The former director of the Hostel series wants you screaming when you walk out of the theater of this movie!
[toggler title=”TL:DR” ]Roth doesn’t care what you think of The Green Inferno. Roth calls the Hostel series ‘warm-ups’ to The Green Inferno. Roth visits villages along Peru’s Huallaga River to help make the movie look realistic. Roth shrugs off accusations of cultural appropriation and cinematic imperialism.[/toggler]
[dropcap size=small]E[/dropcap]li Roth has been known for his gory movies in the past and his latest movie The Green Inferno (based off the video game), things haven’t changed and he doesn’t care what you think of it.
This latest movie is about a group of U.S. liberal college students whose humanitarian trip to South America goes ‘south’ when their plane crashes in the Amazon rainforest. The students are captured by village natives and are tortured, murdered and eaten in a series of gut-wrenching scenes that seem to have divided critics and audiences, based on their preference of gore seen in a movie. Like most movies directed and/or produced by Roth, this movie is not one to enjoy or laugh over.
“You don’t make movies like the kind that I make to be universally loved,” Roth tells Rolling Stone. “You make them because you want to provoke and you want a reaction. The best thing that people can say is, ‘I couldn’t watch it’ or ‘ I watched it with my eyes closed.’ If I’ve really done my job as a director, nobody can actually watch your movie. They’re watching the inside of their hand. You don’t want people walking out of a movie; you want them running out of the theater screaming. When that happens, that’s like a standing ovation for me.”
Roth called the Hostel series ‘the warm-ups’ to his new movie The Green Inferno. The inspiration for Roth to make these came from looking at Italian cannibal films in the 70’s and early 80’s. The Green Inferno gets it’s name from Holocaust’s film-within-a-film and this will add to the latest group of cannibal films made, such as Cannibal Ferox, Mountain of the Cannibal God and Emanuelle and the Last Cannibals.
“I love those films because they really went into the Amazon and filmed with real natives,” Roth says. “There’s no CGI or special effects; they’re really doing it. I think this type of dangerous filmmaking is lost. So many movies are made in a computer and you get masterpieces like Gravity and Avatar, but those are far and few between. Most have become very safe and boring. I wanted to make a movie where the audience members go, ‘The people that made this movie were completely insane. How the hell did you do this?'”
To make the movie look real, Roth and his team visited villages along Peru’s Huallaga River, looking for natives that have been disconnected from western civilization. Roth eventually met the Callanayacu Tribe on the Pongo de Aguirre, which happens to be the same area that Werner Herzog filmed Aguirre, Wrath of God in 1972. “We went 20 minutes past that just so we can claim we went farther than him,” Roth says, laughing. “I had to find a village that looked like it was untouched by modern man, but also one where you could bring a film crew.”
There are many reviews that have accused Roth of cultural appropriation and cinematic imperialism, with Roth’s attempt at real-life horror. But Roth, as expected, shrugged off all the accusations.
“They’re farmers, so they mostly spend all their day in the field,” Roth says. “The idea that they could make 10 times the amount of money they’d make in a day by pretending to be someone else, they thought it was hilarious. They’re like, ‘We can’t believe you actually get to do this.’ It was an education process, but they got it right away and loved it.”
I am personally not a fan of these types of movies and there are a lot of people that aren’t. but Roth does bring up the point that no special effects and CGI is needed to make these movies, which can make it appealing for those to watch that are not fans of CGI and special effects of movies. Above is the preview for The Green Inferno. Watch the preview with caution! It is not for the weak-stomached!
The Green Inferno is now out in theaters everywhere!
