Takashi Miike to appear in HOSTEL + other Eli Roth news

Eli Roth is gearing up to start photography on HOSTEL and aintitcool.com is reporting that an interesting cameo is in the works. Roth is working to get cult-filmmaker Takashi Miike to make an appearance. This would be cool to say the least. Miike’s cameo in LAST LIFE IN THE UNIVERSE only whetted my appetite. 

In other HOSTEL news, here is an excerpt from an e-mail sent out to movie webmasters where Roth talks about how he envisions the film:

I realized last fall that as much as I am thrilled to be doing a horror movie at Warner Bros. (BAD SEED) and a comedy at Universal (SCAVENGER HUNT), and a project with Richard Kelly, THE BOX), the scripts for any of these films would not be ready to shoot until the spring of 2005. I have a very high standard for what I consider “ready to shoot,” and writing a good script takes time. A lot of time, as well as a lot of care, and I am extremely lucky to have such great writers as Richard
Kelly and Brian Nelson (who wrote HARD CANDY, which you will all soon know) working on my next films. So please know that these projects are definitely happening, though I’m not quite sure in what order. Believe me, as soon as I know, I’ll let you know, but for now they are moving forward in active development.

The last thing I want is to be the guy who made one film, so I have been using the last year more as setup for the next two or three years of my life. I have had numerous opportunities to direct pictures that I have turned down because I just felt the scripts weren’t that good. So I buckled down, shut off my phone, and wrote the sickest, most violent, disturbing film I could. I am thankfully not at the point where I have to take a paycheck yet, and truthfully, projects like BAYWATCH allow me to go and do a wild ultra violent independent horror film like HOSTEL. I have had the incredible fortune of having great directors give me incredible advice, and quite truthfully, the one who summed it up best was Guillermo Del Toro. I asked him if there was one project I should do next - a studio movie where I get a real budget to show what I can do with the camera and with sets, or a lower budget balls out independent movie where I have less resources but can push the violence much further? He just said, quite simply, “Whatever gives you the biggest boner, man.” So let me tell you that HOSTEL is a wet dream come true. It’s sick. I mean really sick. It’s based on events I have been researching, which I wrote in with my own personal experiences of some horrific things I have witnessed. And this film gives me such a boner I wake up every morning with a jizz-stained hole burned in my sheets. Okay, is that visual graphic enough for you?

All I can say for now is that I am 2 weeks away from principal photography, and I wasn’t going to say a word until the cameras were rolling, because I’m terribly superstitious and worry that an earthquake will hit or something. HOSTEL is going to be very, very different from CABIN FEVER in tone. This is not a horror comedy. This is a violent, scary film that will be much closer in tone to a film like Miike’s AUDITION or Hooper’s TEXAS CHAINSAW MASSACRE. I am producing the film with Mike Fleiss (who produced the CHAINSAW remake with Michael Bay) and his partner Chris Briggs, and my Raw Nerve partners Scott Spiegel and Boaz Yakin will Executive Produce. I am extremely lucky that Screen Gems came in and picked the film up for distribution already, so I can make it independently and still have a worldwide theatrical release.