The Aughts Eli Roth has had quite a decade. From young director struggling to get his first feature in the can to hotshot horrormeister pushing to the edges of the genre to the bat-brandishing Bear Jew in Quentin Tarantino's epic Nazi revenge fantasy Inglourious Basterds, Roth has come a long way in a town that at times can be about as gentle as that dungeon in Hostel. As we head into awards season — and what has already been a triumphant outing for the much-nominated Basterds — Mediaite asked Eli to reflect on the last decade and the sweat, tears and, yes, blood it took to get here. Luckily for us, he was as forthcoming with his story as the Bear Jew is with his bat — and shared all the gory details. ELI ROTH: My Decade (more...)

my decade Excerpt from the forthcoming book "All the Gory Details" by Eli Roth.  Not for reprint without author's permission. Republishing excerpts on websites is fine. Printable version here. The nineties, while fun and wild at times, were spent in film school, then working on various film sets from 5:30 in the morning until 11:00 at night getting coffee or standing out in the freezing cold asking drug addicts in Tompkins Square Park to kindly keep their voice down.  In short, they sucked, by 1999 I had moved to Los Angeles and finally got my first directing break, co-writing, directing, producing and voicing a series of animated shorts with my friend Noah Belson called "Chowdaheads."  The shorts were to air on WCW Wrestling's #1 rated show "Monday Nitro," but the weekend before they were scheduled to air the CEO got fired, and the shorts were put on hold.  I had put every waking minute of my life into these shorts, and now they were just sitting on a shelf because of a regime change.  I was told to "sit tight" and "hang in there," but by the end of 1999 it was clear nothing was going to happen with them.  It was time to move on. (more...)

I have never seen an Eli Roth movie. It's not by accident — even just knowing that he'd pioneered the particularly gruesome horror sub-genre of "torture porn" would have been enough to keep me away, even if I hadn't seen a Hostel 2 poster. (Ew. What is that?) (more...)