Produced, co-written by, and
starring Hostel's Eli Roth, and
co-written and directed by native Chilean Nicolás López, Aftershock tells the harrowing tale of a group of party goers that
face a devastating earthquake and the chaotic aftermath. Here at Idle Hands we
were lucky enough to drop in on Roth and get the details on the film and
insights into his methods and concepts, which, are explored throughout his
projects. A good time interrupted by sudden death.
The genesis for Aftershock began
from a conversation between Roth and López. “We were talking, after Last Exorcism opened, about how I can
get movies financed on my name and released as “Eli Roth Presents”. I know he [López] loves horror movies, and I was like Why don’t you do an
English-language horror movie? And he was like, “Why don’t we shoot it in Chile?” And we thought, what’s the story, what’s it going to be?
And we thought, let’s do something like REC. Something high-octane, high
adrenaline: do monsters, or do aliens. But then with him telling me about the
earthquake, and the shit that went down that night...We were like, we don’t
need to change anything. We just need to put the stuff in order. It’s all right
there. And we just started writing it. We wrote it over Skype, with our third
writing partner, Guillermo Amoedo, who he had written the Que Pena Tu... movies with.”
Basing an exciting action/disaster
movie on a real event might be considered controversial, especially to the
Chileans who actually lived through the tragedy, but Roth hasn’t found this to
be the case.
“There’s no way the reaction could be worse
than 3:34 AM, which was the Chilean
art film made one year, like as soon as the tragedy happened they went into
production on 3:34 AM. And they said
“This is the story of the earthquake.” And the movie was so bad. People were
like, “This fucking sucks. This is just terrible!” And they [3:34 AM’s
makers] said “Well, the money will go to the victims’ families...” And they
made a shitty movie. People were mad the movie sucked.
So we said, “We’re not going to do
that. We’re not going to make the ‘serious’ movie talking about that night, and
the survival. Y’know, The Impossible
was incredible, but this is very different. We fictionalized it. We wanted to
tell an exciting action story, and base it in real events. It’s based on that
earthquake, loosely, but it’s not THAT earthquake. We talk about the miners,
where the mine incident happened after the earthquake.”
“The Chileans love it,” Roth
continues. “The first part of Chile is really fun: you know, the vineyards, and
the clubs, and the restaurants, and the girls...They love it. So far the
response has been incredible. Because, also, when society falls apart, it’s not
Chileans behaving badly, it’s humans. It’s the way humans react when there’s no
rules. The prisons break open anywhere, there’s going to be riots, and looting,
and rapes, and killing civilians… killing civilians for their clothing. And the
tsunami panicking, all those things really happen. So, when we were filming
those scenes, in the club, all those actors, everybody had lived through that.
Covered in dust, it was oddly therapeutic for them to do it.
“It was weird, you know, Lorenza
Izzo was in a club, it was 3:30 in the morning, and next thing you know her and
her friends were running through plate glass windows to escape, because it was
all going to collapse. And there were shards of glass in all of them, and in
their hair. You’re at a club, in the last weekend of summer, so you’re in a
miniskirt and heels and you’re dancing and you’re drunk—and you’re literally
running for your life minutes later. And she said that the music didn’t stop.
And it was surreal.”
“People losing limbs, people
getting crushed. Nico told me one story about a girl he knew who was on a first
date with a guy. They parked somewhere overlooking the city. The earthquake
happened and rocks dropped down, and landed on the car, on top of the guy’s
head, and the guy was fully paralyzed. And the girl’s sitting there, and she
had to move him to the back seat —this guy she’s on a first date with—and she
didn’t drive stick, so she’s trying to drive the car down the hill to get him
to a hospital. Which was terrifying enough, even if she knew how to drive
stick. We didn’t put that in the movie, but there were so many examples like
that, from that night. This is their lives, and you have the right to tell a
story about it.”
“By the way, any movie is
exploitation if you think about it. If someone is charging money to tell a
story, it’s exploiting subject matter in one form or another.
“Latin people love horror movies.
Latin Americans have been driving the horror box office. Not all, but they’ve
been supporting horror. That’s what drove Evil
Dead, the Paranormal Activity
movies. It’s incredible, that audience.”
“So we’re not selling it as an art
film. We’re not saying, ‘This is the historical document.’ And it makes Chile
look really fun—for a period of time...[laughs].
But I think they’re going to love it. So far, the reaction’s been great. They
know what to expect from me and Nicolas, too. They know what they’re getting.”
On the subject of horror, veteran
horror commentator Roth predictably has much to say:
“I love horror movies because you
can break all the rules. You can break rules structurally, you can get away
with things that you never could in a mainstream studio movie. We made what we
call an independent mainstream movie. We shot it in Chile in English language
for the entire world, but part of the fun of shooting in Chile is, if you shot Aftershock in America, it would have
cost 25 million dollars, because we did everything practically. It’s 99 percent
practical, one percent CG in the movie. And we’re really, really smashing
things, and we got to film in locations that hadn’t been fixed or cleaned up
since the earthquake. Like the cemetery. I mean, I remember, I ‘m pinned
beneath this giant piece of concrete, and I looked over at the tombs, which
were stacked up like filing cabinets, and I saw skeletons, and bones, and tombs
broken open, and I said to López, ‘Man, art department did a great job!” And he
said “Ah, gringo! Art department!” And I was like ‘What?’ He’s like, ‘Dude, we
got in here an hour ago. This has been shut down since the earthquake.’
“I’ve always been attracted to
stories like that, ever since I was a kid. I don’t know why. I love fairy
tales, and ghost stories...they are just the most fun ones to tell. There are
no rules. You can do anything to anyone at any moment. And we take full
advantage of that. You don’t have to please anybody.
“And I think horror movies are the
ones that matter ultimately. If you think about what movies won Best Picture 30
years ago, 35 years ago: ‘Was that Chariots
of Fire?’ ‘I guess...’ And then you see Evil
Dead being remade, Reanimator The
Musical, these movies that really, really hit a chord with pop culture.
Sometimes it takes years, but they’re never forgotten. Even if it’s a moment of
time of the 80s or the 70s …if it’s a great horror movie, people watch it
forever.”
It was a film from the 70s that
left its indelible mark on Roth: “The movie that was the most shocking
experience was The Exorcist, which I
saw when I was six. I thought that it was real. I thought I was going to be
possessed by the Devil. My mom was like, ‘Don’t worry. We’re Jewish, we don’t
believe in The Devil.’ I was like, but yeah, I’d be the Jew. We have dybbuks. What
the fuck’s a dybbuk?! But I was like; I’d be the Jew the Devil makes an example
out of, just to show that he can also get you, too. That movie freaked me the
fuck out. I threw up after I saw it. I used to have a problem with barfing
whenever I saw a scary movie. It’s probably why I make them now, is to pay that
forward, to make a generation of people vomit when they see my films. It’s like
a standing ovation.”
Roth responds to the quote from
the late film critic Roger Ebert that a horror film doesn’t need a big star
because the scare is the star:
“I definitely agree. Sometimes,
you have The Shining, which has a big
star, but Paranormal Activity is an
example, or Evil Dead. You need
stars, you need good actors, good victims. And a lot of times people are very
forgiving, if it’s a low budget film, with production value or whatever, as
long as it’s scary. If you deliver on the scare, nobody gives a fuck. The best
example are those videos that were like when the ‘internet thing’ first
started, and there were people watching, and it was just a room, and then
‘RAAAAA!’ something pops up. And then you couldn’t wait to show it to someone.
To get that reaction. It’s so much fun.”
Roth acknowledges that it is by no
means a simple formula to make a horror classic: “There’s no way to know. It’s
up to the public. You can’t make a horror film that you plan on being a
classic. You try to make a classic. But you want to make a movie that doesn’t play
it safe. That takes chances. That takes risks. That breaks convention. And that
does it in a smart way. You can’t just break the rules for the sake of breaking
the rules. You can’t just have a guy that turns to the boom [mic] operator for
help suddenly (unless it’s about a documentary crew). You can’t be afraid to make a movie that’s
going to upset people, and that not everybody might love. And that might split
the audience. I still see people fighting about Hostel years later, and Hostel
I and II run non-stop on IFC.
It’s great that I made a movie that shocked people at the time, and that people
can still argue years later about whether or not it sucked. It’s when you put
something out there; it’s one hundred percent up to public to decide whether or
not it becomes a classic. It’s totally out of your control.”
Aftershock offers its
own opportunities to flout Hollywood convention:
“[What rules to break] depend on
what story you’re telling. You don’t just make a movie to break rules, but as
you tell your story, you want to stay one step ahead of the audience. In Aftershock, we really build up the
characters, and build up the minor problems they’re going through. We all think
about like ,okay, I want an iphone 5, or why won’t this girl text me back, or I
really like this guy, why won’t he follow me on Twitter? Little stuff like
that. It’s all modern ways of communicating. We really wanted to build up the
minutiae, the minor problems that seem hugely important. For me, the movie’s
Russell Dazzle. We make such a huge deal about this guy Russell Dazzle, who
can’t even really dance, and then five minutes later we just kill him and crush
his legs. To us, the idea that we basically stop the movie, and suddenly
start—and you can feel the audience fight against it—and that’s what the character‘s
going through. He’s in this movie, and then Russell Dazzle takes his girl. And
the audience is like, ‘wait, we were in the earthquake movie, why are we
watching a dance off? What the fuck?’ You feel them fighting, and then the
earthquake happens, and nothing matters except surviving. And that’s the point.
That it takes an event like that to put into perspective all the things that we
think are such big deals.”
“But breaking rules: If this was a
Hollywood movie, there would have been a minute twenty, you’ve got to have the
earthquake happen. But I wanted every decision that these characters make, I
want you to know why. Pollo [Nicolás Martínez], as obnoxious as he is, really
loves his friend, so every decision is based on wanting to help his friend. My
character really loves his daughter, so everything, from the moment the
earthquake hits, is one hundred percent driven by the fact that I don’t want to
leave my daughter without a father. And you understand it. So that when horrible
things happen, and people do selfish things, and selfless things, as we show...”
“The movie is really about moral
choices”, Roth continues. “And we can break the rules by having characters do
things that we understand and we see them do, and we’re cringing in pain that
they’re making that choice, but you get it. You get why they do it. It’s a
human choice.
“And I think that’s what makes the
movie so fucking upsetting. We’d all love to be the hero in those situations,
but in reality, you’re not. And talking to Nicholas Lopez, all that stuff that
happens in that movie, all of that really happened to people that he knew. We
just strung it all into one fictional event.”
“Down to the underground tunnels
where the priests and nuns would meet and have sex, and the nuns would have
kids and kill them and bury them there. Those tunnels really exist. That’s in Chile. It’s also in Spain. The Spanish crew members told me. It’s something that’s
not talked about.”
“In terms of breaking the rules,
the way you can break the rules is to tell the most interesting story. You can
tell the story that shocks people, that disturbs them, that’s maybe not going
to leave some people feeling good, that’s going to really upset others. Some
people appreciate that, and other times it takes...People have an idea of what
a movie is. And what that movie’s going to be, and a lot of times their first
reaction is them fighting, is wishing you had done this. I remember someone
saying to me “I hated Hostel II
because what I wanted to see was blah-blah-blah...” You hated the movie because the movie wasn’t
the one that you had in your head. You’re not watching the movie. You’re
fighting the movie. You’re not going with the story. So it’s fun to force
people to settle down and focus and get them into your story, and then take
them to upsetting and dangerous places. That’s what I think makes movies
interesting. That’s what I think makes movies fun.”
“I think that the worst crime in
cinema is boredom. I will take a bad movie over a boring movie, and a safe
movie, and a lot of these films that I see being put out. I ‘ve even been sent
scripts to direct, they all have to be ‘Earth gets saved’ or ‘the guy
eventually learns a lesson.’ ‘What’s the character arc?’ And it’s just like,
fuck. You can have all that, but fuck it, why can’t you 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 no control over. And then we die. And 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 like awful. And you see it in a movie, and somehow, I
don’t know, it upsets people. But I think it’s hilarious.”
The paradoxical attraction of
horror is by no means exclusive to directors:
“One thing I’ve found from a lot
of actors is they’re fascinated to see their own death. People have come up to
me for years and said I have no interest in being an actor, but I really want
to get killed in one of your movies. I think it’s the one thing we’ll never
see. Even our birth now, if you really want to, I think most people could get a
video of it. I don’t know why you’d want to see that.”
“But your death is something that it’s
only natural to wonder how we’re going to die. The tsunami’s coming for us all,
whether we like it or not. And life is a series of horrible things that happen
to you and you do everything you can to avoid them, until ultimately you lose
and you’re dead. So the fascination of what is--it’s a very human thing to
wonder, what are we going to look like after we’re dead? That’s why it’s so fun
to kill people on film.”
“And it’s funny for Nicolás López,
who’s used to filming romantic comedies. I remember we were filming a scene
where someone was dying in a grisly death, and he’s just—you know, he’s used to
the guy breaking up with the girl, the girl dumping the guy, and the guy
crying...And then you know, someone’s got their hands cut off, and they’re
screaming, and their blood...And he was laughing. And he was like “Why is this
so funny? I don’t get it!” And I said ‘It’s the best, isn’t it?’ It’s so much
fucking fun, to just brutally kill characters. It’s great.”
Another subject Roth is especially
enthusiastic about is working with Aftershock’s
co-writer/director, Nicolás López: “I had the time of my life on Aftershock.
Nicolás is so smart. His movie Promedio
Rojo (highly recommend it; it’s on Netflix). Promedio Rojo is like Latin-American
Pie. It’s Pollo and Ariel [Levy]: it’s the same cast. When he [Nicolás] was
fifteen, he finished school, he had a show on MTV Latin America that he wrote,
produced, directed, and starred in, called Piloto
MTV... It aired after Jackass...”
“Then Promedio Rojo, he did at 19, and Que Pena Tu Vida, he shot it on a [Canon] 7D. It was the first
movie shot on a 7D. He blew it up to 35 millimeter, put it in theatres, on like a few screens, and it made
more money in Chile than Social Network. It became a phenomenon in Chile,
because the kids were seeing themselves on the screen."
“Then he did Qué Pena Tu Boda. Then he did Qué
Pena Tu Familia (I have a small cameo in that). He shoots so fast with the
[Canon] 5Ds, his crew is so good, and there’s such a talent pool of actors. I
went down there, and immediately took Lorreza Izzo, who plays Kylie in the
movie, and 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,
Nicolas Martinez...this whole same crew, everybody, the same DP, the entire
production team, we just said, let’s just bring this on to Green Inferno.”
“Nico and I really want to start
Chilewit, which is our system of making our movies our way, with total control,
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...It’s like a
goldmine for production. I had the best time shooting there."
Working in Chile wasn’t all fun,
as Roth’s forthcoming cannibal horror opus presented the crew with many
challenges and even hazards:
“Green Inferno was no bullshit. We went up in the Amazon, in Peru. It was really fuckin scary at times. I don’t think I
could have made that movie if I hadn’t made my others. There were tarantulas,
bugs like The Mist. It was
terrifying. It was 110 degrees. We all had to get de-parasited. Everybody got
yellow fever shots. We went five hours traveling every day to the set. An hour
in the landrover, to river, then the boats for ninety minutes. The river rose
because there was a flood, and there were trees and debris and shit...There
were so many points we almost got killed on that shoot. But it was great. It
all worked out.”
Chile’s film production
infrastructure may be limited, but that won’t stop Roth and his resourceful
collaborator: “There’s nothing. Canon hooked us up with cameras, and we just
ordered lights from China. Nicolás López basically built the system down there.
We used a C-300, [Canon’s] new film camera. Canon was so impressed with what
Nico did, they just started giving us cameras. He’s like, ‘Dude, you don’t need
a fucking helicopter: Watch this.’ He took a 5D, and strapped it to this thing
called an octocam, which is a remote control helicopter. You’re not allowed to
get a helicopter near a vineyard because it will destroy the grapes, because
the helicopter gets too close. He took the remote control octocam, has us all
walking through the vineyard, and if it was a little bumpy, he ran it through
Quake motion stabilizing... It looks like this hugely expensive helicopter
shot, but it’s just him with a 5D.”
Inspired by his partner in
filmmaking, López, Roth looks ahead to a cinematic future of greater
flexibility and productivity:
“I really think he’s an amazing
filmmaker. He did a movie called Santos, that flopped, when he was 23 years old, and 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. And everyone in his country was like “Ha Ha! You suck!” At 23, he was
washed up.
“And he sat down and wrote Que Pena Tu Vida, shot it in eleven
days, thirty-eight locations, and it was a huge hit. He’s a really good example
of a filmmaker that never waited for anyone’s permission, and then just figured
it out, and did it just through creativity and hard work. He’s on Twitter. I
think everybody just magically wants to be a director, and he’s a director that
you can really look to, like, “I want to shoot a feature, I want to do the way
Nicolás López did it”. He’s the first one I knew that got sponsors to finance
his movie. For Que Pena Tu Vida, he
got fifty grand from Canon, fifty 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.”
“That’s the thing: he’s eleven
years younger than me, he’s a generation younger, so he doesn’t know what
you’re not ‘supposed’ to do. He’s like “Fuck film, dude.” I’m like, ‘Yeah, but
you need the emulsion...’ He’s like ‘My sister’s twelve. She watches everything
on an iPad. Get over it.’
And he’s like, ‘If your movie’s a
big fuckin hit, your movie’s the biggest box office hit, you’re in theatres for
like three weeks, and then ten other movies are kicking you out. So your
movie’s gonna live on iTunes and an iPad whether you like it or not.’ And the
truth is, most people’s home systems have amazing hi-def TVs and great
projection, so it’s like, fuck it. We made this in a new way. We shot this on
5Ds, let’s release it on 100 screens, for the core fans who want to go out
(obviously I highly recommend seeing it in the theatre), but also, fuck it, you
want to order it with a bunch of your friends? It’s 8 bucks on iTunes. Done.
Don’t worry about it: On to the next one...”
“That’s our whole thing: We saw that Woody
Allen documentary, where he’s making two movies a year, and we’re like ‘Okay,
something is wrong with us! We are fucking lazy! We need to be like
‘Shoot-shoot-shoot’ Don’t overthink it. Fuck it, write a script, go. That’s the
speed we’re moving at now.”
Aftershock opens in select theaters today!
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