The Aughts (and The Aught-Not- Haves)

I was clearly burned out from doing press.  I was not allowed to get angry – ever – and found myself becoming enraged over nonsense and odd times.  The journal entry above illustrates that.  I’d be polite, polite, polite, but then snap at the craziest thing, but never out loud, always to myself, in my head, in my journal.  I was just exhausted, and felt alienated from a lot of people who felt I was ignoring them.  But I was doing all the press myself, and it was my moment and I had to make the most of it, but soon they revealed who they really were.  A lot of people turned out to not really be my friends, just people who wanted my attention, and when they didn’t have it, they got vicious.

On April 19th, the day after my DVD came out, I sat down to finish “Hostel Part II.”  I didn’t want to deal with any relationship issues in my life, I just wanted to get back to work, lest I get paralyzed by the fear of not being able to ever repeat the success of “Hostel.”  I spent the next month writing, and by July I we were prepping, and scouting and then casting in August.  I used the same team from before, and it felt like I was making “Part 2” as opposed to another film since I had only done press between the two films.  This time the budget was a little more substantial, but still low, at $10 million.

I did, however, take a week out of my preproduction to fly to Texas to act in “Death Proof.”  It was difficult to abandon the production for a week, but I made it conditional at the beginning that somewhere in prep I was going to disappear to Texas for a week and would not be reachable, so we were able to work around my absence.  On “Death Proof” we shot nights at the Texas Chili Parlor, and we had a great time, but I was pretty exhausted through most of it.  The bar scene was taking longer than anyone thought, but because I was only there for 5 days they had to shoot my stuff out, and we picked up the pace and shot most of my lines in one or two takes.  Quentin was  happy I was there, we had a lot of fun, and I got to improv some lines making fun of Kurt Russell.  One take Kurt threw a bowl of nachos at me, pretending to be pissed, and I just yelled “I’m sorry, I’m sorry,  ‘The Thing”s my favorite movie, this is painful for me to make fun of you!”  It was a good time.  I’d return to my hotel room at 9:00 in the morning and have a skype call with Prague until about 11, then I’d sleep, and wake up at 6 PM to get ready to go to set.  I flew back to Prague, and two days later was due to start shooting.  I was already wiped out before photography on “Hostel Part II” began.

Journal Entry:  September 10^th, 2006.

Here I am the night before starting principal photography on my third film. Milan’s (*my D.P.*) looking at camera tests, costume tests, all that.  I’m looking over the scene.  He’s dreaming of camera moves.  I’m dreaming of moments, performance.  All the girls are great, I just hope they don’t have melt downs during shooting, although I’m sure at some point they will.  Day One does seem daunting.  So many days to shoot.  So many nights.  I enjoyed the hell out of the last one, and my mission tonight is to forget everything that’s happened in the past, block it all out, keep my eye on the film I’m making right now.

The shoot was very tough.  I can’t explain why, it was just hard.  Locations fell through, things went over budget so other things had to get cut, nothing worked easily.  We wrapped in late November, and somehow,I found the energy to shoot my ‘Grindhouse’ trailer ‘Thanksgiving’ in two days.  That turned out to be the most fun part of the whole shoot.  We were laughing so hard, it felt like we were screwing around in film school doing naughty things with the camera.  It was great to end the trip on that note, and got me hungry to shoot something new.  I was starting to get tired of filming scenes of people screaming in dungeons chained to chairs.  But I was happy with the footage, I felt like I’d made my best film to date. I had so much to do when I got back, both to get “Hostel Part II” finished and “Thanksgiving” cut, I was in the editing room seven days a week, cutting from 9:30 in the morning until about 1:30 in the morning.  I didn’t want to talk to anyone, I just wanted to edit.  Everyone was counting on me.  It had to work.  It had to.  I had caused all of this, I had to deliver.

Journal Entry: January 24th, 2007

At a certain point you stop getting phone calls and emails.  One month your voicemail’s full and you’re getting close to 200 e-mails a day.  Then suddenly, you wake up, and you realize that no one’s called you.  It’s not like it happens overnight, it’s a gradual change.  You gradually shut out all your friends until they stop contacting you.  They assume they’re bothering you, or they don’t find you as fun to be around.  You’re moody, irritable, you seem aloof, like your problems and pressures are so much bigger than theirs.    No matter what you do, you’re a dick.  Everything you do is magnified by a thousand.  If you get mad, you’re a tyrant.  If you share a story about shooting, you’re self-centered.  You can’t win. I’m exhausted yet now I need sleeping pills to shut off my brain.  Not much matters except getting the film done.

>>>NEXT: Pirates in the Torture Dungeon (Click here to print.)

This is an opinion piece. The views expressed in this article are those of just the author.