'Hostel: Part II' set visit

Chris Tilly catches up with Eli Roth on location in Prague.

Jun  8 2007

On October 30 2006 I got a severe case of déjà vu. Little over a year before I'd travelled to a film studio on the outskirts of Prague to watch Eli Roth mentally and physically torture good-looking young Americans all in the name of art. And here I was making almost exactly the same trip to Eastern Europe to watch almost exactly the same morbidly violent scene. However, while on the surface things seemed the same, one only had to dig a little deeper to see how quickly and dramatically life have moved on for horror's hottest young director.

Walking on set was immediately reminiscent of my previous visit however – blood-stained footprints guided me to the director's chair that Eli has set up for me next to his monitor, and looking through the day's prop and prosthetics list everything seemed to be in order – 'bolt cutters, chains (multiple), trolley of death, body parts (various), crotch blood bag' – this certainly ain't no Disney film. But this time around the set is bigger, the stars more recognisable and the scope of the project has opened up to make it a truly international endeavour. I'd go into greater detail regarding what I was looking at but unfortunately today (31 of a 40-day shoot) Eli just happens to be shooting the film's finale – the literal and metaphorical money shot in 'Hostel: Part II' – so I'll try to avoid spoilers as best I can.

Instead, let's go back to the beginning. The decision to make 'Hostel: Part II' was a tough one for the then 33-year-old filmmaker – the phenomenal success of the original, which revolved around three young backpackers being lured to a Slovakian hostel where they were kidnapped and then sliced and diced by rich, perverted businessmen, led to a slew of offers from Hollywood, but Roth decided to shun the opportunity to tackle a big-budget project in favour of revisiting the 'Hostel' universe. The world had changed in the intervening year, and Eli felt there was more to say. ''Hostel' was very much a reaction to imagery from Iraq and people's fear of torture' he explains during a break so that an empty crotch blood bag could be replaced by a full one. 'But now I think the fear is your neighbour. And what people saw with Hurricane Katrina was that in America, under the right circumstances, when there's no law and no rules and total anarchy, people start killing and raping. They go back to this kind of feral state. So I started writing ideas for it while I was doing international press. I watched the movie with audiences all over the world to see what people responded to and everyone loves that scene with Rick Hoffman as the American businessman so that got me thinking.'

The result is that there two more American businessmen in the sequel, played by 'Desperate Housewives' stars Roger Bart and Richard Burgi. Their presence gives Eli the opportunity to delve deeper into the machinations of the shady 'Elite Hunting' agency and gives the audience the opportunity to see the world from the torturer's point of view rather than the victim's. I caught up with Bart – so memorable as unhinged pharmacist George in 'Housewives' – over lunch and he elaborated on this change in perspective. 'I play Stuart, who with a buddy of his decides to do something a bit more exciting than they've done before and explore the darker side of the world. The interesting yet not so interesting thing about this character is his normalcy. I'm really just a businessman – somebody who'd be sitting two bar stools over at TGI Fridays, and I think that's what Eli's intending. These people aren't like Charles Manson with the big eyes and the crazy talk – they are people that are all around us.

That concept is certainly taken to extremes today. Two of the film's main protagonists meet in a torture cell and blood is most certainly spilled. What starts out as a foul-mouthed negotiation turns into an all-out argument that explodes in violence of the most shocking sort – Roth doesn't just push the envelope with this scene, he boots it into another postcode. Absurd, funny and horrific all at once, it involves a pair of scissors, an attack dog and a spot-on human prosthetic, the combination of which serves to make me feel quite nauseous.

'I'm not a huge fan of the horror genre' Bart later tells me. 'But having seen the passion of the creative team here – from Eli to the producers to the special effects guys – everyone is so enthusiastic and the clarity of the vision they want to express is so contagious that I've become much more appreciative of the genre and the fun that can be had working on it.'

And Bart is certainly right on that front – while the action is vomit-inducing, the set is one of the happiest I've visited, and Eli puts that down to his returning to Prague to shoot the sequel. ''Hostel' was the most fun of my life and the whole crew was like a family. Everyone worked well together and we all liked hanging around with each other, on set and off it. I wanted it to look and feel like the original. I wanted similar locations – I wanted to go back to the town and back to the factory – it was very important that it felt like the same world.

'When you watch 'Saw II' and they go back to that bathroom, everyone cheers, it's such a great reveal. I knew we couldn't do that particular twist, but it's great when you go to a place you really liked in a movie and get to see more of it – it's like bonus stuff. I think if people want to see 'Hostel II' they want to check into the hostel that the guys checked into.'

But this time around, rather than obnoxious teenage boys checking in (then gruesomely checking out), the victim's are intelligent, likeable young girls. Played by Heather Matarazzo ('Welcome to the Dollhouse'), Bijou Phillips ('Bully') and Lauren German ('The Texas Chainsaw Massacre' remake), they are lured to Slovakia by the promise of hot springs rather than hot sex, so the tone is very different from the outset. 'With the first one, the whole point is that the trip takes such a horrible, unexpected turn' Eli continues. 'The first 30 minutes it's all fun, sort of like a sex comedy, and then the rug is pulled out from under you. With this one I didn't want to do that again, so it will start off scary and creepy and stay like that all the way through. Even while these girls are having fun, because we know what's going on, we're not having fun with them. We're going to feel scared for them. I really just wanted to make a film that was tonally consistent in a way that my first two films weren't, so now the fun is to toy with the audience and play on who's in on it and who isn't. They're going to assume that everyone they meet is a bad guy, so it's fun to play with that.'

The fact that the cast is oestrogen-heavy certainly changes the atmosphere on set – the crew is certainly less crude and boisterous than last time around, and producer Chris Briggs says that in turn has changed his role somewhat. 'I don't want to fall back on gender stereotypes, but as a producer I was never really made aware of any issue or problem about hair and make-up, but on this movie, if you added up all the time, I would say I've spent between 48 and 72 hours in conversations about hair.'

Mercifully I miss out on the hair-based chit-chat. Instead, my day does involve much shouting and swearing on camera, making it hard to get an idea of how well Eli has captured female banter in his script. He assures me however, that he worked long and hard on getting the dialogue just right.

'I'm not exactly known for strong female characters, although people loved Natalya and Barbara in 'Hostel'. I didn't want to just write girls that are evil though. I wanted to show that I could write girls the same way I write guys. And I wanted these girls to be the best characters I've ever written. I wanted them to be real and three dimensional and talk like real girls talk. In the first draft everything sounded like a guy but with a girl's name. It was all like 'Dude, what the fuck's that? Come on!' It was basically the 'Hostel' guys all over again, so I had to scrap all the dialogue. I talked to Quentin [Tarantino] about it, as he's the master of female dialogue. He's tuned into their psychology and he writes girl dialogue kind of based on friends of his, so I just started trying to listen and think and approach things differently – from a female perspective. Once I got over the fear of writing female characters it actually came quite easily and I was really happy with it.'

His cast would appear to agree. Both Phillips and German wax lyrical about his words on set, while when I got the chance to sit down with Heather Materazzo she had nothing but nice things to say about the way her character was written. 'I play Lorna, a girl who lives in a bubble. She's very manic and everything's very pretty and fabulous. She has moments throughout the film where you see her break out of that manic-ness and you get to see a glimpse of a girl who is in an extreme amount of pain. Who is extremely sad. Eli wrote a very strong character, but was smart enough to write it so I could grow and give her layers and see where I could take her.'

'I think he's tapped into a woman's strength and her vulnerability, but I think that's also in part down to him trusting me and Lauren and Bij – he's not so stuck with the words on the page and if something is not working there's room for improvement. It was very much a collaborative effort.'

Wait a minute – Eli Roth collaborating with girls to make what sounds disconcertingly like a chick flick? As torrents of blood spew forth and severed limbs are replaced thoughout out the day, I find that hard to believe, and happily, when I put the question to Roth, he immediately puts my mind at rest. 'It's a girl's movie, but guys are going to love it too, because there's gore and sex. We're aiming to push it and have as much violence as 'Hostel', if not more. Only this time around it's from a female's perspective. But my main priority is that it's scary. Ultimately, it's not about doing more blood and guts, it's is this scary and do I care about these people and what happens to them next?' So by the time my day on set was done, that feeling of déjà vu had thankfully subsided. Eli Roth appears to be making a film that stays true to the spirit of the original, while at the same time expanding the scope, upping the ante and making a film that's grander, grosser, gorier and more importantly than all that, scary as hell.

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