Eli Roth Taps Into Latino Audiences with AFTERSHOCK
- Details
- Category: Interviews
- Created: Wednesday, 08 May 2013 22:30
- Published: Wednesday, 08 May 2013 22:30
- Written by Lupe Haas
Roth produced and co-wrote the horror disaster flick AFTERSHOCK, an independent film shot in Chile with filmmaking savant Nicolas Lopez who impressed the American-born Roth with his MTV tv pilot when he was sixteen and his follow up comedies. “I’m a huge fan,” the director and producer behind the Hostel movies told CineMovie’s Pili Montilla.
Roth teamed up with Nicolas Lopez on AFTERSHOCK in Chile to produce a mainstream Hollywood film featuring Latin actors that would work for the “whole world.” Roth, along with Lopez, coined the phrase Chile-Wood in hopes of making more films with his new found filmmaking community in Chile. The experience working with top quality talent and crew was so positive he cast many of the actors from AFTERSHOCK in his directorial effort, The Green Inferno, also shot partially in Chile. Roth has since appeared in Lopez’s next film.
By going to Chile and featuring Latino actors, Roth is looking to tap into the Latino movie-going public. “Latins are the strongest movie-going audience right now. And they love horror movies,” he remarks during our sit down with the multi-hyphenate. Roth got a taste of Latino humor with the constant ribbing of the gringo. Roth reveals filmmaking is so lax in Chile that the cast and crew kept making fun of him for thinking there was such as thing as art department and professional stunt men. “Gringo, you’re so worried about everything. You’re so gringo about it,” they teased him.
Roth, who broke out with his own indie film, Cabin Fever in 2002, brought his own knowledge of low-budget, high quality filmmaking with Lopez who had his own cost-saving methods. Roth tells Pili he thought the art department did a great job with the life-like skeletons and hair in a cemetery scene, but then he was told those cemetery location props were real, left behind by the destruction of the previous Chilean earthquake. The incident also led to more ribbing by his new Chilean friends.
Roth had the most fun “smashing” things up in the Spanish and English language film which opens May 10, 2013.