InglouriousBasterds

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.

The Rotten Tomatoes Show often has an actor or filmmaker stop by to share a Top 5 Movies list of some sort, and next week's show has a doozy. In a special sneak preview offered to Cinematical & Horror Squad by our friends at Current TV, we now offer the clip for your perusal. But since we ARE talking about the exploitation-lovin' Eli Roth, gore-slingin' director of Cabin Fever and Hostel, AND the guy who bashes Nazis in the noggin in Quentin Tarantino's Inglourious Basterds, you can expect the movie clips to be a little bit ... nasty.

So enjoy the sneak preview clip after the jump, and if you'd like to know a little more about Eli's #1 pick (hehe), here's a semi-recent review of it that I penned for FEARnet.com.

By Todd Gilchrist

During an exclusive telephone interview to promote his role as Pvt. Donny Donowitz in Quentin Tarantino's WWII epic Inglourious Basterds, Eli Roth told Cinematical that Thanksgiving is not the next film he's set to direct, but it's definitely going to get made. "That movie, the financing, the money is in a bank account," Roth said. "I mean, I could literally say I'm starting production tomorrow we'd start. It's 100 percent up to me, but I'm just working on the script with Jeff Rendell, the co-writer. Jeff's the one who in the trailer, he plays the Pilgrim, and we're just writing it. We're just figuring it out and we're just coming up with the kills and the characters."

Thanksgiving was initially created as a fake movie trailer that connected the two theatrical halves of Tarantino and Robert Rodriguez' Grindhouse, but its own popularity inspired the director to blow it up from a 16mm short into a feature film. Roth actually indicated that Endangered Species, a PG-13 sci-fi film in the vein of Cloverfield, was to be his next directorial effort. "I want to be finished with Endangered, and then Jeff is supposed to come out to Los Angeles probably some time in August and we'll probably bang out the script," he explained, indicating that the disparate content of the two films may ultimately complement his enthusiasm creatively.