic. If I had shot the girls in the same way that I shot the guys in the first film, I don’t think that people would have enjoyed it–you couldn’t take it. If I had shot the Heather Matarazzo scene the way I had shot Derek Richardson’s–with all the stark reality and hand-held rawness–you would feel sick and wonder why you were watching it. It is the difference between hunting a lion and hunting a deer–when you shoot a lion, people say “Oh, what a brave hunter!” but if they shoot a deer, they say “Oh, that poor deer.” I had to shoot that scene in a way that was much more cinematic and I went operatic–it was lit like a 16th century painting with candles–and purposely stylized it so that you could watch the scene because you were more aware that it was a movie.
My competition in the theaters now is “Ocean’s Thirteen”–I’m competing with every movie star and $100 million ad campaigns. There is still “Spider-Man” and “Pirates” as well–how am I going to compete with that? I think a great horror film can trump everything. If you can do the opening scene of “Jaws” or the shower scene from “Psycho”–if you have a great kill that can go down as the signature scene–it doesn’t matter what movie star you have or how much money you spent on special effects because people have got to see that moment. That is what I think this film has–at the end of the film, I think people will come out going “I’ve never seen that in a film before.” When I went before the ratings board, they said that they didn’t know what to compare it too because they had never seen anything like it before. That is what people like about me–I come up with original stuff. People see my name on a film and they look for intelligence and originality. “Hostel” was the one that raised the bar and pushed the envelope farther than any film had at that point and now, that kind of stuff is done on “24.” If you watch “Hostel” again, the drill scene is now being done on television in prime time so the stuff you do now has to outdo that–my competition is now “24" and “Nip/Tuck” and “CSI.” I have to have scenes that people will care about–ones that scare people and also push the envelope in order to get people to go out and see them.
In terms of shooting the various torture scenes in “Hostel: Part II”–beyond the cinematic elements that you previously discussed–was the set atmosphere or your approach different this time around because you had women in the roles of the victims? Having a guy strapped naked to a chair, as you did in the first film, is one thing but the sight of Heather Matarazzo naked, bound and dangling upside-down, even if it all fun and games and on a movie set, is presumably a pretty loaded image to deal with in the flesh.
It definitely is and I knew that going in. I always say that no matter what the device is or what the torture is, what makes the scene terrifying and horrifying is the actor in the chair. It doesn’t matter what I do–it is the look on the actor’s face that makes you feel sorry for them and scared for them. When Derek Richardson was going “Where am I?,” that was when you knew that it was going to be horrible. It isn’t the actual graphic violence that makes it scary–it is that build-up. First, you have to get great actors and with Lauren German, Bijou Phillips and Heather Matarazzo, you get incredible performances on any number of levels. The key then is to make them comfortable. I save those scenes for the end of the shoot so that they can let it all out. I want to make them feel like they are comfortable and in a safe environment and that we are all there to support them. These actors go to a very dark place and when they are crying and screaming, it is real–they aren’t in any physical pain but they are stirring up some deep mental anguish, like the most horrible thing in their lives is right there on the surface and they are reliving it, and if you have a boom guy standing around yawning, that will kill it. The crew knows that and at that point in the shoot, they know everybody and are there for them.
We rehearsed Heather getting in and out of that rig so many times and she was taking yoga so that she could hang upside-down for up to eight minutes at a time, even though we were only doing three-minute takes. With that, getting Heather in and hanging upside-down was nothing and she was able to get to that emotional place and she could really focus on the performance. We worked it out so many times that getting her up and down was no problem and we could approach it like any other scene. It was difficult to shoot because listening to her scream like that for so long was horrifying but they were actually some of the smoothest shooting days–we shot it over two days because I wanted to do it right and make it look beautiful with all of these stylized camera moves instead of rushing around and doing it hand-held.
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Whenever anyone makes a violent horror film in which women are victimized, they always run the risk of being accused of misogyny. In this film, it seemed at times as if you were consciously going out of your way to defuse those potential accusations in the way that you have structured the various torture scenes. In the goriest sequence in the film, both the victim and the torturer are women while in the others, either the victim is able to turn the tables on her male attacker or we don’t get a clear glimpse of circumstances surrounding the actual death.
It wasn’t so much a decision to keep people from calling me a misogynist–people are going to call me whatever they are going to call me, no matter what–but I was conscious of the audience trying to enjoy the film. I think there are certain deaths that should be on-camera and certain deaths that should be off-camera. If you put everything on-camera, it isn’t an enjoyable experience and the audience feels duped and wonder why they were made to sit through all of that. You don’t want to see a little kid get shot in the head–it isn’t fun to see that–but it is an important story point that pays off later and it puts people in that dark place so that later they will feel that much more exhilarated. It shows how this society works and the violence that these kids are growing up with and what they will eventually become.
I felt like there are certain things that you have to show but I don’t want to lose the audience or ever have them turned off–I want them to care more and be more invested and still be looking even though they are scared of what is going to happen. Then you give them something like the scene with Ruggero Deodato that does have the graphic violence and it is fun and it is gross–that scene would not have worked off-camera because that is exactly what we need at that moment in the film. These are conscious choices–everything that I am doing and every choice that I am making is to further engage the audience in the story and get them to care more and keep them on the edge of the seat right up until the credits roll.
What was the experience of bringing “Hostel: Part II” before the MPAA? With the previous film, you got the “R” rating but between that and the “Saw” films, the organization received a lot of criticism for alleged leniency–where they prepared to bring the hammer down on you this time around?
Between “Hostel” and “Saw II,” they got many, many complaints and I think that we were definitely under the microscope this time around whereas before, we were under the radar. I don’t think that anyone thought that “Hostel” would have the kind of impact–either culturally or at the box-office–that it did. When “Hostel: Part II” came in, they were ready for it and I think that what they built it up to be in their minds was so much worse than what it actually was. We had a great discussion about it. I feel lucky that we have a system like the MPAA. In Germany, they will go “You take these two scenes out or your film doesn’t go into theaters” because it is a government censor board. In Japan, “Hostel” didn’t come out in theaters because they wouldn’t allow a film where an American disfigures a Japanese girl’s face–that was a major territory and even with Tarantino’s name and Takashi Miike’s name, we couldn’t come out in theaters. There is no discussion and no recutting–they watch your movie and it is either yes or no. The Ukraine said no because they said it was going to hurt tourism in the Ukraine, even though it had nothing to do with the Ukraine. In Europe, it is a lot more difficult because even with the “18" rating, they will tell you that it isn’t going into theaters and that is that. Here, they say that this is why they think it is NC-17 and we have a discussion about it. It is the only such system where I have a voice in the process–I don’t get to talk to anyone else in any other country. Also, the studios pay for it, so it is an independent commission and not the government. We are doing it specifically to avoid government censorship.
With “Hostel: Part II,” I told them that it was “Hostel: Part II,” not “Happy Feet II,” and people know what it is. People who go to this movie are specifically going back for more of what they liked in the first one and we have to give it to them or they are going to string me up naked and upside-down. I said that it was being sold on my name and Quentin’s name and people are actively choosing to see this because they want more of that–they want a movie that is going to push things further and that contains the most shocking ending in horror history.
To what degree did Quentin Tarantino influence the proceedings this time around as executive producer?
Quentin was making “Death Proof” while I was making this. I read “Death Proof” while I was writing this one and when I read his female characters, I thought that this was the new bar, the new standard, for females in horror films. The “Death Proof” girls are fantastic characters that are so well-acted and so well-written. You can’t just have paper-thin characters anymore and they can’t just be great roles in a horror movie. They have to be great roles for girls and terrific characters that people will remember and we have the talent to pull them off. I think people are going to watch Bijou Phillips and think that she is amazing on the screen and see Heather Matarazzo and think that she is unbelievable and watch Lauren German and wonder “who is that girl?” That was Quentin’s influence. He read the script and he loved it and he watched the edit and loved it. Quentin also got me to do the “Grindhouse” trailer and to act in “Death Proof”–I actually acted in “Death Proof” a week before shooting “Hostel: Part II”–and being an actor his movie while watching him as a director also influenced me. Quentin did influence “Part II” but in more subtle ways than with the first one.
Speaking of “Grindhouse,” will we ever be seeing a full-length version of “Thanksgiving,” the holiday-themed slasher film for which you created a fake trailer?
I talked to Edgar Wright about it and we were joking that if we did a “Grindhouse 2,” I would do it as a 45-minute movie–he’d do “Don’t” and I’d do “Thanksgiving” and Robert said that he could do “Machete” in five days. The only thing is that we would have to do it like they did Dogme 95–call it Dogshit 2005. We’d have to do it for a million bucks, shoot it in seven days and everyone playing a high-schooler would have to be 30 and up. We’d have to follow those rules very clearly.
In your estimation, what is on the horizon in terms of the future of the horror genre?
As the culture changes, new fears arise. There are certain things that I am going to explore in “Cell,” for example. That has people getting zapped with a phone pulse and going crazy–that is in the book but for me, that is just a jumping-off point. For me, what I think is really fascinating is why the bees are dying. A quarter of the bee population in America is dying off and people are saying that it is because of cell phones knocking out their radar. Einstein said that the human race is four steps behind the extinction of the bees–once they go, flowers won’t get pollinated, vegetables won’t grow or get oxygen–and cell phones could be killing off the bees. I want to show part of that so that you feel like something is coming–all this wireless stuff that is pumped into the air to make our lives convenient may be doing something that we don’t even know anything about. I want to explore that fear and I think that is something that makes it modern. You couldn’t have made that movie in the 1970's because it wouldn’t have worked but now, as technology evolves, new fears will emerge. “Terminator” came from a fear of computers. Things like “Prophecy” and “Day of the Animals” came from ecological concerns. They were about the fears of the times and you have to know what the fear is going to be in order to know what the horror is going to be.
link directly to this feature at http://hollywoodbitchslap.com/feature.php?feature=2202
originally posted: 06/06/07 09:53:47
last updated: 06/06/07 10:16:55
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