Eli Roth Quotes

You have to write scenes and design scenes that are scary and horrific, but that are also watchable. I didn't want people to just feel like they got punched in the stomach.

Borat shows American stereotypes of Eastern Europe but it's an accurate depiction of what a certain type of American is. They think they can buy and sell these girls and then they get bought and sold.

Some disaster movies look like you're watching someone else play video games. They're fun but it's not real.

It's very flattering to feel like you actually helped create a sub-genre.

People want to be disturbed when they go see a horror movie.

If someone gets up and walks out of the movie, it means it's really affected them.

The point of the first one was that it was about guys being lured by sex and the stereotypes ... I always say it's like a horror version of Borat. Borat's not an accurate depiction of Khazakstan, it's an accurate depiction of America. That's what Hostel is.

My parents love it! They're on set. They make cameos in the movie. My father is a psycho-analyst and a professor at Harvard and he told me how many of the other professors at Harvard have gone and seen it. They love Hostel and they love the thought behind it.

I look at careers like Ben Stiller and think that's a great career to have where you're doing movies that you write and direct, and also act in films, although he's primarily an actor.

I love movies. I mean, I really, really love movies.

I started the film [Hostel Part II]with the girls in an art class and there's a nude male model. People think that women are objectified, well here you go! Here's a man being objectivized but now it's under the guise of art.

Creative writing and shooting are muscles that atrophy. But when you work them, you become a self-generator who can branch out.

Anytime you make a movie, the goal is a wide theatrical release, with the right distributor.

'Troll 2' is one of the rare sequels where you don't have to waste time watching the first one, since the films have absolutely nothing to do with one another.

I like to take risks and do weird things and stuff that's not normal compared to other Hollywood movies. Not stuff that's totally avant garde and daring, but doing stuff that's in other languages and not using stars and using real people - things that they generally don't do in mainstream films.

If you don't want to be scared in a horror film, don't close your eyes. Close your ears.

'Eraserhead' is a weird, horrible nightmare, and it doesn't narratively make sense. Stuff's happening, but you honestly feel like you're in a nightmare, and it has such disturbing imagery that it stays with you forever once you've seen it.

What I've always thought I would do is make a bunch of movies and then stop to teach for awhile. And then just teach at film schools - you know, teach children.

I want people to see my name on a movie, pay money and know they're going to be entertained for 90 minutes.

Once I got over the fear of writing female characters, it actually came quite easily and I was really happy with it. I just thought about girls I knew really, really well and I'd just have conversations with them and tried to relay how they talk about certain things.

The difference is in Hostel it's in the theatre - it's in public but it's in a private place. You have to actively make a choice to want to go see it. It's not being forced on anyone. Whereas 24 you can be flipping channels and it's right there in your living room. Anyone has access to that. But that just shows how mainstream it is and how people are seeing this stuff on YouTube. People are scared of it. This is a subject matter that everyone's talking about and everyone's thinking about, particularly in American culture.

What is important to me is that people know I respect the business of making movies.

The censors were great. There's always back and forth. But it's Hostel 2, it's not Happy Feet 2. Everybody knows what Hostel is and people that are going to see it are going for more of what they loved in the original. No one is accidentally going to walk into it, no parent is accidentally going to take their child, and we're not pretending what it is in the advertising. We're saying it's very violent, it's very scary and a continuation of the first one.

Life is a series of avoiding horrible situations until ultimately you're dead. That's how I feel about things.

You'd be lucky to get tortured to death in one of my films. It's the best thing that could happen to your career. But I'm very aware that as soon as you put women in this situation, all of a sudden people are like: "Wow, well wait a second!" Immediately, people become very sensitive to it.

Hopefully we'll get to a point where there are absolutely no restrictions on any kind of violence in movies. I'd love to see us get to a point where you can go to theaters and see movies unrated and that people know its not real violence. It's all pretend. It's all fake. It's just acting. It's just magic tricks.

I saw 'Alien' when I was 8 years old. To me, it was like a combination of Jaws and Star Wars, and that's the movie that made me want to be a director.

You can pretend everything's fine, but if there's an unhappiness or you're not having sex or you're not communicating or you're made to feel third best in the house and you don't address it and you just try to put on a nice face and a smile, that kind of aggression and anger is going to come out in some sinister way.

I've realized that I can't multitask in the writing department; I can only kind of do one thing at a time.

Much of my youth was spent in the parking lot or inside a Dunkin' Donuts.

I always say that no matter what the torture is, or the tool is, first of all it's nothing worse than what's been done already and that wasn't done by the church and the state for over a period of 250 years during the European witch trials.

When I was 22, I had this horrible psoriasis outbreak. It was all over my legs, I couldn't walk because my legs were cracked and bleeding. Weird things like that can happen to your body.

I'm from Boston, and in Boston, you are born with a baseball bat in your hand. And actually, most of the bats in Massachusetts are used off the field instead of on the field, and we all had baseball bats in our cars in high school.

Look at comic books. It used to be something that only geeks were into. And now it's everywhere.

Pulp Fiction won the Palme d'Or and people said: "Wait a minute, he's actually smart and he knows what he's doing!" I feel that with Hostel, any time you make a film like that it's going to illicit a strong reaction and you can't worry about that.

I knew how to act and had studied acting and enjoyed it, but I'd never pushed myself to really perform as an actor, and create a role, and have the whole character's backstory.

Everyone is so terrified of being labeled a racist.

I like movies like Mother's Day, where you watch it, and you've liked it for years as a horror movie.

There's fear in everything, but we can't just succumb to that. We have to suppress it, so we get used to suppressing fear to make it through the our day. Otherwise, we'd become paralyzed by them.

As a director, you have to know what actors are doing. You're the one telling them what to do. The actors' job is to come prepared to the set, but sometimes, if they're beginning actors or people who are non-actors, you have to teach them how to act.

Anytime you're the first to speak out against something, there's going to be a backlash.

One of the great joys of life, now that you can afford a nice suit, is getting one for free. That's why I like to do press tours - I always say making movies is just an excuse to get free clothing.

Shooting at Quentin Tarantino movie was like a masterclass in directing. Although I went back literally right into rehearsal, started shooting ... while I was doing it I had to write my Grindhouse trailer and I added two days of shooting. My brother was producing Hostel and the Grindhouse trailer and I was like: "Gabe, just figure this out!"

For the fee of $10,000, anyone could be escorted to a room, handed a loaded gun and offered another human to kill. The concept made me nauseous. But it also felt real, and rang bells with my more cynical side.

'Cabin Fever' was very much inspired by 'The Thing.' It's really a perfect guy's horror movie: There's no love story, it's just straight-up horror. And it's so well-done. It moves at a slow pace, but it's really terrific.

We live in an age now where so many people watch movies based on what Netflix recommends. It learns your taste and they really understand viewer habits.

You do need an outlet to release all of those fears. You build it up and then, when you go to a movie theater, it's the last place that it's socially acceptable to be terrified. It's saying that, for the next 90 minutes, you're allowed to be afraid and you're not a coward for feeling that way.

The best movies now are called 'thrillers.' Because if you use the word 'horror,' people's associations are straight-to-video crap.

The scariest people are usually the sweetest.

I think in life we get very caught up in the minutia and, unfortunately, it generally takes some sort of tragedy in your life to put things in perspective.

When I'm filming a kill scene [as a director], I just get happier and happier as we chop up body parts.

When someone throws up while watching one of your movies, it's like a standing ovation.

One of the great elements of the supernatural is having that mystery and letting people's imaginations run wild with it.

The one negative to horror is that it's always law of diminishing returns. When you go in the funhouse, the ride is never scary the second time. You will never have that pure experience as when you first watch it.

I have no tattoos. There's nothing I've even been that into to get a tattoo of it.

I want an iPhone 5, someone said something nasty on twitter, or my boyfriend isn't texting me back, like whatever the thing is that seems so major in your life, when a real disaster hits you suddenly strips it all away and you see what's really important and who you really are.

Chile could work as a double for L.A.; it's very production-friendly and there's terrific talent down there.

I generally follow my own compass and make films about what's scaring me.

Natural disasters are terrifying - that loss of control, this feeling that something is just going to randomly end your life for absolutely no reason is terrifying. But, what scares me is the human reaction to it and how people behave when the rules of civility and society are obliterated.

I think that horror films have a very direct relationship to the time in which they're made. The films that really strike a film with the public are very often reflecting something that everyone, consciously or unconsciously feeling - atomic age, post 9-11, post Iraq war; it's hard to predict what people are going to be afraid of.

I think horror should never be safe, whether it's violent or non violent.

I'll direct any movie starring a monkey or the Olsen Twins. Preferably both.

Women became almost our bigger audience. Teenage girls went crazy for my movie. I saw it. I went to theatres all over and there were gangs of girls going and screaming. There were kids that were 10 or 11 years old when September 11 happened. They've been told for years they're going to get killed, they're going to get blown up. Every time you go on an airplane, X-ray your shoes because you're going to get blown up. Terror alert orange, don't travel. So, people have a reaction and they want to scream. Horror movies have become the new date movie.

'Hostel' is that's how I feel about what's going on in Iraq. There's people that just want money and people are being sacrificed for it.

I love historical movies. I want to make a violent medieval epic.

As a kid, my idols were Sam Raimi and Peter Jackson, and I get into crazy races with myself. Raimi was 21 when he made movies, and when I didn't get 'Cabin Fever' made that fast I thought I'd failed.

There's something very scary about exposing yourself on camera, knowing that you're going to be put on thousands of screens around the world for everyone to judge, but there's also something very thrilling and exciting about it.

Twitter is wonderful. You can kill rumours instantly.

When you make a film for a million and a half dollars and it opens at 20 million, the next question out of everyone's mouth is, 'When's the next one, when's the next one, when's the next one?'

'Beatrice Cenci' was an amazing film. If it were released today it'd win Best Picture. It's so well done, it's so contemporary, and the filmmaking is so smart.

Possession and exorcism is something that's in every religion and every culture. It's a real primal fear: Is the body a vessel for our spirits? What happens if something else takes over it? Where does the spirit go?

When I was filming the death scene [in Inglourious Basterds], and I'm killing somebody, I had to work myself up.

Hopefully we'll get to a point where people realize movies don't cause violence. It just reflects the violence going on in the culture.

A comedy can actually get funnier and funnier. Even though you know the joke, you enjoy it so much, it's the facial expression, you laugh. The laugh doesn't wear off. It could be with you for thirty years.

I've always wanted to make a big apocalypse movie. I love 28 Weeks Later, I think it's great but Cell is totally different. It's about people's dependence on technology, the collapse of society and watching everything fall apart. That's something I've always wanted to do, which I believe it can!

I don't want people to feel: "Why am I watching this? It's sick and sadistic." I want people to watch and think it's scary but they can't wait to see what happens next. I also wanted to make a movie that was watchable.

I think in the late '80s and early '90s horror was dead.

I've always dreamed of having a year-round haunted house.

I'm not interested in going after a part. I think if someone wants me for a part and approaches me then I'll take it on a case-by-case basis and see what that part is.

Believe it or not, but I was a camp councilor for three years. I love kids.

What's important for me is staying healthy.

Imagine trying to relive your worst break-up, your worst fight, the most painful death of a loved one, and just really relive it step by step, and bring it up and apply it to the scene you're in.

I love movies that have that resonating scare, that really get under your skin and make you think.

I like movies that work on two levels - like The Simpsons, kids can watch it and adults can watch it. Teenagers can watch Hostel and if they want to see a blood and guts violent movie they're going to have a great time. They're going to scream and yell, it's a great date movie because they're going to squeeze their date and their date is probably going to be too scared to go home ... so you take them home and put on Dirty Dancing and everybody wins.

Las Vegas is a 24-hour city. It never stops.

Quentin Tarantino faced the same backlash when his films came out until eventually people felt they were actually much smarter.

If you are having fun on the set, you are not getting things done.

When I go see an R-rated horror movie, I want lots of violence.

The film, 'Aftershock,' for me is really about how the minor problems in life that we think are so major ultimately mean nothing when a tragedy happens, when a real problem happens.

I'd love to see us get to a point where you can make a movie and not worry about the limits of the violence. Then I think they'd get so violent that people would get bored of it.

You have to trust your instincts and hope the fans like what you do, but you don't gut check with the fans. If we're going to make a series, people are going to have a lot of opinions and if there's one overwhelming majority or one thing you continuously hear repeated from the fans, you certainly take that into account going into next season.

All the copycat movies were always PG-13 and people said: "Nobody wants violence."

I need to eliminate 'like' from my vocabulary. I begin sentences with, 'That's seriously like ... ' I hear myself talking in this Los Angeles high-school student kind of way, and I hate it.

I think that many people are ashamed when they feel afraid. There's this thing in our society that you're not allowed to feel scared. You have to be a man and put on a brave face, but we all have fears.

Even post-WWII, nobody talked about the Holocaust. It wasn't until the '50s that people started talking about it.

My phobias worsen as I get older. I'm scared of flying, driving. I'm terrified of sharks. I'm a germaphobe. But I try to face my fears; I do. Well, most of them.

In musical theater, if you have a song, it has to advance the plot. If you have a song in a musical and it does not advance the plot, it gets dropped.

I can think of endless horrible things to do to people!

I never put out a vanilla edition of a DVD.

I want to have an ending where people say: "That's the most shocking ending I've ever seen in a mainstream horror film."