Hostel

[MacGuffin]

When talking about the new generation of horror directors Eli Roth’s name will invariably come up. He has directed two of the most exciting horror films for the new generation, Cabin Fever and Hostel, and is also one of the most visible having appeared in Bravo’s The 100 Scariest Movie Moments and even gotten Quentin Tarantino to present his new flick.

Hostel is certainly a big change from the disease horror of Cabin Fever. Hostel is about three backpackers in Amsterdam who are so damn horny they leave the sex capital of the world to travel to a small Slovakian city to find even looser, hotter women. They have some of the best times of their lives until they are kidnapped by a company that specializes in killing stupid backpackers.

Daniel Robert Epstein: You’ve been promoting SuicideGirls a lot. When I met [Shaun of the Dead director] Edgar Wright, he knew of SuicideGirls from you.

Eli Roth: I tell every director, ”You got to do an interview on SuicideGirls because you get a password and he interviews the most incredible people” [laughs].

DRE: What’s Quentin [Tarantino] say?

Roth: Quentin said “That’s really cool. I got to do that.”

DRE: Tell him he’s welcome to email me anytime he likes.

Roth: I definitely will. We’re supposed to go to Iceland for New Years.

DRE: That’s awesome!

Roth: Yeah it should be really fun. We were just there like a month ago at the Icelandic Film Festival for the world premiere. It was the first time we had a finished print of the movie. I was also there for New Years last year. I met Eythor [Gudjonsson] when I was there with Cabin Fever and I wrote the part of Oli for him in Hostel. Quentin was telling me about a QT fest that he does in Austin and how we should do it in Iceland. We should do it for one night, show kung fu flicks and talk about the movies.

DRE: I read in the press notes that producers of Hostel had the title and the idea that backpackers just start getting killed and that set you off with this script. It reminds me when in the 80’s William Lustig and Larry Cohen would sit around coming up with taglines and that’s how they came up with Maniac Cop.

Roth: Yeah, I love Lustig. We actually did an Italian poster for Hostel that’s an homage to Maniac. But here’s what happened [producer] Chris [Briggs] had done a lot of backpacking and traveling and said that we should set a horror movie in that world. But we didn’t really know what the movie was. I’ve been to Europe and done backpacking and thought “God that is really a great universe.” It’s cheaper to shoot in Europe, to use a European cast but spread a couple of Americans around and make a good scary movie. Though we really had no idea what the movie was at that point. Then about three and a half years ago I was talking with Harry Knowles from Aint it Cool News about really disturbing stuff we had found on the Internet. Harry showed me a site where you could go to Thailand and for $10,000 walk into a room and shoot somebody in the head.

DRE: That’s just awful.

Roth: Yeah and what’s really awful is this site claimed that the person you were shooting willingly signed up for this. That they were so poor that part of the money would go to their family. We were thinking it would be a really cool documentary. But if it was real the people running it would kill us. So it laid dormant for a while until a year ago it hit him that that Hostel is about this system in Thailand. I thought, it doesn’t matter if this is real or not, what matters is that somebody built a website for it and somebody was trying to get credit cards and money advertising this. They were so in tune with this notion that out there, there is some businessman that’s so bored that nothing gets them off anymore. Drugs don’t do it, hookers don’t do it, so they want that next level of forbidden stimulation and excitement and this is it.

DRE: I really could see Quentin and Takashi Miike checking out a place like that [laughs].

Roth: It’s so funny because I credited Miike as himself. Also Quentin really wanted to play the part that Rick Hoffman did but I thought that it couldn’t be a place where only really violent movie directors go.

DRE: [laughs] I love Rick Hoffman; I’ll watch Cellular just to see his role in it.

Roth: Yeah.

DRE: Did he have to audition or did you just know he could do it?

Roth: I knew he could do it. It was also one of those things where we didn’t have the part cast. Chris Briggs is very close friends with Rick. I knew him from Cellular and I thought, “Jeez he’d be terrific.” Then he showed up and he just nailed it. We didn’t even have to audition him. He’s just such a superb actor. I think he’s just one of those guys that’s getting a cult following. People are like, “Oh I fucking love that guy!” They know him from The Bernie Mac Show and The Street and those kind of TV shows where he always played that fast talking smarmy, slimy Wall Street guy. But he is just a nice, sweet guy that’s really got that kind of role down to science.

DRE: I think this role is going to get him to that next level of doing something beyond that.

Roth: I hope so. We wanted an actor that would come in and kind of take you out of the movie but when the movie’s over feel like, “Oh my God that guy almost stole the movie.” Actually a lot of people are saying for all the violence inborn in the film; that moment tends to be the most disturbing for people.

DRE: That’s because most of the Elite Hunting’s customers are these weird European guys then all of sudden there’s that asshole you always bump into on the subway. It makes it much more real.

When the guy shows up on the train and starts talking about his hands and about food. I thought “this is Pancakes kid 2.”

Roth: I like the idea of this being this weird dude on the train that seems harmless but creepy. Then later you realize why he’s talking about with his hands. He likes to have a connection to these people he later gets. Whereas most people would want to do it anonymously he wants to experience the whole thing.

DRE: I thought that he was a crazy guy who ran the whole thing but no he’s just a businessman who goes there a lot.

Roth: Yes, exactly. That’s the whole thing, you’re slowly discovering along with Jay Hernandez what’s happening. You realize that guy’s just one customer and that hundreds of people go to this place.

DRE: When we last spoke about the DVD of Cabin Fever you mentioned all these projects you had coming up but not Hostel. Then like a year later pictures from the set of Hostel popped up on the internet. What happened?

Roth: I realize that anytime you go in with somebody for a single conversation then somebody finds out about it and it’s all over the Internet. It is normal for people to develop multiple projects but on the Internet there’s just infinite information. Some people are good with fact checking, but a lot of times they don’t even fact check with me. They just put it up there. So I thought that I would do this movie differently. I’m just going to go to Prague and quietly do my thing and be like, “here are the photos from my set, we’re cutting it now.” The whole movie was done in a 12 month period. I finished the script and I went right to Prague. Normally it takes three years to get going. Hell Cabin Fever took six years to get done. I realized that the Internet is great but Eli’s just starting to get the reputation of this guy who keeps attaching himself to different projects and not doing anything.

DRE: Recently I got to speak to Greg McLean, the director of Wolf Creek.

Roth: Yeah, I enjoyed Wolf Creek.

DRE: I loved it.

Roth: Yeah, I’m really excited for him.

DRE: I had to call him out a bit because the movie is so based in reality then John Jarrett character does a supernatural thing where he’s in the car that the girl randomly picked. So I got to do a little bit the same thing for you. Even though I loved Hostel and I’ve been recommending up and down. The ending is a bit convenient.

Roth: The ending was re-shot. We originally had a different ending where Jay Hernandez keeps following this guy and he was going to kill him and the guy is there with his daughter. Jay was going to take his daughter to fuck with the guy. But audiences just couldn’t handle it. So we went back and I just shot a much more straightforward super violent ending and people loved it. I realized that it was the right ending because sometimes you got to make the movie for audiences. I don’t want to be the only one that likes the movie. If you’re in the room with 300 people and 290 of them are completely confused as to why you did a psychological twist, they go, “Huh? Where’s the blood? We want blood.”

DRE: Besides that there is another part right before it that seems a bit convenient. But as you said you made it a bit more commercial, which isn’t necessarily a bad thing.

Roth: We’re not making Schindler’s List. We’re not making a movie that’s bleak and has no fun in it. We’re making a movie for audiences and it’s a horror movie and it’s dark and it’s going to be realistic and violent but it’s not Munich or Syriana. I’ve had numerous experiences when you’re in a small town in Europe and you meet some weird person then you run into them two days later at a totally different place and you’re like, “Oh, my God that’s that fucking guy.”

I was in Prague and they say not to change your money in the street. Derek Richardson goes and changes his money on the street and the guy rips him off for $200. Three weeks later, Derek and Jay Hernandez are walking along and there’s that fucking guy that took Derek’s money. Fucking Jay grabs him and says “Give my friend his fucking money back you motherfucker.” The guy gave him like all his money and more. So Prague is five times the size of this little village in Slovakia so you can say it’s convenient but I’ve had that experience. I remember I was in Iceland I was living on this farm in Reykjavik when I was 19 and some American girl was a total bitch to me. I was just having a conversation saying “oh it’s just cold in Iceland” and she was mad because she thought I was trying to pick her up. Fucking four days later that girl showed up at another place I was at an hour outside of Reykjavik with her fiancé to buy a horse. I was like, “Oh, look who’s here” and we just fucked with her. I’ve had that experience every time I’ve traveled, in every single European country. It seems like crazy coincidences but to me that’s my experience.

[SHAFTR]

overall, I was diappointed with Hostel, but I still enjoyed it. 

possible spoilers
The first act or so is just a huge letdown.  It is poorly written, not funny and tiring.  After that, the film does get much better.  The torture room scenes are great, I just wish there would have been more of them.  I also like how the plot slowly unveils, leaving the viewer with more responses.  Finally, I liked the whole vengeance third act.  So, in the end this landed about in the middle between Saw and my expectations.

[MacGuffin]

FEATURE - Eli Roth's Evil Excursions
By any measure, including the fact that he used three times more fake blood on the $4.5 million Hostel than he did on the $1.5 million Cabin Fever, writer-director Eli Roth is on a horror roll. By Fred Topel, FilmStew.com

Given the $19.5 million first weekend box office take of Hostel, it would appear that executive producer Quentin Tarantino's first reactions to the project were entirely justified. Following the success of Cabin Fever, filmmaker Eli Roth had come to the pulp fiction guru for advice and after a geek fest of horror movies including War of the Gargantuas, Hell Night, Blood and Black Lace and Zombi, the pair got down to business.

"I told him the idea for Hostel," Roth recalls during a recent interview with FilmStew. "He was like, 'Are you f*cking kidding me? That's the sickest f*cking idea I have ever heard. Eli, you've got to do that. F*ck it, do it low budget.'"

Inspired by the brutal films of Asian masters like Takashi Miike, Roth wanted to include torture the likes of which American Audiences hadn't seen. But he didn't want to just remake a Miike movie. "I think that Miike makes the greatest Miike movies ever, and there's one Miike and there's no need to try to be Miike," he enthuses. "I just want to be the best me, not the best Miike. Sorry, that was lame."

While some of the tortures in Hostel feel like they're straight out of Asia, its overall influences are hard to pin down. "I didn't want to imitate shots like in Cabin Fever, where I was like 'This is my Texas Chainsaw Massacre shot and this is my shot from The Thing,'" Roth admits. To wit, Roth begins the film with a 20-minute adventure in debauchery.

"I made a conscious decision not to make it a scary horror movie from minute one," he explains. "We had the creepy title sequence, but I wanted the audience to go on a trip with the guys. I wanted them to be there in Amsterdam having fun. And then they get lured in and kind of seduced into going to Slovakia the way the guys do. Then, they f*cking pay the price for it."

"I felt like, if you start off the movie with people's fingers getting cut off and eyes getting cut out, then 45 minutes into it, you're changing the channel already," he adds. "You're just bored. So I really wanted to have something that would keep people guessing, that would keep them off guard, where they would really not know where it was going."

Casual audiences may not even notice the technical transitions Roth makes during the film's tonal shifts. "It starts off colorful, and light, with controlled camera work," he observes. "Once Oli [Eythor Dugjonsson] disappears, then the color starts to drain away, and by the end it's like very rough, hand-held camera work and it's basically black, ashen, and just the color of blood."

If it sounds like a lifetime of thought went into Roth's craft of scaring people, that's because it did. Having seen The Exorcist at age six, by the time he saw Alien two years later, he was practically reading the trades. "I said, 'I wanna be a producer,' because it said, 'Produced by David Giler.' And my dad said, 'You know, the producers have to raise all the money.' Then it said, 'Directed by Ridley Scott.' I said, 'Well, what does the director do?' He says, 'The director gets to spend the money and tell everybody what to do.' I was like, 'Ok, I wanna be a director.'"

Now that he is a successful filmmaker, there is more than horror inside Eli Roth. "The directors I love are like Spielberg, and Peter Jackson, and obviously Quentin and Sam Raimi," he reveals. "They started out making amazing horror films, but they love movies and they just look at great stories. I now am at the point where I want to tell stories."

"I just love, like, when you're sitting around with friends, at a sleepover, telling ghost stories," Roth continues. "It's just so much fun to be scared like that. I can't watch real violence. I don't like real blood in real life, but I can watch movie violence endlessly."

With two indie films under his belt, Roth insists he will be even more selective with regards to any upcoming studio offers. "Obviously, if someone came up to me and said, 'We want you to do Indiana Jones 4' or even Porky's 4, I'd be like all right, great," he says. "But now, I'm spoiled. I have done two movies in a row that I got to write, produce, direct, completely control, and was involved in the marketing of the movies and the poster ideas."

Perhaps the best path for Roth would be to continue doing his own indie films until he has his own studio, so he can stay independent. "Maybe, if I keep going on this path, I could eventually wind up like Quentin or Robert Rodriguez, who get to make movies for 40-50 million dollars budget level, [but] they're completely controlled and they do it their own way, and you know, make'em in their backyard. That's how I'd like to do it."

"After this movie I am spoiled. It's making me think twice about how I want to do everything in the future."

[MacGuffin]

Newly announced by Sony for release on 4/18 is Eli Roth's Hostel (SLP $28.95). The DVD will include anamorphic widescreen video, 4 audio commentary tracks (one with Roth, a second with Roth and executive producer Quentin Tarantino, Boaz Yakin and Scott Spiegel, a third with Roth, producer Chris Briggs and documentarian Gabriel Roth, and a fourth with Roth and Harry Knowles), the Hostel Dissected featurette and the Kill the Car multi-angle featurette. A UMD version will also be available the same day.

[©brad]

Newly announced by Sony for release on 4/18 is Eli Roth's Hostel (SLP $28.95). The DVD will include anamorphic widescreen video, 4 audio commentary tracks (one with Roth, a second with Roth and executive producer Quentin Tarantino, Boaz Yakin and Scott Spiegel, a third with Roth, producer Chris Briggs and documentarian Gabriel Roth, and a fourth with Roth and Harry Knowles), the Hostel Dissected featurette and the Kill the Car multi-angle featurette. A UMD version will also be available the same day.

so wait wait, roth did 4 commentary tracks on the same movie? isn't that a tad narcissistic, like a 4-hour long car waxing festival?

speaking of...

[MacGuffin]

so wait wait, roth did 4 commentary tracks on the same movie?

He did five for Cabin Fever.

[modage]

its a bit crazy that theres 4 commentaries and its not LORD OF THE RINGS or something.  but whats even crazier is that Roth is on ALL OF THEM!  how can he have THAT MUCH to say he couldnt give anyone else their own track or have their bits be edited down to a featurette or something?  mac, did you listen to the cabin fever 5?

[MacGuffin]

mac, did you listen to the cabin fever 5?

I listened to his solo, him with the actresses, and some of the guys.

[modage]

how were they?

[last days of gerry the elephant]

I was dissapointed by the theatrical release a tiny bit too, I was hoping for more gore (as advertised), or maybe more of a connection to the characters so I would care? Who knows, but I'm planning to pick this up on April 18th for the unrated version the dvd includes.

http://www.moviesonline.ca/movienews_7374.html

[MacGuffin]

how were they?

Eli Roth's solo track on the DVD is already one of my favorite commentary tracks ever! It was so jam packed with great ancedotes and useful information; I swear the guy never stopped to take a breath. It was a lot like Rodriguez's track on "El Mariachi" with information overload. The guy knows his horror films and gives you a timeline about the rise and fall of the genre, even calling out the bullshit about if it's a Oscar worthy film or makes over $100 million (like "Silence of the Lambs" or "Sixth Sense") then it's a thriller. It's all horror to him. Great stuff.

The actresses track focused on how the ladies got the roles, dealing with nudity and sex scenes and the day-to-day conditions of working on the set.

I don't remember too much about the guys track, but Banky said:

Im on my third the "Guys" one and James Debello is fucking hilarious and he talks with no regard for anything respectful.  He talks about his co-stars tits and how he thinks they are fake, he talks about parts in the movie he did not like, he talks about strippers in NC he tried to fuck.  It is some funny shit.  This DVD is really worth the money.

[penfold0101]

I kinda liked this, but was ultimately disappointed.

i found it pointlessly gratuitous by the end, there is only so much hacked off flesh you can see before you just stop squinting!!

Some parts of it didn't seem to fit together quite right...... I think I need to watch it again.

I'm a fan of anything dark and gory so I walked out happy!

[Pubrick]

I kinda liked this, but was ultimately disappointed.

i found it pointlessly gratuitous by the end, there is only so much hacked off flesh you can see before you just stop squinting!!

then one line later..

I'm a fan of anything dark and gory so I walked out happy!

wtf? are you two people?

[penfold0101]

no just mixed views on this film. and still quite undecided, probably. but i know i liked it a lot. 

[MacGuffin]

I LOVED this movie. Like mod said, it had a very original premise. It builds up the characters, getting you into their shoes, and that helps the subjective nature... before everything turns for the worse. While I didn't find it overly gory, that also helped at certain times making you believe you are seeing more than you actually are. And I loved how the last act is basically without dialogue.


EDIT: For those interested, on his solo commentary track during the end credits, Eli Roth gives a thanks to all the supportive fimmakers he met after Cabin Fever, and included was PT Anderson, saying that he was "encouraging."