People have an idea of what a movie is and what that movie is going to be, but a lot of times their first reaction is them wishing you had done [something else]. I remember one time [I heard] “I hated Hostel II because what I wanted to see was…” You hated the movie because the movie wasn’t the movie you had in your head. You weren’t watching the movie, you were fighting the movie and not going with the story. It’s fun to settle people and force them to get into your story, then take them to upsetting and dangerous places, I think that’s what makes movies interesting and fun.
That’s what I find so boring. I think the worst crime in cinema is boredom. I will take a bad movie over a boring or safe movie. A lot of these films that I see being put out, even a lot of the scripts I’m sent, they all have to be “Oh, Earth gets saved, the guy eventually learns a lesson, what’s the character arc,” and it’s like fuck off. I mean fuck it, why can’t you just have people do horrible things and die in terrible ways for no reason? That’s what life is. Hitchcock talked about The Birds being about the randomness of life, and life is this series of unforeseeable tragedies that we have absolutely no control over – and then we die. You just have to be happy in between those moments and be thankful that you have your health, because that’s going to go someday too, it’s just awful. Then you see it in the movies, and I don’t know how it upsets people, I think it’s hilarious.
Moving away from Aftershock, someone asked Eli whether his experience in Chile made him want to stay and shoot The Green Inferno:
Eli Roth: Absolutely, I had the time of my life on Aftershock. I mean, the first part of the movie?
There’s such a talent pool down there. I immediately took Lorenza Izzo, who plays Kylie in the movie, and immediately cast her as Brooke Bluebell in Hemlock Grove. She gets killed in the first episode by the werewolf, she’s the cheerleader. Then I cast her as the lead in Green Inferno, Ariel Levy, Nicolás Martínez, this whole same crew – everybody. Same DP, cameras, the entire production team, we said let’s just bring this on to Green Inferno.
Nicolás López and I really want to start Chilewood, which is our system of making our movies, our way, with total control down in Chile, but making genre movies that are independent but mainstream for the world – English language movies. There’s such a great talent pool down there, and of course after Aftershock everybody wanted to be in Green Inferno. Everybody started learning English. If you were on the fence, you started learning English. It’s like a goldmine for production, I had the best time shooting there.
Green Inferno was no bullshit. We went up in the Amazon in Peru, it was really fucking scary at times. I don’t think I ever could have made that movie if I hadn’t made my others. It was tarantulas, bugs like The Mist, it was 110 degrees, we all had to get de-parasited, everybody got yellow fever shots, and we traveled five hours every day to the set. We had to go an hour in the Land Rover to the river, then you had to get in the boats and it was 90 minutes up the river, and the river rose because it flooded one day and it was like The Impossible with trees and debris. There were so many points where we almost got killed on that shoot, but it was great and it all worked out.
Finishing things off, we asked Eli where the idea for Aftershock came from between himself and Nicolás López:
Eli Roth: We were talking after The Last Exorcism opened about how I could get movies financed on my name and released through “Eli Roth Presents,” and I know he loves horror movies, so I said “Why don’t you do an English language horror movie?” He said “Why don’t we shoot one in Chile, what’s the story, what’s it going to be? Let’s do something high octane and high adrenaline. Do I do monsters, aliens,” but then I remember him telling me about the earthquake and the shit that went down that night and we were like “We don’t need to change anything, we just need to put this stuff in order.” It’s all right there. So we started writing when he was in Chile, we wrote it over Skype with our third writing partner Guillermo Amoedo.
Our whole attitude was was just shooting. While we were scouting Nicolás was like “ADIDAS is having a party, we got permission to shoot there, let’s go.” So we shot a whole party sequence and that was like a month before we started shooting. Even the stuff on our scout, a lot of the footage he was like “We can cut this into the movie.”
I really think [Nicolás] is an amazing filmmaker. It’s hard to comprehend. He did a movie called Santos that flopped, when he was like 23 years old, It was before Scott Pilgrim, it’s that type of movie set in a comic fantasy, and he loves it and it’s his favorite movie, but the whole world was like “This sucks.” It flopped hardcore and he was humiliated. Everyone in his country was like “Ha-ha, you suck,” like at 23 he was washed up. He sat down and wrote Que Pena Tu Vida which he shot in 11 days in 38 locations, and it was a huge hit. He’s a really good example of a filmmaker that never waited for anyone’s permission and that just figured it out just through creativity and hard work. I think everyone magically wants to be a director, and he’s a director you can really look to as someone and say “I want to shoot a feature, I want to do it like Nicolás López did it.”
He’s the first one I knew who got sponsors to finance his movie. For Que Pena Tu Vida he got like $50 grand from Canon, $50 grand from ADIDAS – he basically cobbled together $200 grand, shot the movie, and it made millions of dollars at the box office and he didn’t have to pay back any investors. He owned the movie outright, it was genius. I would highly recommend checking out his work.
At this point I’d like to thank Eli Roth for his time, and be sure to check out Aftershock when it opens May 10th!