Q&A: 'Hostel: Part II' Director Eli Roth
A scene from Cabin Fever.
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A lot of people interpreted the daylight of Cabin Fever as an artistic choice, saying it made it scarier.
[Laughs] That's great. It's weird when you're backed into a corner what you can come up with and how forgiving the audience is if they're into the story. Nobody's thinking about the fact that it's not night or day. Actually, because a lot of it was during the day, you're right, it kind of did work to the film's advantage.
It's not what you'd expect from a horror film.
Plus, you can see the blood and guts a lot better! The night scenes, I'm like, "You can't really see the blood as well." It doesn't look as good as the daytime stuff. So I got to do that, and the other thing [about having a bigger budget] was that I got to have a second unit going that my brother Gabe directed. And Gabe ran all over Europe getting pick-up shots, so we could really expand the film, and we could afford to go and shoot in Iceland. And Iceland is some place that I've always wanted to go. It's been a dream of mine. We were the first movie ever to shoot at the Blue Lagoon in Iceland. It was really cool that they let us shoot there. It's like the crown jewel of Iceland. But I'm kind of a celebrity in Iceland, the way David Hasselhoff is a celebrity in Germany and Jerry Lewis was really famous in France. I decided that I was going to claim Iceland as the country where I would be the most famous American. It's so disproportionate to any amount of fame or celebrity I have here. I've been going there since I was 19 and they love it when people pay attention to them. And they knew that I would make it look beautiful.
Speaking of your brother Gabe, is he going to be doing another behind-the-scenes documentary for the Hostel: Part II DVD like he did for the first film?
Oh, yeah. He's cutting the one for the DVD right now. We shot, like, 100 tapes worth of footage. Something crazy like that. Gabe has an absurd amount of footage. And most focuses on our associate producer Mark Bakunas and our obsession with him.
You seem pretty open about letting people in to your process — you're a lot like Robert Rodriquez in that way.
Robert's one of my heroes, and what I love about him is that he was really one of those filmmakers who make the idea of becoming a director so accessible. I mean, I idolized guys like Steven Spielberg and George Lucas, but to me when I was in film school they always seemed like they were in this other universe. With Robert, it seemed like, "Oh my god, this is like a guy I grew up with." You felt like you knew him. And he did it himself without any connections and he did it on raw adrenaline and talent and creativity. That was the kind of filmmaker that I wanted to be and that's what I was forced to do because nobody would give me money to make any of my films. So I felt like I learned so much stuff, stuff they can't teach you in film school, that I was more than happy to pass on my knowledge to other people who want to be filmmakers.
And I had never seen a behind-the-scenes feature like [the one we did for Hostel]. I mean, it was my brother shooting it, so there's me in the shower — all this crazy, weird stuff. So many times the behind-the-scenes features seem so pre-packaged and everyone's so polite. I was like, "I want to give people the feeling of what it was like to be there on the shoot." I like those behind-the-scenes that are fun and funny and silly, and when you're making a movie as dark as Hostel and certainly as dark as Hostel: Part II, it's fun to see that you had a really fun time shooting it, that it wasn't bleak and grim on set the whole time. Most of the time we're incredibly silly.
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