Five Things With Eli Roth – The Last Exorcism, Updates On The Man With The Iron Fist, Endangered Species And More

It’s just a couple of days until The Last Exorcism, one of my favourite films of the year, is released on UK DVD and Blu-ray and I’m looking forward to checking it out again on Blu.

I’ve been lucky this week enough to have a good chat with the film’s producer, Eli Roth, and get under the skin of what makes the film so interesting. Here are Five Things he told me.

1. 360 Degree Reality

What I love about Huck and Andrew [Botko and Gurland, the writers] is that you can turn on their movies and if you miss the credits you’ll think you are watching a real documentary. Daniel Stamm really did that with his student film A Necessary Death. So when we lost Huck and Andrew because they went to direct The Virginity Hit we thought “How can we ever replace these guys?” because the world they create is so real that you don’t think these people are acting. And Daniel did it wonderfully too.

In one way you’re technically free, you can show anything, you can show the crew, but it’s very, very difficult to maintain that reality in that it has to be a 360 degree reality. If there’s one false note the whole thing falls apart. Everything has to feel completely, completely real. By the end, hopefully, people get caught up in the story enough that they aren’t thinking about what the camera will catch and won’t catch.

2. Whose Point Of View?

Daniel very clearly wanted this to be a documentary and not found footage. This isn’t where somebody found the camera and pressed play, this has clearly been edited by someone and scored – as documentaries are. Someone put this together and that person has a POV and what is their agenda is the question we wanted to continually raise when watching the film. Why is this professionally edited?

People came out of this saying “Why is this edited with titles and music? You don’t have that in a documentary” but other than a verite director like Fred Wiseman have you ever seen a documentary? They’re all edited.

I like the discussion about whether this was created by somebody who wanted you to believe in God or the Devil, or perhaps, is this Cotton’s greatest trick? They say that Cotton does lots of magic tricks, and he’s always making movies and things. They’re all valid arguments, and we like that idea.

At this point I told Eli that I thought the “truth” of the movie was clear to me.

If it’s clear to you, then it could be clear. I don’t want to answer one way or the other because it will make people think they got it wrong or their point isn’t valid. We had long discussions about who made this film, why and where this came from. We want people to think about “What was their agenda?”

We flirted with putting Church of St. Marks, Pastor Manley’s church, and doing bad opening credits like in the movie The Room where he doesn’t know where the credits go. He’s sort of Executive Producer, Director Pastor Manley and we were going to put all of the satanists in the credits. But obviously, that would have answered the question.

3. With Low Budgets Come Great Posssibility

We made the movie for a million and a half dollars, and when you do a movie that low, you can take a stand and say “This is the end, whether you like it or not”. We knew that some people were going to love the ending and some people were going to hate it. When I was a kid, the ending of The Thing drove me crazy but now I love it. We wanted an ending where people came out of it and talked about it afterwards. The kind of film we wanted to make was one where you could watch it again and rethink the points of view and what someone was thinking, get the little hints. All of the clues are there. That’s the fun of doing a movie at this budget level, that you can take a chance, and make an ending that takes a position and says “This is not for everyone”.

4. Indulgent Filmmaking vs. Immersive Storytelling

At this point, I questioned how immersive a film in the mock-documentary style could ever really be, with the constant reminders of how artificial film and cinema is lurking in every frame.

Bad camerawork and bad editing remind me that I’m watching a movie, or a bad song that was obviously thrown in to sell soundtracks.  My feeling is that the elements should all serve the story and everything should get you caught up in watching the story.

There’s that one shot in Atonement that goes on for eight minutes, you’re so constantly being reminded that you’re watching a movie. Everyone’s like “Look how great this shot is” and I say “That’s not a great shot because you’re aware of it”. I hate it. It’s rare I watch a shot where I’m more impressed by the assistant directing than the directing. You could just feel them congratulating themselves on how amazing their shot was, and that kind of thing. Children of Men pulls it off brilliantly – it’s got to serve the story.

Everyone has iPhones, we can all record video, we watch stuff on YouTube. Back then with Blair Witch or Cannibal Holocaust, it was the first… now it’s a legitimate form of storytelling. You just have to embrace it and do it well. People are so used to seeing The Office, for example that they accept it.

5. Future Projects

They [Botko and Gurland] are going to do [the fake documentary style] with The Other Woman, but I’m not involved with that. We were involved for a period, but those guys [Botko and Gurland] are going in another direction with it, and that’s fine. They’re still writing Funhouse for us, so they’re doing that, but they’re going another way with The Other Woman.

Here, I told Eli that I loved the politics and charge of his Hostel films and hope there’s more of that impassioned, furious filmmaking to come from him.

Last Exorcism is a very politically charged film. One one level it’s about the clash of science and religion, and what happens when neither side will see the other’s point of view.  Everything that I do, subtext is always seeping in there.  The thing that I’m writing now is very much in that vein, Endangered Species. That thing, I’m quietly moving it forward in my own way. I look forward to shooting with it in the spring.

I’m now going to China for RZA’s movie The Man With the Iron Fist. We start shooting that December 27^th, which I’m really excited about. We wrote this kung fu movie together that he’s directing and starring in. And while I’m over there, I’m going to start prep on Endangered Species.

The UK DVD and Blu-ray/DVD double pack of The Last Exorcism are out on December 27th, the US DVD and Blu-ray on January 4th. Thanks again to Eli for taking the time to talk to me.