THN was recently lucky enough to sit down and chat with one of the modern masters of horror, Eli Roth (we think he did that cabin film about a cabin at one point or another). With THE LAST EXORCISM PART II, Roth’s latest movie, due out in cinemas later this month, now seemed the perfect time to squeeze him for information. That’s right, we didn’t just talk about cuddly bunnies and rainbows for the whole interview.
So where does this sequel find Nell? Where do things go after the events of the first film?
We were having trouble, where do we go with the story? And we loved the idea of following Nell, and what would happen if she lives in a world where the first film exists but it exists as a viral video. And she has absolutely no memory of what happened to her. She’s completely clueless to the fact that it’s even online, she doesn’t really know what the Internet is. And she’s now, because she has no family, she’s told someone has perpetrated a fraud on her, and her whole family was killed, and that’s it. And so she’s in this home for troubled girls, and slowly she’s trying to re-integrate and say none of this really happened and then the girls find the video online and things start to happen, and it’s about her slowly coming to terms with what’s happening to her.
Was it a conscious choice to move away from found footage?
Yeah, I mean the first one, as much as it is found footage, it has been edited and scored and put together, so somebody put it together, and what was their agenda? And that was the thought about who put this film together and why does it exist? So the only way we could really justify doing that again was “What if another documentary crew went back to Iverwood to find out what happened?” and none of us wanted to see a film about that. We love Ashley Bell, we love that character, and I was fascinated by the idea of what if you were possessed, where there was something inside you, and you embraced it? What if that was the only thing you realised you could trust? That all your faith and everything else had turned its back on you and suddenly if you embrace this thing then what did that lead to? And Ashley was the actress that could really pull that off. So that was where we went with the story.
How much of this came from Ed [Gass-Donnelly, director and co-writer]?
A lot of it came from Ed. We brought Ed and we told him where we wanted to go with the story with Damien Chazelle our writer and Ed loved it. He loved the idea of Ashley being this innocent girl that’s had this thing happen to her and then slowly being haunted and everything she tries during life keeps unravelling in these very creepy ways. And Daniel Stamm [director of the first film] loves Lars von Trier, like THE IDIOTS is like it for him, and Ed loves Roman Polanski, and he was like “This should be like ROSEMARY’S BABY or THE SHINING”, like classical photography, slow moving, slow build, tense, atmospheric but very cinematic. He comes from a theatre background, he’s very performance based. And I loved his film SMALL TOWN MURDER SONGS, I loved the way it was shot, I thought it was really really well done, for a very low budget, and he knows how to make the scene tense and interesting and scary. And I really wanted to feel like his film, I wanted him to come in and feel welcome to put his creative stamp on the movie and his ideas and he threw in all sorts of things. And levitating was one of them. I was like, “Ah, can’t levitate, THE EXORCIST…” and he said “No no no, I know how it’s going to work in the story, I know how to integrate it, I know how to do it, I know how this moment’s really going to feel it,” and he was right. It was terrific.
Were you ever tempted to direct either of the two LAST EXORCISM films? How do you decide which ones to direct?
Well, generally, the ones I’m going to direct are the ones that I have written or come up myself. AFTERSHOCK (upcoming survival horror produced by and starring Roth) was a specific project where we wrote it to cross Nicolas (Lopez, director and co-writer) over to an American audience. But I love producing when it’s a story I really like, and I can help bring another filmmaker out into the world and help them get their break. I’ll never forget what Quentin did for me, coming on as ‘Quentin Tarantino presents…’ for HOSTEL and how that widened my audience beyond the CABIN FEVER scope. So there are movies that I want to see and movies that I want to make, so the movies I want to see I’ll produce and the movies I want to make are the ones I will write myself.
THE LAST EXORCISM PART II is set in New Orleans. Did you shoot there and are you commenting on anything there?
Well, obviously that question’s more for Ed and you’d have to ask him that, but we loved New Orleans as a backdrop. We love the ghost of what that city has, what it is, what it was. And setting it in the Mardi Gras, which has this strange pallor of sadness over it since Katrina. It’s still there and it still goes on, but somehow this idea of going to New Orleans for decadence isn’t the same as it was, you can’t go there and not think about that or feel it. Or feel that these poor people are still devastated by it. So it’s an interesting place and we loved shooting there and the people are wonderful and the crews are great, so it was a pleasure to go back. But you know it’s really, the first one was really that religion vs. science vs. faith, and this is still very much a film about faith, and what do you embrace, and what do you do when that faith betrays you.
A big thanks to Eli for chatting to us. THE LAST EXORCISM PART II is out in cinemas on the 7th June.
