Did anything weird or trippy happen while you were making The Last Exorcism?
Just casting our lead actress, Ashley Bell, was trippy. My father, by a complete run of coincidence, went to high school with Ashley’s father. I had a 70th birthday party for my father, and he said: ‘My friend Mike wants to come and he’s going to invite his daughter Ashley. I think she’s an actress.’ Four months later she auditions for Daniel, the director. She goes in, knows me, knows I’m a producer and doesn’t say a word. Daniel said: ‘I found someone: Ashley Bell.’ Every other actor I have had any kind of remote contact with name-dropped: ‘Oh I’m a friend of Eli’s.’ She’s a class act.

Did you also see The Exorcist at an inappropriately young age?
Of course. And The Exorcist felt so real. I’d never seen anything that horrifying. It scared me for years, I had nightmares for years as a child and had always wanted to be involved in an exorcism movie.

What are your favourite scary movies?
I saw Alien when I was eight years old. To me, it was like a combination of Jaws and Star Wars and that’s the movie that made me want to be a director.

You famously made Hostel audiences throw up. What film has made you throw up?
Alien. It traumatised me. I actually threw up I was so nervous after I saw it but that’s like the highest compliment you can give a horror film. Then, when I was 12, I saw Evil Dead and that movie traumatised me too, but
I also discovered that a 21-year-old [Sam Raimi] directed it, that you can go off in the woods with your friends and for not much money make a classic.

Who’s your favourite actor?
Peter Sellers is probably my favourite actor of all time. I just watched Dr Strangelove the other night. I’m obsessed with him, even in The Party and Being There. Peter Sellers can do no wrong in my book. I also love Ricky Gervais, Sacha Baron Cohen, Steve Coogan. I’m obsessed with Brits and, go figure, I’m dating one!

What do you watch on TV?
I really like The Office, the original one. And obviously Sacha Baron Cohen, I have all the British Ali G DVDs. When I was shooting Hostel, the children who played the street kids were these gipsies who lived in a commune. They didn’t go to school but knew English from watching HBO and Ali G. They called me Eli G, and I had to say: ‘Yo bitches!’ Recently I’ve been watching Nighty Night with Julia Davis. That’s one of my favourites.

Do you love Brit bands too?
Of course. I will be forever stuck in classic rock. I listen to The Beatles, The Rolling Stones, David Bowie. I have a soft spot for ’80s metal, because I grew up in Massachusetts, so I listened to Guns N’ Roses, AC/DC and Iron Maiden. I like weirder, more obscure stuff too like Devo.

Peaches Geldof is only 21. Does she introduce you to new bands?
Totally. Bands such as Edward Sharpe And The Magnetic Zeros, bands I would never have known otherwise. She makes a playlist and says: ‘You’ve got to listen to this and this.’ She knows every new band, so she’s like my DJ and is introducing me to all the latest stuff.

Did you like The Boomtown Rats back in the day?
I still like The Boomtown Rats. Bob Geldof is actually my favourite person to argue about music with, because he just rolls his eyes when I talk about the genius of Powerslave, an Iron Maiden album. He just scratches his head, looks at his daughter and says: ‘Why did you pick this guy?’

What scares you in life?
The thought I might die before I get to make all the films I want to make terrifies me.

Can you talk about your upcoming projects, anything about Thanksgiving?
Sure, my friend Jeff Rendell has been working on the script whilst I’ve been doing the press and as soon as I’m done with this, I can go sit down and write. I really need to finish my scripts; I’ve just been so busy in The Last Exorcism land, which believe me is a good place to be, but I’m ready to go back to writing.

I hear you’re working with Huck Botko and Andrew Gurland on…
Funhouse, we’re doing the Funhouse remake, they’re writing that right now. They’re great. They’re such funny guys I’m really excited.

Will we be seeing more of you acting after your cameo in Piranha 3D?
(With irony) Really, I didn’t think I could top my SAG Award winning performance in Inglourious Basterds, but then Alex Aja [director] invited me to come on set and hose down tits on Piranha 3D and I said what time do you need me? And having seen my performance in that film, I think there’s certain things you do that really are just sacrifices for art and for the betterment of cinema. And unless it’s a film I think is that much of a charitable contribution to the world, where you feel like you’re just contributing to the betterment of mankind, I probably wouldn’t do it… Unless it involves hosing down tits. Then I would do it.

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But the star insists reviewers are just not interested in watching horror movies.

He says, “I think the term ‘torture porn’… says more about the critics than it does about the film and their complete lack of understanding or frankly interest in those types of movies.”

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Eli Roth
The man behind The Last Exorcism recently threatened he’d like to make a Thanksgiving trailer. Such bad taste aside, he looks surprisingly dapper next to star Ashley Bell. Let’s just hope he has a darker suit for Frightfest in London this weekend.

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“I did it all myself. I wish I could say I’m a hologram but I did it all myself,” Bell told OnTheRedCarpet.com at the Los Angeles premiere of the film. “Now I feel like I’m stuck. Like every time I go to audition for something, I have to do a back-bend and then read the sides.”

So how did the star prepare for her role as a possessed person? “I read every single book I could find on exorcisms that hadn’t been banned,” she said. “Going into it the director [Daniel Stamm] said to watch all the exorcist movies and then don’t do that. So we were immediately set to do something different and go our own way.”

The film’s producer and famed horror director, Eli Roth, stopped and crashed Bell’s interview to rave about her performance. “I want an Oscar stat for Ashley Bell,” Roth said.

They Made No Cuts to Get a PG-13 Rating
After taking in a screening last week, I was shocked to realize the film wasn’t rated R. It was just too scary to think otherwise. Yet it’s actually PG-13, owing to a lack of foul language and very few bloody moments. But did Stamm have to cut anything out to get that rating? Turns out, they didn’t have to make any changes.

“We never shot for any particular rating,” Stamm explained. “I shot what I thought was scariest. To me, gore isn’t necessarily scary. It’s all about suspense and eeriness. It’s almost like shaking a bottle of Coke and the pressure builds up, but you keep the lid on it for as long as possible. Once you go into gore, you release that pressure and have to start all over again.

“There wouldn’t be any dirty language, because they’re on a farm of this very religious guy,” he added. ” ‘The Exorcist’ is a brilliant movie, but to me a demon is this timeless entity, and if a demon suddenly says ‘f—,’ that destroys the agelessness. I had no interest in having our demon use dirty language. When we were putting it together in the editing room, we thought this might very well be a PG-13 movie.”

There Is Only One Digital Effect
We live in an age of reliance — some might say over-reliance — on computer-generated special effects. But what’s often sacrificed with CGI is a gritty realness, which is why top-flight directors like Christopher Nolan use practical effects whenever possible, despite the often added expense.

Though he was hardly working with a budget on the scale of “Inception,” Stamm used only one visual effect in “The Last Exorcism”: to ramp up an enormous fire. What’s more, he barely used any special effects: one bloody cut, one bloody cow, one bloody cat, and one thing that will remain secret, lest we spoil the movie’s twisty ending.

For the special effects, Stamm recruited makeup effects guru Gregory Nicotero, who’s worked with nearly everyone in Hollywood, including Quentin Tarantino and Michael Bay.

“[Nicotero] sent the cow from Los Angeles in a huge box,” laughed Stamm. “He had his guy on set with the blood pump, who was all prepared to go full-out gore. It’s so tempting when you have a genius like that who can make anything look spectacular, but you always need to remind yourself to use restraint because that’s not the story you want to tell. Also, you don’t want to get into ‘Exorcist’ territory. We didn’t want to use any gimmicks. Our whole movie is based on the idea of whether she’s possessed or crazy, so we couldn’t have her levitate or have her head spin.”

She Did All Those Bends Herself
You can’t walk into a subway station in New York City without seeing the “Last Exorcism” poster: a black-and-white photo of Bell bending over backwards as the purported demon contorts her body. When this happens in the movie, it’s a shocking and scary moment. Turns out that this scene contained not a single visual effect and that Stamm didn’t even know he’d be able to pull it off until days before they shot it.

“She’s double-jointed,” he said. “I had no idea. I just cast her because she was brilliant. Two days before we shot the actual scene, which was planned completely differently, we were in the hotel lobby and I asked her if there was anything she wanted to try during the exorcism. She got up and said, ‘Why don’t I do this?’ and she bent over backwards in the hotel lobby. I ran back to my room and rewrote the scene and now it’s become the core of the movie.

“I made sure Patrick didn’t see that before the scene,” Stamm continued. “The first time he ever saw it was that first take. A lot of the stuff in the finished scene is from that first take because he just couldn’t believe what he was seeing.”

They Studied Horror Movies to Avoid Imitation From “The Blair Witch Project” to “Cloverfield,” Stamm and his team were so adamant that they not repeat anything that’d come before that they watched all of these films and excised any points that felt duplicative.

“We made sure we weren’t doing anything in these other movies,” Stamm explained. “And I also gained new understanding of these movies. ‘Blair Witch,’ when I re-watched it, I realized for the first time what a smart film it is, how it’s so tense and smartly built.”

They did, however, make one exception. The townspeople who talk about myth and superstition in “The Last Exorcism” were directly inspired by the townspeople recounting the legend of the Blair Witch. “We learned a lot from that,” Stamm said.

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Other guests: Kathy Griffin, Pam Grier, Neve Campbell, Michael Madsen, Eli Roth, Patricia Arquette, Rob Schneider, Uma Thurman, Harvey Weinstein, Sarah Silverman, Rosario Dawson, Bob Weinstein, Michelle Rodriguez, and more! Maybe you, if you crash it! They’ll probably let anyone with a Vincent Vega wig in. Who are these “friars” to say you are not John Travolta? Oh my God. Are you John Travolta? (Source)

He said “I do think that many people are ashamed when they feel afraid, there’s this thing in our society that you’re not allowed to feel scared. You have to be a man and put on a brave face, but we all have fears. It’s not just fears of monsters attacking us, but fears of dying alone, never meeting or falling in love with the right person, or of losing your job. You do need an outlet to release all of those fears and when you go to a movie theatre, it’s the last place that it’s socially acceptable to be terrified. You’re probably on a date with someone squeezing your hand, and you scream and let it out and it feels good, and afterwards you’re energized. It’s actually a cathartic experience.”

The actor/producer/director can be seen currently in the critically panned ‘Piranha 3D’. (Source)