A Nice, Meaty Chat With Eli Roth

By Todd Gilchrist

After just a few short years in Hollywood, Eli Roth has managed to create a genuinely multifaceted career, not only as a writer and director, but a producer, and most recently, actor as well. After a few small roles in his own films and a brief appearance on both sides of the camera in Grindhouse (he not only directed the fake-trailer Thanksgiving but played one of the guys getting Jungle Julia drunk in Death Proof), Quentin Tarantino enlisted Roth to play Donnie Donowitz, also known as "the Bear Jew," in his WWII opus Inglourious Basterds. If appearing in a second Tarantino film wasn't enough, this time he's sharing the screen with a literally international cast, headed up by none other than Brad Pitt, with whom he shares the majority of his screen time.

Cinematical recently spoke to Roth in an exclusive telephone interview, where he acknowledged his good fortune thus far. In addition to talking about his role in Inglourious Basterds, Roth talked at length about how playing Donowitz rekindled his creative fire behind the camera, and he also reflected on what makes the horror in horror movies last once they've left the screen.

Cinematical: In Hollywood, directors don't usually say, "what I really want to do is act."

Eli Roth: I'm actually at a photo shoot, so I'm going from director to actor, now a model, and what I'll end up as is a waiter.I didn't say what I really want to do is act, either; it was Quentin who pushed me. Even in Cabin Fever, I'd hired another actor for that part, and it really just didn't work out. We were on location and there was no one else to play [the role], and it was the girls, Jordan and Cerina who said, you've got to do it! so I did it and Quentin loved it and he pushed me to be in Grindhouse. I mean, I knew that I loved doing it, but I never considered that real acting; I was just screwing around and having fun. But Quentin sat down with me and said "you're going to play Donowitz, and this is a real part and it has to be a 360 degree role," and he said I know you can do it. Quentin's confidence in me made me push myself; I said, you know what? If I'm going to do this, I have to be great, I have to bring my A-game and prove something to myself and prove something to everyone else – that there's a level of talent that's there that nobody knew I had.

Cinematical: Quentin obviously has very specific ideas in mind for each of his characters. Did that help you or was that a challenge because you would be plugging yourself into a predetermined characterization?

Roth: In my case it helped, because Quentin knows I'm from Boston and I'm Jewish, and he's heard me talk with my Boston accent with my friends before. He knew the whole thing, basically, so I knew that the character was something in my range and was something that I could do. If it was a role that I felt was really not right for me, or I couldn't do it justice, I wouldn't have done it. But Quentin loved when I was in character, and I really dropped everything for it; I put down my pen and went to Austin and I researched the character. Everything I would want an actor to do for me, I did, and when we showed up for rehearsals, the first thing [he said] was "tell me about yourself," and you had to have your character's entire history. You had to know your character the way you know your best friend, and describe them and know how they would react. Anything that happens, if a guy walked into the room, if a girl walked into the room, if a dog walked into the room, you know how your best friend would react, and you have to know the character that way, and once you know that, you can be in character. And Brad [Pitt] was the same way; the two of us were in character all of the time and it was like hanging out with Donnie and Aldo. So for Quentin, it was like he had these guys in his head for eight years and now he was seeing them come to life; and once he sees you in the part, then you're the part, and he can't see it any other way.

Cinematical: Because Quentin's films are a pastiche of certain influences, was there a mandate to give a "period" performance, or was this considered a history-neutral portrait of WWII?


Cinematical: Having tackled a role like this that you said was such a challenge, have you thought consciously about how to maintain a balance between directing and future acting projects?

Roth: Yeah, but I mean, for me there's no balance. It's all about directing, and if projects come along as an actor – and I'll take it case by case – truthfully I never had ambitions to be an actor. All of my life I'm doing this to direct movies; that's all I ever wanted to do. So I'm living that dream now, and I'm still at the beginning of my career, so for something to take me off track, it's got to be something special. Also, I just worked with the best cast in the world and the greatest director, so it would be very difficult to top that; and when Alexandre Aja called and asked me to judge the wet t-shirt contest in Pirahna 3-D, I said what time do you need me? That was like a cameo in his movie, but for real acting it would have to be something pretty special for me to do it. But Quentin said to me while we were shooting, "Eli, you could have another career if you want this, because if you want to be a movie star, you have it." I said I don't; I love it and it's wonderful, but the fun for me is doing it in this movie as this character with you and Brad and Christoph [Waltz] and Diane [Kruger] and Michael Fassbender and all of the Basterds – that's where the joy is. But he said, "yeah, but now you have permission to write great parts for yourself," and I said that's something that I'm going to do. I wanted to give a performance that would make people say, "we had no idea he was capable of that." I didn't want people to go, "oh, he didn't f*ck it up," or "oh, he was alright," I want them to go, I had no idea he could do that - I can't wait to see him on screen again." The good thing is that I'm in a position where I can be very choosy and never have to act again in my life if I don't want, so if I choose to do it and if I do it it's going to be something special.

Cinematical: I've always characterized your filmmaking style as having almost the soul of a comedic director who works in horror, in the sense that the gore and repulsive stuff that's in your movies is a payoff to each scene rather than the reason for each one to exist.

Roth: It's a great way of putting it. I look at the shot composure of Animal House as an example of how I would compose shots in Hostel; to me, even though they're different genres, the way the films are made [is the same]. I look at Buster Keaton, who's one of my all-time favorite directors, and the way he frames shots, so that to me is a tremendous compliment.

Cinematical: How did this experience working in another genre, not to mention on screen, rekindle your creativity as a filmmaker?

Roth: Well, what was great was him letting me direct "A Nation's Pride," the film within the film. Those two days just reminded me how much fun I have behind the camera and how much I love it and how this is really what I should be doing in my life. After the Hostel movies I needed a break, and I think that for me the key now is finding a balance; I was so focused on getting in the door and getting my movies released and becoming an established director and proving myself to the fans and the community that my films make money. So much of my life had gone into that that I really had never kind of caught my breath, and now that I've done it, [I wondered] where is my career going? I loved that, I loved working with Quentin, but I knew when I was shooting those two days, shooting "A Nation's Pride," I knew that was what I should be doing. I knew that I would have a uniqueness that I could pull off that nobody else could do; somebody else might be able to do it well, but it will be different, and I was like, nobody's going to have a unique, particular point of view that I have, and this is what I need to be expressing. This is when I'm happiest – when I show everybody in the editing room "Nation's Pride" and Quentin just looks at me beaming, because in the script he had four shots in his head, and I delivered him 200 shots all cut together in five and a half minutes that he thought would be 20 seconds of footage. He only needed 20 second of footage, but when I gave him five and a half minutes of battle, he was so happy – and that thrill, for me, is the greatest thrill.

Cinematical: In the past, you and I have talked about horror movies you consider classics, and Blue Underground is releasing one of them, Torso, this month.

Roth: I don't know if it's a Blu-ray, but I think it's a new transfer. Torso is one of my favorite films, and I read a bad review of it on Rue Morgue and I thought it was so snarky and the reviewer really didn't get the movie and was mad that there wasn't a saw cutting through a torso, completely ignorant of the fact that was not the original title. That was an exploitation distributor who called it Torso. The title is Bodies Show Traces of Carnal Violence, and it's an amazing film. You can't judge it by today's special effects, because it's a low-budget film from 1973, but it is one of the greatest movies about sexual violence. It really influenced Hostel 2 in terms of the danger of rape; the red herring works brilliantly in the film because they really do a great job of making you feel like every man is a potential rapist or murderer. It's one of the most sexualized thrillers – you rarely see as much sex in a horror film as you do in Torso; I think it's very ahead of its time, and I'm so happy that American audiences will really get to appreciate it. Sergio Martino is a terrific director and he made great giallos with Edwige Fenech and some other classics, and this is his masterpiece.

Cinematical: That brings up an interesting question about horror. Having seen this film and a Ruggero Deodato film recently, I was wondering when you're watching horror films or making them, how you know where the line is between something being purely provocative or disgusting and actually exploring something conceptually substantive?

Roth: You can tell when you watch the movie, and you can tell when an audience responds to a film. You can watch a movie and say, oh, this is just exploitation; there's a reason that Mother's Day survives, and there's a reason Mother's Day works. It's not just hillbillies raping and killing girls in the woods; there's so many ideas in that film, and you look at what the writer, Warren Leight went on to do, and he's like an award-winning playwright. I talked to Charles Kaufman, the director, and I said, when you're introducing a character, do you use the camerawork to represent the character's personalities, and what's your theme about the city versus country? You start talking to him about how tired he was of pop culture, and these hillbillies are just [an example] of how the pop sewer has overflowed, and that's what they're a product of. He shot fake commercials to have on the television and then in every shot there's a television. He was really making a statement about pop-culture overload disguising it as an exploitation film.

But look, I think there's room for both. I love movies that are just straight-up exploitation, but the ones that endure and the ones that last are the ones where the filmmakers put in that extra level of thought; after 25 years you put them on in front of an audience, and they'll respond to it and enjoy it. The ones that are pure dreck and just garbage, even if people don't realize it, there's something boring about them. But the fun is to go back and rewatch those movies you watched as a kid and go, why did I love this? We watched the new DVD of Pieces and Quentin watched it with his friend Ada, and she is an incredibly smart woman, and she watched the movie and said this is a brilliant film. She said, "even if the director didn't know what this movie is about, this guy in this movie is having sex with all of these beautiful girls and they all keep dying but he's never a suspect. He keeps getting a free pass!" And you're watching it wondering how does this dork, first of all, get all of the most beautiful girls on campus, and then they're all dying and he's never a suspect. They practically make him a deputy, and at the end of the movie that body reaches up and grabs his balls. She said, "that body, those are the pieces of the women that he has discarded; he used those women and threw him away, and now they are castrating him." I had never really thought of it that way or deconstructed Pieces before, but there we were having an intelligent conversation [about it], and we went through the movie and examined it and you know what? Her theory held up. It made sense. There was an actual, real point and theme to that movie about this man treating these women like pieces of meat, and it's not even the killer who's doing it, it's the main character, and they rip his balls off.

So often times you don't even realize it; you think it's a bad movie, and suddenly there's another level of thought that makes you say, you know what? There's a reason this movie is still so unbelievably popular after 25 years, and I should be so lucky to make a movie that people watch 30 years from now. I always try to put that extra thought in my films; I don't want a message to be crammed down someone's throat – first and foremost I want them to be entertained and have a fun time – but I also like the movies that if someone presents a theory, when you watch it again on repeated viewings, that theory holds up and you maybe realize the movie is much smarter than you gave it credit for. I love those films.