Eli Roth recently went to Reddit for an AMA to promote his new horror film, The Green Inferno, and here are some of the highlights.
On the challenges of working on the film:
“Inferno was so hard only because we were in this remote village in the amazon. It was 5 hours of travel every day, going in land rovers and then up the river 90 minutes. The day we threw Lorenza Izzo in the river was hard because we found a location that was washed away when we went back to film it. So we found a rock she could cling to but it almost pulled her under and she almost drowned. that sort of thing happened a lot. It was actually really scary.”
When asked to share some crazy stories from production:
“The village had never seen a movie before. We showed them one with a TV and generator and DVD player. The producers showed them Cannibal Holocaust, they thought it was a comedy. After that everyone agreed to be in the film. Also our production designer Marichi lived in the village for 3 weeks getting it ready for the shoot. At the end she had to go back to Chile to finish prepping the rest of the film. The village gathered around to give her a gift – they handed her a 2 year old. She was like WTF and they said “This is our gift to you.” She had to politely decline the baby.”
“The first day of shooting in the village was the big arrival scene. All the kids were tied up in canoes and we had hundreds of villagers painted and ready to kill. And we have heads on sticks and dead bodies all over. And as I yell action two boats full of Missionaries showed up. They were certain that Satan had come to the village and freaked out. Then the villagers said “It’s not Satan, Eli Roth is here making a horror film.” They were so angry I had beaten them they started disrupting the filming by playing music. The village told them to come back when we were done. It was surreal. I of course tried to film it all but the villagers told me I had to back down, that it was a serious situation so we barely have footage of it.”
On working with the MPAA:
“I can’t tell you what a pleasure it is to work with the MPAA. Nobody sees it from where I’m sitting but all around the world they hack horror movies to pieces, only in the US do they really try to protect the integrity of the film and work with you. We had many long discussions about The Green Inferno but ultimately I was very happy with where we wound up. There’s no director’s cut, this is it. Everywhere else in the worldit’s a government censorship board and they never protect violent movies because they want to be re-elected. In the US we have the MPAA which is a self-policing body and they’re all movie lovers and understand what my audience wants to see. Their job is to help make a movie acceptable for theaters but also to warn parents about what’s in it. We may disagree at times but we always have a reasonable discussion about it, not even an appeal. We just get on the phone and talk it out – no one else in the world does that. EVerywhere else they just cut it and say take it or don’t release it.”