Interview: Eli Rothactor, Inglourious Basterds
[by Norman Wilner]
The last time I saw Eli Roth, he was a lot narrower. The Hostel director and I were on a cult-movies panel back at the 2005 Toronto Film Festival. He was downright skinny then, an energetic beanpole.
Not any more. Last year, Roth bulked up considerably to play one of the Nazi-bashing Jewish-American soldiers recruited to strike terror in the heart of the Axis in his buddy Quentin Tarantino’s WWII epic, Inglourious Basterds.
Roth’s lost some of the muscle – he says he’s about 186 pounds, down from a shooting weight of 200 – but he’s still pretty big and showing it off in a tight white T-shirt and khakis.
“I like being this weight,” he says. “I want to maintain it. I mean, to be what I was at in the beating scene, I had to eat continually, non-stop. It was a bit much. But this feels comfortable. I wanna be just beefy enough.”
Let’s back up a little and discuss “the beating scene.” Inglourious Basterds features Roth as Sgt. Donny Donowitz, a character nicknamed “the Bear Jew” for his size, his strength and his passion for crushing Nazi skulls with a baseball bat. And this being a Tarantino picture, the film gives him a good long whack at that last thing.
“That’s what’s great about it,” Roth says. “When you’re killing Nazis, people don’t feel bad.”
Roth tells me that Basterds springs from Tarantino’s fascination with the World War II movies the director watched as a kid, which never really examined the ethnic-cleansing aspect of the war or engaged with the idea of Jewish vengeance.
“I remember he came to my Passover Seder,” Roth says. “He’d been sort of using me to gut-check things, almost like a Jewish technical adviser: ‘How would Jewish people feel about this? Would you ever forgive the Nazis?’ And I was like, ‘No, they tried to exterminate us and they were very successful at it. We would kill every single one of them.’
“If I saw a Nazi today, I’d wanna kill him,” he says. “I really feel that way, as lots of Jews do. People are still really pissed. They’re furious. It’s not only the deaths; it’s that so many people got away with it. Part of the anger of the Jews is that these Nazis just dissolved back into society and were never punished for what they did.”
Roth didn’t expect to land such a prominent part in the movie. He didn’t expect to be in it at all, he says, until Tarantino offered him the part a few days before pre-production began in Berlin.
“I really threw myself into the role,” Roth says. “I said, ‘If I’m gonna be onscreen with Brad Pitt, I have to bring my A-game.’ I knew that what would make the role great was the look in this guy’s eyes. He couldn’t just be a big, strong, hulking guy. You had to look in his face and instantly see that pain, that anger, that frustration, that anguish – that murderous rage and joyous glee. He loves it. Once he gets it out, it’s orgasmic. It’s the most satisfying thing in the world to him.
“But it’s not that he’s a sadist. He knows he’s a strong guy, and he’s fighting on behalf of those little old ladies in the neighbourhood who are losing their relatives. I just thought of my grandparents during that time, how their cousins and fathers and sisters over in Europe just disappeared and were exterminated, and what that must have been like.”
It’s a different kind of cinematic release for Roth, who made his name with gross-out crowd-pleasers like Cabin Fever and the Hostel films. And the audience response has been different, too.
“Let me put it this way,” he says. “I’m used to coming out of a screening of a film I’m involved in and having 19-year-old goth girls come up to me and grab me and go, ‘Oh my god, that was amazing.’ But there were two screenings at the SAG theatre, and the older Jewish women were going crazy. I mean, like, crazy. Valerie Harper came up to me and goes, ‘That was the greatest!’
“I was like, ‘Wow, Rhoda digs the Bear Jew. This is really cool!'"
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Eli Raphael Roth (born April 18, 1972) is an American film director, producer, writer and actor. He is part of the group of filmmakers dubbed the Splat Pack, because of their association and their focus on the horror genre. Roth is known for making extremely violent, low-budget horror box office hits.
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