Eli Roth talks The Green Inferno

2012/10/25 18:03:17 +00:00 | Jonathan James

Staying on the topic of cannibals, Eli Roth is getting ready to shoot his first feature in over five years. The movie is titled The Green Inferno and Roth recently spoke about getting ready to film in the Amazon:

Via Movieline: Eli Roth is going off the grid. For the cannibal pic The Green Inferno, Roth tells Movieline he's taking a small crew to a remote village up the Amazon River that has "no electricity, no running water, nothing." Producers recruited many of the 200 native villagers to play extras in the horror film by screening the cult film Cannibal Holocaust. It was the first movie they'd seen in their lives, Roth remarked. "They thought it was a comedy!"

For The Green Inferno, the tale of "naive do-gooders" who run into cannibals when their plane crashes in the jungle (co-written by Roth with Aftershock scribe Guillermo Amoedo), Roth is taking a page out of the Werner Herzog playbook by venturing deep into the Amazon for what he excitedly refers to as "as adventure." "The location that we found is truly spectacular," he said. "It’s so far up the Amazon, no one has ever shot there. The last person anywhere near there was Werner Herzog for Aguirre, the Wrath of God."

The village is so remote, in fact, that Roth says locals had never seen a film before. "We said, ‘Can we shoot here?’ and talked to them, and our producers said ‘We have to explain to them what a movie is. They’ve never seen a television,'" Roth recalled. "So we brought a generator and set up a television. I thought they were going to show them E.T. or The Wizard of Oz, but they showed them Cannibal Holocaust to see how much they could handle." 1980's Cannibal Holocaust saw director Ruggero Deodato brought up on obscenity and murder charges when authorities at the time believed the graphic human violence depicted onscreen was real. How did Roth's new acquaintances react? "The villagers thought it was the funniest thing they’d ever seen." 

Aside from The Green Inferno, Roth is also involved with Aftershock, Ti West's The Sacrament, a sequel to The Last Exorcism, the Goretorium haunted attraction in Las Vegas, and the Netflix series Hemlock Grove, so expect plenty of Eli Roth-related news in 2013.

Source: Movieline