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Eli Roth Interview at AICN - Cell Discussed
Capone over at AICN talks to Roth about Hostel II and the upcoming film adaptation of Stephen King's - Cell.
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So, whatever happened to Roth's involvement? Shock poses that question to 1408 producer Lorenzo di Bonaventura who tells us, "Eli was attracted to it right away, but we couldn't set up his take anywhere." As it turns out, many were turned off by Roth's grue-filled approach, "so Eli fell out and it was a little while later that Dimension Films bought the rights to the short story. [Writer] Matt Greenberg came in and Scott [Alexander] and Larry [Karaszewski] came in with Mikael." And what was Roth's take, exactly? "It was too bloody to say out loud," Di Bonaventura laughs. "It was madness and an entirely different movie. He has such a love of the bloody parts of the genre I think it scared everybody."
Di Bonaventura is pleased now with the film's final approach which forgoes the gore. "Some of the most interesting aspects of the story - the mental disintegration as opposed to the physical degradation that's going on - that's something that Mikael and the writers could bring to the table."
Roth, coincidentally, is now working with writers Alexander and Karaszewski on an adaptation of Stephen King's "Cell."
"I love the idea that technology turns on us," Roth said in an interview while promoting his second Hostel movie. "I have always wanted to make an apocalypse movie, and I like that this isn't a straight zombie movie, that these are humans who are crazy, whose brains have been scrambled by cell phones. I read that a quarter of the U.S. bee population has died off, and they don't know what's killing the bees. Is it a virus? There are people who think it could be cell phones, that they're screwing up the bees' radar, and they can't get back to their hives." (In fact, the study suggesting this has been discredited, the Los Angeles Times reported over the weekend.)
Roth quoted physicist Albert Einstein as saying that the human race is four steps removed from the extinction of bees. "So I'm thinking it's already starting to happen, that all these cell phones in our culture and our world are going to start affecting us and the planet in ways we cannot even imagine," Roth said.
Bees or not, Roth added, "What really made me want to do Cell was Hurricane Katrina. You just saw, in a matter of hours, the total breakdown and complete destruction of society. People almost reverted to some primal, animal state. You looked on TV, and there were bodies floating down the street and people shooting at each other, and nobody showed up. The police quit and the Army didn't show up for five days."
Roth said that he has conferred with King, who told the filmmaker to make Cell his own. "I had heard he was pissed at Stanley Kubrick about The Shining, which is a film I love," Roth said. "I thought, 'OK, Stephen King is my favorite writer. I don't want him mad at me.' I said, 'I will do this if it's really an adaptation. I'm not going to do a straight recreation. I'm not going to film the book. I'm going to take core elements of the book and the story, but I'm going to make it into a film. I'm going to adapt it.' He said, 'No worries. Do whatever you want. This is your adaptation of Cell.'"
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The project has been put on hold because Roth is busy working on his next film “Trailer Trash”, a movie full of fake trailers. Mad, but we love him!
When he gets round to making The Cell, he has told us he really wants Stephen King to have a cameo role, as he has done with several of his movies before.
Roth: The latest with "Cell" is that the script is not finished. I've realized that I can't multitask in the writing department; I can only kind of do one thing at a time. So right now I'm working on [a guest-director episode of] "Heroes," and then I'll work on "Trailer Trash," and then we'll see about "Cell" after that.
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