<http://schema.org/articleBody>
"FacebookPinterest\n\nAt first, Eli Roth's Aftershock (hitting theaters, as well as VOD, iTunes, and Direct TV, on Friday) looks like a gorgeous spring break-style movie\u2014three friends making their way across cheerfully colorful Chilean landscapes with plenty of booze, good music, and beautiful women. That is, until a massive earthquake hits while they're at an underground nightclub and they spend the rest of the film trying to escape the horrifying chaos that follows it. Also: a tsunami.\n\nRoth and the film's director Nicol\u00E1s L\u00F3pez\u2014who co-wrote and co-produced Aftershock with Roth who also stars in the movie\u2014were inspired by the real-life 8.8 earthquake that hit Chile in 2010 and the aftershocks, tsunami, and prison escapes that followed. Turns out there are a lot scarier things than an apocalyptic natural disaster.\n\nGQ talked to Roth about filming '70s-style, how we react to disaster, and the tsunami that's coming for us all.\n\n\u00B7\u00B7\u00B7\n\nGQ: Tell us about collaborating with Nicol\u00E1s L\u00F3pez. \n\nEli Roth: I'm a huge fan of Nicol\u00E1s L\u00F3pez's Spanish language movies. I saw his film Promedio Rojo years ago and we've always been friends and talked about collaborating. (He has a very successful romantic comedy trilogy: Fuck My Life, Fuck My Wedding, Fuck My Family.) We called Aftershock, when we were shooting, Fuck My Hostel because it very much starts like a Nicol\u00E1s L\u00F3pez movie and then turns into one of my movies. I've also wanted to do comedy so it was a good chance for us to flex that other side of our creativity. We wanted to make a high octane thriller and he started describing to me what it was like to live through that 2010 earthquake and the events that followed, the stories were so unbelievable and horrific we thought, This is the movie right here. We don't have to invent anything. We took real incidents that happened to different people we knew and the tsunami, the prisons breaking open, the club collapsing, the speakers falling on people\u2014all that stuff was real.\n\nGQ: What's scarier\u2014the natural disaster or the way we react to it?\n\nEli Roth: Natural disasters are terrifying\u2014that loss of control, this feeling that something is just going to randomly end your life for absolutely no reason is terrifying. But, what scares me is the human reaction to it and how people behave when the rules of civility and society are obliterated. That was one of the things that we wanted to make the movie about: the literal and figural collapse of society and what do people do when they just stop behaving and are in survival mode, or attack mode, or defense mode. The film's also very much about moral choices, the choices you make, and what you have to live with.\n\nGQ: And what about the people who just go apeshit?\n\nEli Roth: That was one thing we talked about, the prisons breaking up\u2014what did these people do? Rioting, looting, raping, attacking. Other people were killing civilians and taking their clothes to try and blend in and escape that way. All in the panic of a tsunami warning, so there's that extra level of panic on top of it. We wanted to really show the entire spectrum of how people behave in situations like this and also spend the first part of the movie building up minor problems that seem like a huge deal. \u00C2\u00A0\n\nI think in life we get very caught up in the minutia and, unfortunately, it generally takes some sort of tragedy in your life to put things in perspective. My feeling is that the tsunami is coming for us all eventually and that life is basically a series of horrible events that randomly happen to you for absolutely no reason with no explanation that you try to do your best to avoid and find happiness between those moments. But, a lot of times, life is defined by how you got over one horrible thing. Life is a series of avoiding horrible situations until ultimately you're dead. That's how I feel about things.\n\nGQ: How did you balance between the roles of actor/writer/producer while filming?\n\nEli Roth: When I'm writing I wear my writer's hat and then when it comes time to figure out the production I wear my producing hat and I had a really good team with me. I said to Miguel Asensio, our Chilean producer and Nicol\u00E1s' partner, and our other producers: \"Once we start shooting, I'm an actor and only bother me if it's really an emergency and absolutely necessary,\" so they took care of the producing once shooting started but there's always situations that need me. There were many nights where I'm covered from head-to-toe in fake blood and dust and dripping in sweat when I'd be going through bank contracts and signing legal pieces.\n\nGQ: Were you conscious of avoiding any horror movie clich\u00C3\u00A9s, like the good guy winning in the end?\n\nEli Roth: That's part of the fun is playing on expectations. People know that I co-wrote the movie and that I'm the producer and the star of it so \"Okay, he's going to write the heroic character for himself,\" and what happens when you play on that expectation and your character does something maybe that the audience doesn't necessarily expect them to do. As long as it's grounded in a place of reality and the audience understands why the character makes those choices you could really, really have a great time. \u00C2\u00A0\n\nWe tried to do everything in a different way. Since we're talking GQ, the fashion designer Jeremy Scott did some beautiful pieces for us. This is the first movie that he's done clothes for and I said to Jeremy, \"We're going to destroy them,\" and he said, \"No, that's my dream! I've always wanted to have destroyed glam!\" And I would send him pictures from the set of all the people in his clothes piled up in the dust and say, \"Destroyed glamour\" and he's like, \"It's amazing! I love it!\" We looked at it like Jean-Paul Gaultier designing clothes for the Fifth Element, like, \"special wardrobe created by.\" Very cool.\n\nGQ: How did you film disaster scenes like the nightclub collapse? \n\nEli Roth: One of the great innovations that Nicol\u00E1s pioneered is shooting the feature film on the Canon SLR camera. He shot Que Pena Tu Boda on the 5D Mark II and we shot Aftershock with that. It's a $2,500 camera body and you can put a beautiful lens on it and it looks like expensive 35mm photography. So in a sequence like the club scene, when we're dropping the ceiling, we're really doing it. We had about 100 extras\u2014these were not stunt girls, they were in heels and miniskirts\u2014and they're running across and we're really dropping it so you have to have it when you photograph it. We wanted to film it like a '70s movie where almost everything is real. A lot of the modern disaster movies are done with computers and they look incredible but at a certain point it's like watching someone else play a video game and we wanted this to look and feel very real and visceral and 99% of it\u2014there's a couple of shots that are CG\u2014is real and one of the ways we did that was just shooting with those SLR cameras, you get five cameras going and you're going to get one take and that's it.\n\nGQ: Have you ever experienced an earthquake?\n\nEli Roth: I have and it was very scary. I really felt like I was standing in the ocean all of the sudden\u2014the whole building was rocking and shaking and there is a moment where you really, very quickly, you just want it to stop and it won't.\n\nGQ: Did you do any of those moves we all did in elementary school drills, like stand under a doorway?\n\nEli Roth: I did! I was actually with a girl and we ran under the doorway standing there thinking, Is this what we're supposed to do? Is this helping? Are we safer here? We didn't really know and you're standing there for a while waiting to hear what happens. You peek out and see what your neighbors are doing, then you look around, and basically just wait for another aftershock."^^<http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#string>
<http://www.gq.com/story/the-gqa-eli-roth-on-new-disaster-horror-flick-aftershock>