A lot of people labeled the first Hostel as misogynistic, and now instead of centering the horror on a group of guys, you've made it a group of girls — is this some kind of response to that?
Look, people say all kinds of things about me. Any time you kill a woman in a horror movie, people say you're misogynistic. People immediately react to the nudity and the violence. That one critic immediately called it "Torture Porn." The violence is so shocking that they immediately want to relegate the film to a sub-genre of pornography. They don't even look at the intelligence or what the underlying messages are or the social commentary that's layered into it, or the effect of filmmaking. They don't look at the design, they don't look at the camerawork, they don't realize how much they are being manipulated into feeling that way.

Bijou Phillips in Hostel: Part II. Click here for more stills from the movie. Photo by Rico Torres / Lions Gate

And the first film was really so much about exploitation, and the way people exploit each other and the lengths that someone will go to and the things they will do to another human being for their own personal pleasure. In Amsterdam, all that stuff is clearly set up with the guys and the hookers. Everything these guys do to the girls in Hostel happens to them. They become that piece of meat that someone can lock into a room and do whatever they want to them. And there's nothing they can do about it. They think that they can buy and sell these Eastern European girls because they're American and they're Eastern European, and of course they're going to love us because we have money and we're American, and they are the ones who get bought and sold. So there's actually a very moral message of, you know, do unto others as you want to be treated yourself.

So I think that whenever you're making a film this violent and this edge-of-the-spectrum, you know you're going to get a strong reaction from people. Some of it's going to be positive, some is going to be negative. A movie like this is not made to please everybody. It was such a bizarre shock to all of us that this movie opened at No. 1. If it had made $10 million at the box office in its entire run, that would have been a grand slam for us. Then when it opened at $20 million and knocked out The Chronicles of Narnia? Genuinely shocking.

How was the reaction to the film different in Europe than in America?
The European audiences saw it as a comment on American capitalism gone too far. I'm sure there were plenty of Europeans who didn't like it — but even in Slovakia and the Czech Republic they loved it. It was the No. 1 movie there. They got it. In the same way that Borat is not a film about Kazakhstan, the Europeans in Hostel are stereotypes of what Americans think Europeans are like. And the Americans are portrayed 100 percent accurately. It's more of a comment on American fears and American xenophobia and stereotypes of other cultures than it is an accurate portrayal of another part of the world.

I watched the movie with audiences all over the world, and it was great to see the different reactions. There's that scene where the guy shows the camera with the picture of the naked girls and says, "You've got to go to Slovakia because ever since the war there are no guys, there's a shortage of young men over there." Our guys, the Americans, don't even question it! [Laughs.] When I showed that to European audiences, they all laugh at that line. They know there was no war. But over here, some guy in a suit from Sony leaned over to me and said, "Man, there's always a war going on over there." [Laughs.] Like he was trying to appear sympathetic to their cause! You dipshit! The whole point of that was to show how ignorant Americans are about culture that they'll fucking believe anything! It was great.