WAMG Talks To ELI ROTH

What happens to a group of travelers who are in an underground nightclub in Chile when a massive earthquake hits? Hint: Nothing good!

Well, except that it gave me the opportunity to sit down with Eli Roth to talk about his new movie AFTERSHOCK, in which he stars, co-wrote, and produced. I would say that’s a pretty darn good outcome! Check it out below.

In the middle of a night of wild partying, a hapless American tourist (Roth) and his friends are suddenly plunged into a living hell when a powerful earthquake rips through the coastal town of Valparaíso, Chile.

What do you think it is about travel that sets a good tone for a film? 

Eli Roth: Well, travel – Everyone has fantasies of traveling. We all want to escape our lives and go somewhere fun. A lot of times we want to go as far away from our lives and comforts as possible, but that also sets up a great horror movie because all the things that are wonderful about travel – the isolation, being in a new place, not knowing anyone – that can all turn against you. Every time I sit down to write a movie I try to write something completely different. I go “Ok, I’ve never done this type of movie before!” and then, after the fact, I realize that every movie is about a bunch of people going to a new place, then something horrible happens… and I don’t try to do that! People say that no matter what you’re making the same movie. No matter how hard you try you are always making the same movie over, and over, and over – on some level. With travel – it’s always fun, when you are watching a movie, to see an exotic location. A lot of people don’t know anything about Chile, or have never been there, or maybe they know it from wine, or maybe they know the miners. That’s what  Nicolás López would joke about – “Oh, you think this is the city of God, and we all live in a giant favela.” [laughs]

I went down there to write the movie with him, and it was so beautiful. It’s like being in Santa Barbara. Gorgeous vineyards, and oceans. Santiago is very similar to Los Angeles. It looks like here in Los Feliz. There’s a W Hotel, Starbucks, amazing restaurants… It’s a fantastic city. Valparaíso, where we shot the movie – they allow graffiti to happen so graffiti artists from all over the world have turned this town into a walking museum. It’s crazy. It was a wild experience shooting there. I think travel sets up a great – it’s such a perfect setup for a horror movie. Every one has that experience where they go to a different town and they go to the wrong store, or they say the wrong thing, or they have the wrong encounter – and you just get this feeling of people looking at you – and suddenly it’s terrifying. So, we wanted to make a movie about society, and the fragility of society – and what happens when it all collapses, which is what happened. It all came from real stories of what Nicolás told me it was like that night of the earthquake. We didn’t want to make the serious Oscar version, so we fictionalized the earthquake and the events, but all of the events happened. The friend getting the hand cut off, the speakers crushing people in the clubs, the tsunami, the prison breakouts – all of that really happened that night.

WIth all of those events actually happening, and shooting on the location of the actual earthquake, how was your reception in the town? Especially with the subject matter hitting so close to home? 

Eli Roth: People loved it! People love movies, and they knew that it was fiction – but, when we shot the club scene, Lorenza Izzo, who plays Kylie was in the club, and her friend got his hands cut off. She was there when they were trying to find the hands, and she had to run through a plate-glass window. You either had to try to find the hands – and then the aftershocks hit, and they were like “The club is going to collapse! It’s going to collapse!”. Then, the cell phone service went out, so nobody had GPS. Everyone realized that they were so dependent on their phones that they didn’t even know where to go! You couldn’t call the police, you couldn’t call the fire department. When we were shooting that scene, people were covered in dust – and they were saying “This is exactly what it was like!”.

Wow…

Eli Roth: … but they knew we were fictionalizing it, so no one was offended by what we were doing. Nico is such a popular filmmaker down there – people were really excited. They love horror movies down there, so I had a huge, huge fan base in Chile. My films have done very well in Latin America, so people were like “I wanna be covered in blood!” [laughs]. People were excited to be in it. It was fun! It was a great energy.

How does being one of the writers on a film affect your acting approach? Does that give you more of a license to improv or change things around as you go? 

Eli Roth: Absolutely! I remember after INGLORIOUS BASTARDS Quentin (Tarantino) said “Now you can write great parts for yourself” and “You’ve proved you can act. You’ve done it alongside the best, and you’ve done it under me.”. I trust Nico so much. Nico, our third writer Guillermo Amoedo, and I had such a great time writing this script – but a lot of the dialogue came from me going there on a location scout, and hanging out with Ariel and Nicolás Martínez, who plays Pollo. Pollo’s his nickname anyway. So, a lot of the dialogue is us just goofing around. We’d go “Oh, that’s really funny. Let’s put that in the movie.” By the time we had the script – it was so fast in the way we shot it, that we really had to be tight. We didn’t have a lot of time for improv, so the improv came in the weeks leading up to the shooting. One of the nice things about being the producer, and the writer with Nico, is that anything we came up with we shot. The whole opening, where we were at the Adidas party – Adidas was actually throwing a party and they were like “Do you want to shoot here?”. We weren’t suppose to start shooting till January 15th, and the party was December 15th, but it’s summertime there. So, I just got on a plane, took the cameras down, and we went in and just improved a whole bunch of stuff – that became the entire opening before the vineyard. That was the fun thing about the way we shot this movie. Nico pioneered shooting on a Canon 7D.

Really? A 7D? That’s impressive!

Eli Roth: It’s amazing what he’s done. He’s a genius! His first movie PROMEDIO ROJO, which is on Netflix – they call it Latin American Pie… He made it when he was 19 years old, and people are looking like him like he’s Robert Rodriguez. It’s so funny, and it’s on Netflix with subtitles. You’ve gotta see it! Then, he made a movie called SANTOS which, at 23, was a huge flop. Everyone was like “Haha. You’re washed up!”.

Nicolás had a show called PILOTO MTV that he dropped out of school at 15 for – because he was writing, directing, producing, and acting in it. It aired after JACKASS. It was a massive hit in Latin America. This is when he was 16 years old! You can look him up on YouTube. Look up PILOTO MTV. You’ll see fat Nicolás López at 16 years old with hair. They’re fucking hilarious! [laughs] I keep telling him he has to subtitle them. They’re so fucking funny! It’s totally ridiculous.

After that he did PROMEDIO ROJO. He was writing for the main newspaper in Santiago when he was 13 years old. He had a column in the main paper. He’s hyper-intelligent. So, after SANTOS failed he buckled down, got sponsor money, and he made this movie FUCK MY LIFE – QUE PENA TU VIDA. He did it for, like, $200,000, and he shot it on a 7D. He sent the footage to Technicolor, and they blew it up. They released it in theaters and it made more money that THE SOCIAL NETWORK and THE HANGOVER PART II. It was a huge hit. So, then was like “You don’t need a film camera anymore. You can shoot a feature film on an SLR. We tried the Canon 5D Mark II. I went down to Chile. We shot tests on it, we blew it up, and it looked like we had shot it on a Luxor 35mm. If you light it right, and put the right lens on it, and you know how to shoot it, it can look like expensive 35mm film. I said “Well, what about shooting on film?” and he said “Dude. My sister watches everything on her iPad. She’s 12. She doesn’t give a fuck. Kids don’t give a fuck.”. Say it’s in theaters. If you’re movie’s a smash hit it’s in theaters for 17 days, and then it’s on iTunes anyway, So, we wanted to make this in a different way. “Let’s shoot a movie in English for the world. Let’s shoot a mainstream genre movie ” and we sold it all over the world. It’s being released theatrically worldwide. In America it’s on 100 screens and on VOD, and iTunes. “Let’s see if that works.” We did the movie for so little. We financed it by pre-selling it to every other country. His movies – QUE PENA TU VIDA (FUCK MY LIFE), QUE PENA TU BODA (FUCK MY WEDDING/MARRIAGE) , and the third QUE PENA TU FAMILIA (FUCK MY FAMILY) I have a cameo in – they’re all on Netflix with subtitles. It’s a great example of how the new generation is making movies. I thought “Ok. Everyone is saying you need ‘this’ camera and you really need to do it ‘that’ way. Let’s go and see if we can pull off a movie on a 5D.” – and that’s how we did it. Part of the fun is that we didn’t use CG. We wanted to make it real. We really wanted to smash the ceilings. We really wanted to destroy the cemetery, and we did! That was one of the nice things about shooting down there. It’s so much cheaper to shoot, and with the 5D we had 5 or 6 cameras covering stuff, we really destroyed stuff. There’s very, very little CG in the movie. 

Since you were destroying things, it had to be one shot, right?

Eli Roth: One shot. Destroying that club is one shot. I remember watching them rehearsing, and the ceiling collapsing, and 80 girls in high heels trampling over each other and I said “Wow. I didn’t realize Chile had this many stunt girls!” and Nico goes “Ah! Gringo! Stunt girls? These are extras!”. I was like “Are you serious dude? They could get hurt.” and he goes “Ahhh. Stop being such a Gringo!”. We would just close our eyes, and thank God no one got hurt. I remember firing a blank. There’s a scene where an actor gets shot with a gun, and we have a pregnant woman firing a gun. I said “López, it’s dangerous to shoot a blank at this…” – “Naw… Naw… It’s fine” and Pablo, the AD is like “Ah, here. Point the gun at me.” He points it, and fucking shoots at Pablo, and he’s like “See. I’m fine. All right. Let’s go”. It was that. The way we tested the gun was that the AD stood in front because we had to fire it, and he was like “Ok. We’re good!”.

The best example of Chile is shooting in the cemetery when I’m crushed under a rock. I looked around, and there were skeletons next to me, cracked open tombs, bodies… and I said “Man, the art department did an amazing job!” and he’s like [laughs] “Gringo! Art Department!” and I was like “What?”, and he goes “We haven’t dressed anything! They just opened this for us. It’s been closed since the earthquake.”. There was so much in Chile that was destroyed from the earthquake and wasn’t fixed that, so we could go to locations that were still destroyed, like the cemetery. It’s all real. There was just a piece of concrete on me. That’s it. That was the only dressing,

Not to give anything away, but I’ve always wondered… Is it strange to see yourself tortured, or even killed on film? 

Eli Roth: Actors love to see themselves die. They love it. It’s the one thing in our lives that we can never see. Now, you could see your birth. Someone could videotape your birth. You could watch that and go “I don’t really remember that, but that’s what happened.” but our death, we’ll never know. We’ll never know what our death looks like. You’ll never see it. You can watch it, but that moment of dying – you’re never going to see that. So, watching yourself die, and seeing yourself dead is a fantasy that most people have. It’s a morbid curiosity. It’s natural to imagine what your funeral is going to be like. What you’re going to look like as a dead body? What’s going to happen to you after you die? All of the stuff you do – what does it mean? What happens to everything? Does anyone remember you? It’s all ultimately meaningless. Then you’re dead. End of story. Next. Nobody cares. [laughs] So people have a fantasy – for actors- to watch themselves die. People have come up to me and said “I don’t want to be an actor, but I’d love to be killed in one of your movies.” Everybody has that fantasy.  As kids, when you’re playing games, when someone shoots you, you go “Aghhhhh” and you play dead. When you try to take the ketchup from the fridge and your sister comes home, and walks into the kitchen to see you playing dead… It’s something that everybody does. It’s a natural curiosity.

So, I got the chance recently to go to the Goretorium. 

Eli Roth: You did?

I did. My twin sister and I went for our birthday. It was a great time… which leads me to my next question. I’ve heard rumors that you have dressed up and hidden in your previous haunted houses. Have you, or do you do this in the Goretorium? 

Eli Roth: Of course. Any time I’m in Vegas. If I’m there, I’ll jump in and scare people. It’s as thrilling to scare people as it is to be scared.

AFTERSHOCK stars Eli Roth, Andrea Osvárt, Ariel Levy, Nicolas Martinez, Lorenza Izzo, and Natasha Yarovenko, and Selena Gomez.

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Facebook:  https://www.facebook.com/Aftershockfilm

Twitter: @aftershockfilm

AFTERSHOCK opens everywhere today