Eli Roth Talks New ‘Ice Cream Man’ Horror Movie, Tarantino & More with Rich

Eli Roth got the idea for his new movie looking at an ice cream truck and thinking about how completely we hand our children over to a stranger playing music.

"What if that person was like the Pied Piper and they wanted to do some sort of mind control," Roth told Rich. "I hear the music and I start salivating."

Ice Cream Man arrives in theaters nationwide Friday, August 7, and Roth is not selling it as a tasteful exercise. The truck rolls into town during the last week of school, the music activates the kids, and the kids start killing the adults. It is being released unrated.

"I wanted to make the craziest movie in my career," Roth said. "It's fully gory and completely insane."

More kills, by his count, than all his previous movies combined. The children doing the killing are delighted, like it is Christmas morning, opening adults instead of presents.

Roth shot a schoolyard sequence with a hundred children and twenty stunt people during a Toronto heat wave. The parents, required to keep eye contact with their kids, were horror fans, which created a new problem. "I had 30 moms standing behind me, and they were like, my daughter would like a fake head, and can't my son have a leg."

The kids were unbothered by the gore and derailed by everything else. One five-year-old raised his hand mid-setup to report an untied shoe, then went back to hacking up a teacher with an ax.

All of it traces back to a theater in Chestnut Hill, where Roth saw Alien and came out with a career. He asked his father what a producer did, learned the producer raises the money, then saw the words directed by Ridley Scott and asked what a director does. His father said the director spends all the money and tells everybody what to do. "I was like, oh, I want to do that."

Alien also gave him the standard he still chases. "That adrenaline rush, you have to see it in a theater. It's like being at the game." He watched the last ten minutes from the aisle in a sprinting pose, then went outside and threw up.

His foundational trinity is The Exorcist, The Evil Dead, and The Shining. Sam Raimi making The Evil Dead in the woods for $350,000 at 20 or 21 is what convinced Roth he could make Cabin Fever without Hollywood.

Then there is Quentin Tarantino, who cast him as Donny Donowitz in Inglourious Basterds and taught him that everything starts with character.

"It's not about the script. You have to know who this person was, where were they yesterday, where are they going now," Roth said. Tarantino does not watch the monitor. He stands next to the camera watching the actors, and he keeps watching when the coverage turns to someone else, because that is where the gold is. The scene where Roth and the others try to pass as Italian in front of Christoph Waltz only clicked once the camera was off them, and Tarantino turned around and relit it.

Working opposite a performance that good, Roth said, is the easy version of the job. "When you're working with an actor that mumbles or doesn't give you anything, you have to overdo it. When there's an actor like Christoph, you just react."

The tunnel entrance, bat in hand, took a different method. Tarantino kept Roth back there for five days.

"He's like, we'll get to it today. And I'd be back there. We set up a punching bag and weights and a pull-up bar so I could just stay angry and sweaty. So I was like a caged animal."

The Ted Williams rant that follows was Roth's, ad-libbed with permission. He asked whether he could showboat a little for the guys, and Tarantino let him go.