Smash hit

Roth does an excellent impression of Lynch and his slightly stilted way of talking: “ ‘Eli, man, we’re going on the Net. Davidlynch.com is going to be f---ing beautiful, man.’

“David starts spouting out probably 200 ideas and I’m just trying to write everything down on note-cards. I would go over to his house every day, which was like the greatest job ever . . . And we would grab a camera, sometimes Digital Video and sometimes 35mm, and shoot these crazy experiments.”

Lynch agreed to allow Roth to use his name as executive producer on Cabin Fever in an attempt to attract financiers. “It was no longer a straight theatre movie,” says Roth. “It was an artsy film.” Here Roth adopts the slow, ponderous, pretentious voice of the cinephile: “It’s so Lynchian.”

Roth shot the film in 24 days in an out-of-season Scout camp in North Carolina. To play the hostile backwoods folk, he enlisted locals, including a recently released mental patient. Some rural communities, notably Burkittsville in Maryland, where The Blair Witch Project was filmed, have been less than enamoured with their portrayal on film, but Roth insists everyone knew what they were letting themselves in for.

BACKGROUND

• Hostel: Part II

• Hostel: Part II - Sunday Times review

• Hostel

• Festival: If you go to the woods

Here’s blood in your eye

Eli Roth’s movies revel in disgust, but the director proclaims himself the ‘horror Borat’

Related Internet Links

• 2007 London Film Festival coverage

• Times Online Film Trailers

“These communities were so thrilled to have us filming there. They’re all like, ‘We’re so happy, we can’t wait to go see Cabin Fever’ . . . I just say, ‘Please don’t, don’t ever see this movie, you’re just going to hate it and I want you to think I’m a nice guy.’ ”

Although no Scouts were staying at the camp and the manager was warned about the nature of the film, he still insisted on bringing youngsters to watch. “Every time he brought a group of kids, there was always someone covered head to toe in blood going, ‘F---, f---, f---.’ And the kids loved it.”

Roth recalls one of his actors, Rider Strong, star of the long- running American television series Boy Meets World, was out walking when suddenly he came rushing back to base, chased by 30 or 40 pre-teen girls. “Those girls were like ants,” he says. “I saw them descending over the hill . . . They chased him like A Hard Day’s Night, Richard Lester-style, through the woods.

Meanwhile, though Roth found himself labelled “David Lynch’s protege”, he also found Cabin Fever referred to as David Lynch’s film. Lynch advised him to drop his executive producer credit. “He saw the movie and said, ‘This is great, you don’t need my help any more, you’re going to be fine on your own.’ The two best things he did for my career were putting his name on a movie and taking his name off a movie.”

Roth has subsequently been linked with other more prestigious projects, including an adaptation of the Stephen King story 1408, but he is not forgetting his beginnings. “Splatter on the Linoleum may make its way to the DVD,” he jokes. But, then again, maybe it isn’t a joke.

Cabin Fever receives its British premiere as part of the Edinburgh International Film Festival (0131 623 8030) at the Cameo on August 15

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