The Hostel and Cabin Fever director, Eli Roth, has been away from the camera for a little while. Roth, who has a starring role in Quentin Tarantino’s forthcoming dyslexic WWII flick Inglourious Basterds alongside Brad Pitt, stopped into MTV to talk about future projects, including a ‘huge budget’ science fiction epic and a feature length version of his Thanksgiving trailer from QT’s previous outing, Grindhouse.
“I’m almost done with my new script,” Roth said. “I was actually almost done with it before ‘Basterds’, but I had to put it down, and that was actually a good thing I took time away from it, but I’m going to finish that up and start shooting this fall.”
Roth remained tight-lipped about the details of main projects, but gave a few teasers: “I don’t want to give away the title yet, because I have to make sure I own it 100%, but it’s going to be something that is really fun with lots of mass destruction. I wanted to do something along the lines of ‘Transformers’ or ‘Cloverfield’ that was a little more science fiction-based, and with lots of chaos and mass destruction.”
“I don’t want to say what [the monster is] yet,” Roth continued. “Once it gets set up, I will let everyone know. It is not aliens or robots or a virus – it’s a little more grounded. But when people hear it they are going to be like ‘That is going to be insane!'”
Wow, if Roth could combine the visceral carnage of his Hostel movies with the spectacle of Transformers then we could be onto a winner here.
Roth then went on to talk about his Thanksgiving side project – first seen as one of the hilarious fake trailers sandwiched between the two sides of 2007’s Grindhouse. “The plan is this: I want to do a huge budget movie, but tack on three weeks to the end of it and shoot ‘Thanksgiving’,” Roth revealed. “I want to do an $80 million dollar movie, and then schedule three weeks at the end to quickly shoot a $5 million dollar movie.”
Describing his vision of Thanksgiving as “the sickest, bloodiest, most violent slasher movie,” Roth boldly claimed: “I want to make the highest body count slasher film I can.”