EDINBURGH INTERNATIONAL FILM FESTIVAL
WATCH
ELI ROTH'S
GRUESOME CANNIBAL
HORROR FLICK
Henry Northmore talks to director Eli Roth about the extreme lengths he went to in making The Green Inferno
l t ti
i hi Eli Roth revels in his reputation as the bad Eli R th th b d boy of horror cinema. He shocked movie fans with the l esh eating virus of Cabin Fever and for many epitomised the gory excesses of the mid-00s with the ultra- violent Hostel. ‘As a kid I loved sitting round the campi re in the dark listening to scary stories, that was the most fun for me. Going back to Grimm’s fairytales with kids being baked in ovens or anything that had a monster. It’s just how I was born.’
This year’s EIFF will be screening The Green Inferno as part of its Wicked and Wild strand. It’s an affectionate tribute to the Italian cannibal movies of the 80s (most of which were banned in the UK as Video Nasties), in particular Ruggero Deodato’s infamous Cannibal Holocaust. The shoot itself was almost as gruelling
as the carnage on screen. ‘I prefer shooting everything practically. We went deeper into the Amazon than anyone had ever shot before,’ explains Roth, ‘to a village with no electricity, no running water, a village so far off the grid they didn’t know what a movie was.’
‘It was a i ve hour drive, then a two hour
boat ride either way,’ adds actress Lorenza Izzo – she plays a student activist who heads to Peru to protect the rainforest and the indigenous tribes but inadvertently i nds herself on the menu. ‘The village was amazing but you were covered in insects and half of them were poisonous.’ The location grounds the grisly action in reality while the villagers were recruited as extras. ‘When we were shooting with these people you can’t fake it,’ says Roth, ‘you couldn’t create that kind of authenticity. It’s like a Werner Herzog movie on steroids.’ ■ The Green Inferno screens at Filmhouse on Fri 20 Jun & Cineworld, Sun 22 Jun, as part of Edinburgh International Film Festival.
14 THE LIST 12 Jun–10 Jul 2014
FIND OUT WHAT DONALD TRUMP DID NEXT
With his recent purchase of Turnberry, Donald Trump remains in the news. Eddie Harrison speaks to Anthony Baxter, director of You’ve Been Trumped, about his decision to make a follow-up doc
G eorge Orwell said ‘journalism is printing what someone else does not want printed – everything else is public relations’. The prominence of Anthony Baxter’s 2011 documentary You’ve Been Trumped was largely due to saying something that billionaire Donald Trump did not want said: that his golf courses were environmentally unsound, and that his plans conl icted with the interests of local communities. The depiction of the negative tactics used by Trump to suppress Baxter’s investigation made it a cause célèbre and has led directly to his follow-up i lm, A Dangerous Game.
‘In a way, I felt I had to continue because I still had a story I wanted to tell,’ says Baxter.
‘Trump was continuing his development 40 miles up the road from where I live in Montrose, and at each screening of You’ve Been Trumped, whether in Birmingham, Alabama, or in the Hamptons, more and more people came and told me that they had similar feelings and experiences. It was a local story with universal appeal.’
In A Dangerous Game, Baxter expands his investigation of
environmental and geo-political concerns, looking into similar situations in places like Dubrovnik in Croatia, where plans for exclusive golf resorts are stirring up local opposition. And this time, he’s had a little more i nancial assistance with the i lm’s creation. ‘We had some support from Creative Scotland with the
development, and the BBC with the pre-production, although the i lm itself is self-funded and we’re now actively seeking help via crowdfunding site Kickstarter to get the i lm out there,’ says Baxter. ‘It was deeply annoying that with You’ve Been Trumped, I went to the British Film Institute for funding and they told me that “no one in England is interested”, which I found astonishing. There’s also plenty of TV executives who think they know what people want to see, and it’s stil ing i lmmakers. It was a big break for my i lm to get screened on BBC2, which certainly brought it to a wider audience. It’s great that it happened on this occasion, but makes you wonder why it doesn’t happen more often.’ You’ve Been Trumped has been shown widely across the world, and A Dangerous
Game, fresh from the Hot Docs festival in Toronto and at Shefi eld Doc / Fest, screens in Edinburgh before opening in the UK in September. Baxter’s i lm is likely to cause yet more controversy and debate, but in an age of PR spin, can journalists and i lmmakers actually make a difference? ‘When I i rst trained as a journalist, newspapers would send us to council
meetings to investigate what was happening; that simply doesn’t happen anymore. When I worked in news at Radio Teeside, we had 12 journalists; now there’s maybe two,’ says Baxter. ‘People in a television newsroom don’t have time to properly investigate stories, and people like Rob Edwards (environment editor of the Sunday Herald) are part of a dwindling group who still get involved in unearthing stories. Film and television may well be where that investigative tradition continues, and I sincerely hope it does.’ A Dangerous Game screens at Cineworld, Tue 24 & Sat 28 Jun, as part of Edinburgh International Film Festival.