Jewish Avenger | Eli Roth in Inglourious Basterds.
Perhaps the most depraved scene I’ve ever seen in a mainstream multiplex is the death of Heather Matarazzo in Hostel: Part II: her character is stripped naked, suspended from her feet, slit open, then weeps in agony as her blood spills down upon her orgasmic female tormentor.
And now I’m on the phone with the man who conceived that scene: 37-year-old writer, director, and occasional actor Eli Roth. There’s a sizable anti-Roth contingent in the critical community: some blame the success of his Hostel franchise for inspiring a spate of so-called “torture porn” movies; others dislike him for what they imagine to be his baneful influence upon his friend Quentin Tarantino, encouraging him to make empty retreads of exploitation movies instead of the grown-up masterpieces he “should” be making.
Roth, for his part, revels in his bad-boy status — he once posed for a two-page photo sporting a 24-inch “devil dick” for a book about marketing horror movies. And during the Hostel controversy, he was only too happy to do interviews, skilfully parrying criticisms of the film and making the case for it as a subtle piece of social satire.
And he’s eager to defend Inglourious Basterds, in which he has a memorable supporting role as Sgt. Donnie Donowitz, a.k.a. “The Bear Jew,” a Jewish G.I. who loves nothing more than bashing in German soldiers’ heads with his trusty baseball bat. I was able to speak briefly with Roth last week as Basterds prepared to roll out across North America.
SEE Magazine: I’ll ask you the same question that we used at the start of our review: is Inglourious Basterds Quentin Tarantino’s masterpiece?
Eli Roth: That’s always subjective. You really raise people’s expectations when you say it’s his masterpiece. But I believe it is. I think Quentin could never have made this movie without making his other films. To me, it takes all the elements of his previous movies and combines them into one: the tension of Reservoir Dogs, the style and humour of Pulp Fiction, the characters of Jackie Brown, the action of Kill Bill, the adrenaline of Death Proof — he rolls it all into one movie, and I think he’s achieved a new level of writing with this movie. He’s writing like Arthur Miller, like a great Broadway playwright: I told him that students are going to be performing these scenes in acting classes for the next 50 years.
SEE: Was this part written for you? How did you get involved in front of the camera?
ER: The part was not written for me. Quentin had been writing it for years, and he had the whole character figured out before he met me. But as he got closer to shooting it, in 2008, I almost became his Jewish technical adviser — he’d call me and present these hypothetical questions, like “Could you ever give absolution to a Nazi?” And I’d have to tell him, “No — absolution’s a Christian concept. We collect interest. We get more angry about stuff. These people tried to exterminate us — I’d want to wipe every one of them off the planet!” I told him that if he really wanted to understand how Jews think about these things, he should come to my family’s Passover seder. And he came. He listened to us talk about how Jews were slaves in Egypt and how Moses freed the slaves and we told the story of the 10 plagues, which is always related to the Holocaust and then to the world today. And my father read letters from Holocaust survivors and we had a really intense discussion. I think Quentin already had an instinct about what the ending of the film had to be, but I think that experience helped confirm what he was feeling. So anyway, eventually he told me, “You know, I’ve been hearing your voice as I’ve been writing The Bear Jew.” And the night before he left for Germany, he told me I had the part.
SEE: It’s interesting to hear you talk about that seder and the discussions of the Holocaust, because this is a film that really doesn’t seem to care one bit about historical accuracy or moral responsibility or the grim realities of war.
ER: Oh, I’d disagree with that. This isn’t history, but I think it is historic. It’s a work of art, and it’s meant to provoke thought and discussion. To anyone who gets upset about it, I’d say, “Why don’t you get upset about the fact that all Nazi officers in most World War II movies are trained Shakespearean actors who speak English in the concentration camps, but with a slight German accent? How historically accurate is that?” I think with Quentin, he frees you up to draw your own connections with the real world. I mean, post-9/11, I had fantasies of going back in time, taking one of those planes and crashing it and sacrificing myself like those suicide terrorists. In fictionalizing it, I think Quentin is talking to something very real, which is this human desire to go back in time and save thousands and stop evil. How many World War II movies have we seen end the same way? We all know how they’re going to end. But this one ends differently. That’s something all interesting art should do.
SEE: You also made Nation’s Pride, the Nazi film-within-the-film that features prominently in the climax. Did you watch a lot of old German propaganda films to make sure yours had the
right look?
ER: Oh yeah. I knew I had a big task ahead of me. I mean, Hitler attends the première of this film, so not only did I have to impress Quentin with it — I had to impress Hitler! But it was great that Quentin had a Jewish director do it, because he knew that I wouldn’t pull any punches. I had to show how self-aggrandizing the Nazis were, how they revelled in their own glory. The movie is about the power of cinema — in World War II, that power was used for evil, but here it’s used to save the world.
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