Untrue rumours circulate about Eli Roth and his intentions for Peaches Geldof. Critics don't get him. And yet he's in cracking form - helped, no doubt, by his involvement in another hit horror, The Last Exorcism. Meet that rarest of entertainment species - a ball player, writes TARA BRADY
'SO OUT of nowhere the Sunhave this story about Eli Roth and Peaches Geldof getting married," sighs Eli Roth. "They're getting married in a roof-top ceremony in New York City. Quentin Tarantino will preside over the wedding.
"I mean this is insane, right? This is a totally, completely, 100 per cent made-up story, but now it's been in 500 places, including CNN. CNN! My parents have been on the phone complaining that they're the last ones to find out. Quentin has been on the phone asking when and where. What is wrong with these tabloids? Are there no standards left in journalism?"
He pulls one of his charming ringmaster smiles. "Apart from people like you, of course. We're practically old chums."
Auteur, raconteur, popular tweeter and bone-fide movie geek, in the film-writing business, we have a word for interviewees like Eli Roth. We call them ball players. These entertaining folk understand that performance doesn't end when the director yells "cut". He hustles. He tells amusing anecdotes. He flatters. He makes you feel like Leonard Bernstein must be playing somewhere in the background.
"For me," he says, "it's all about entertainment. I make movies I would want to see, and I try to get them out there."
Inaccurate wedding reports aside, this has been a good week for Eli Roth. Having built up a fanatical fan base as the horror-meister behind Cabin Feverand the Hostelfranchise, and a new batch of recruits following his turn in Inglourious Basterds,the movie hyphenate has now turned his attention to producing.
Last weekend, The Last Exorcismdebuted at No 2 at the US box office, a mere $100,000 shy of Takers, a futuristic heist flick starring Matt Dillon and Hayden Christensen.
"We made this movie for $1.8 million when the average movie budget is $80 million," says Roth. "They called Takers low-budget when it cost $33 million to make and had $45 million of advertising money. But they have another 50 or 60 to go before they turn a profit. We're already there."
The Last Exorcism, a tremendous found-footage psych-out based around a demonic possession, was directed by German newcomer Daniel Stamm, and stars overlooked TV regular Patrick Fabian. Its Blair Witch-style success can, for the most part, be attributed to ingenious viral marketing and three little words: "Eli Roth Presents . . ."
"I always liked it when directors were friends," says Roth. "I loved it when Steven Spielberg worked with Tobe Hooper on Poltergeistor when Spielberg worked with Joe Dante on Gremlins. I always thought that was really cool as a kid. And it works. The reason I went to see Delicatessen was because it was a 'Terry Gilliam presents'. Obviously with Hostel, Quentin Tarantino coming on board was a huge deal. And coming after Hostel 2, I can get a certain kind of film made if my name is on it as producer or presenter."
Doesn't he find it hard to switch off the part of his brain that directs? "Honestly, no," he says. "Because I love this job. I can raise the money then give it to whatever director I want. There's a lot of talent out there. I wanted to give someone a break. Cabin Feverwas a nightmare for me; it took years of my life. And when Tarantino came along and put his name on Hostel it made life a lot easier.
"There are people out there who deserve a shot. Daniel Stamm spent three years making Unnecessary Death, an amazing movie that nobody saw. Patrick Fabian, who does an incredible job in our film, has worked for years in TV but never got the lead before. The satisfaction for me is in getting the story out and changing the lives of all these people."
Born in New England to Dr Sheldon Roth (a noted professor of psychiatry at Harvard) and the painter Cora Roth, young Eli was fascinated by horror. At six, he watched The Exorcist. By 13, he was sawing himself in half at his own bar mitzvah.
"Put some of it down to Massachusetts," he says. "They had us performing The Crucibleas 11-year-olds. How absurd is that? You know there were only 19 witch burnings in Salem, where I grew up, as opposed to 300,000 in Europe? But it is in the culture, and in a strange way all of my films have been about possession. They're all about the loss of control of the body. Because that's what really got me about The Exorcist. The idea that something could get inside you. It doesn't have to be the devil. We've all had relatives that go funny in the head or who become unrecognisable because of Alzheimer's. These are very live fears. So what I loved about this script was its psychological approach. There's no possession make-up. There's only messing with your mind."
I wonder if he views his own work as being all that different from his father's. "The two are definitely linked. For sure. It's in my genetics. My dad worked at Bellevue. He saw what human beings were capable of and what happens to them when they lose their minds. I always found that stuff fascinating."
Not everybody is enamoured with Roth's milieu. For every critic who gets excited about his animations for David Lynch or his smart Nazi propaganda insert, Nation's Pride (the film-within-the-film in Inglourious Basterds), there are a dozen who don't get it.
The director, in turn, isn't too enamoured with the writers who dismiss his work as the end of western civilisation. Chris Tookey of the Daily Maildescribed Hostelas "the most revoltingly violent pornography ever to have polluted mainstream cinema".
"The problem is that criticism, especially in the United States, has lost its way," says Roth. "There are a few great critics out there. There are even some great online critics. But newspaper subscriptions are falling, and there's no test to be a critic any more. It used to be that you had to know your stuff, you had to be a great writer, and you had to work your way up.
"Now everybody is lumped in with bloggers who don't check facts and who don't know anything. Make no mistake: the online critics have an agenda. The overwhelming majority are not writing about film because that's what they want to do, they're writing because they want to direct and they see this as a stepping stone. There's no purity, there's no intelligence, there's no discourse, there's no social context. There's only 'How do I get into Hollywood?' Quentin and I have seen this too many times - there are bad reviews because you haven't indulged some fantasy they have where you turn them into a director."
So he gets a lot of screenplays, then? "You better believe it. Honestly, 95 per cent of the interviews I do in the US end with somebody handing me a screenplay. That why it's always a pleasure to come here, where critics still have integrity. You read newspapers in the UK and you get interesting points of view." He grins mischievously.
"Unless, of course, it's Chris Tookey at the Daily Mail."
