Eli Roth talks his Grindhouse trailer
Source: ComingSoon.net
At this weekend's New York Comic Con Eli Roth talked about his mock trailer for the upcoming Quentin Tarantino-Robert Rodriguez horror anthology Grindhouse, his tribute to those great (and we use that adjective loosely) '80s slasher films based on holiday themes. Roth told us how that came about. "Quentin comes to me and he's like [at this point Roth goes into an impressive Tarantino impression] 'We're going to do this f*ckin' thing! It's going to be like so cool, right? It's going to be like Grindhouse and we're going to have fake fuckin' trailers! You gotta do one, cause Robert already shot his! Dude, check out the f*ckin' lobby cards!' It's like they talked about it, but Robert literally went and shot his while they were on the phone…and then he did f*ckin' lobby cards! This guy is unbelievable, like how did he do this? Then the lobby cards are what got everyone talking, they were so funny, and I was like, 'I gotta do one of these things.' There's this slasher movie my friend Jeff and I've been dreaming about, cause growing up in Massachusetts, Thanksgiving is the biggest f*ckin' deal, it's ALL you hear about. Every year, there was a new slasher movie and it was a different holiday… it was 'My Bloody Valentine', 'Friday the 13th', 'Halloween, 'Silent Night, Deadly Night.' I'm like, 'How can they not have done Thanksgiving?' I'm like, 'What are they going to start doing? Passover Massacre'? So when Quentin said, 'Dude, you gotta do a trailer!' and I was like 'Thanksgiving! It's my 1981 slasher movie, I've been dying to do it for years!' We had all the gags worked out.
"But first he put me in 'Grindhouse' which is a whole 'nother weird experience and then while I was shooting 'Hostel: Part II', I was writing the trailer and then I just added two days on after and we took like a decapited head here and a body part, and we kind of recycled everything we had and threw it all into this trailer, and had a great time doing it! It was so much fun. It's like two days of just money shots, every shot was like gore, nudity, no continuity, bad acting, just everything. 'Who cares If there's a light in the shot? It's Grindhouse!' It was so freeing to do something that was just fun and off-the-hook. I was like I really have to do something like this next, just something that's going to be nuts and insane and fun, almost like an old Woody Allen movie, just to switch it up a little."
We'll save Roth's hilarious analogy about being in Tarantino's segment of Grindhouse for our full interview from Comic-Con coming soon, then look for even more with Roth closer to the release of Hostel: Part II on June 8, but you can see Roth's homage to '80s holiday horror films two months earlier when Grindhouse, which opens on April 6.