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While we sit back on our tablets reading and snarking about upcoming films, many don’t understand just how difficult the filmmaking process can be. Doing it with the aid of millions of dollars, or on a posh stage is one thing-but taking talent deep into the Amazon is entirely new game. Of course, if you’re a terrible filmmaker, the viewer won’t even know you were deep in the jungle, thus you may as well have used a green screen. But we’re talking about Eli Roth here, director of horror classics including Cabin Fever and Hostel.
Riffing on the English title for Cannibal Holocaust II, Roth took his crew deep into the Amazon for The Green Inferno, which see student activists from comfy NYC travel to the remote forests of Peru to stage a protest but instead they discover a tribe of not-that-friendly cannibals. Roth, who used many stages for his Hostel films, this time took his cast, including Daryl Sabara, Kirby Bliss Blanton, Lorenza Izzo, Ariel Levy, Aaron Burns, Magda Apanowicz and Sky Ferreria, way out of their comfort zone. Dig this…
“We went in the Amazon deeper than anyone has ever shot a movie before,” Roth told Empire. “I went so far up the river, we went to a village where they had no electricity, no running water, and they never before had seen a movie or television. We had to explain to them conceptually what a movie was, and we brought a television and a generator and we showed them Cannibal Holocaust. They thought it was the funniest thing that they had ever seen, but we had to know whether they were down with it to let us in their village.”
The real-life terror comes in the Roth’s reflecting back to the Amazon set: “Thank God no one got killed, but there were tarantulas, there were spider bites, there were snakes. It was insane. Everybody had to get de-parasited after we got back, but the footage was incredible. I’m just editing the material right now.”
Though, speaking on Cannibal Holocaust similarities, Roth explains it’s one of his favorite movies, “but I really wanted to do something that was much more like a Werner Herzog movie. I wanted it to look like The New World, The Mission, or Aguirre: The Wrath of God.”
