“I think women are gonna love it,” the Knock Knock writer-director told BuzzFeed News at the Sundance Film Festival.
Bel (Ana de Armas) and Genesis (Lorenza Izzo) in Knock Knock
Sobras International Pictures
PARK CITY, Utah — Eli Roth knows his latest movie Knock Knock is going to provoke conversation — and he wouldn't have it any other way. The latest from the Hostel writer-director, which premiered Friday at the Sundance Film Festival and was later bought by Lionsgate for a reported $2.5 million, plays out like a straight man's fantasy turned nightmare. The movie centers on family man Evan Webber (Keanu Reeves), who is home alone for the weekend when two gorgeous women (Lorenza Izzo and Ana de Armas) show up at his door, dripping wet from the rain, unsubtly throwing themselves at their host. Once Evan gives into temptation, however, the women reveal their true (very unstable) colors, and Knock Knock descends into an off-the-wall psychological thriller.
As was the case with Gone Girl — and you may want to stop reading now if you still haven't seen that film or read Gillian Flynn's novel on which it is based — Knock Knock plays with the trope of the malevolent woman who uses sex as a weapon against men she feels are deserving of punishment. It's an archaic archetype that both films attempt to subvert, and whether they succeed or not is up for the audience to decide. But those who feel these female characters are underdeveloped can easily give the films a misogynist reading. Just as Gone Girl was praised by some as a progressive satire and decried as anti-feminist tripe by others, Knock Knock has been inciting a similar debate at Sundance.
But Roth is no stranger to controversy, and he did not shy away from discussing the inevitable feminist critique of Knock Knock when he sat down with BuzzFeed News for an interview at the Canon Creative Space in Park City. The director, who co-wrote Knock Knock with Nicolás López and Guillermo Amoedo, also talked about his departure from gorier past works, and why he's determined to make movies that start a conversation.
Evan (Keanu Reeves) in Knock Knock
Sobras International Pictures
Knock Knock feels substantially different from your past work.
Eli Roth: Well, sure. It's interesting 'cause every time I make a movie, I feel that one is completely different from the next. When I made Hostel, I was like, it's totally different from Cabin Fever. Cabin Fever was funny. It was an homage. Hostel's dark and straight, and Hostel II, I thought it was more operatic and stylish. And then Green Inferno is lush and green and in the jungle, in the Amazon. It looks more like an adventure movie.
But yet, in a strange way, they're all the same film, because it's clearly this theme of privileged Americans that want to go out into the world — one is for fun and escape and sex, another is for sex tourism and adventure and life experiences at the expense of others, and the other one is to save the Amazon but really for their own vanity and everyone pays the price.
I wanted to make a film that looked and felt very different from my other movies, that was not a horror movie, that really was like a '90s thriller, like Fatal Attraction or Basic Instinct — a charged sexual-tension thriller. And something that looked and felt like an old Roman Polanski movie — either Rosemary's Baby or Death and the Maiden was a very big influence. I wanted something that really was like a slow burn tense movie that just kept the audience guessing and questioning, and really felt more like a chess game, and that doesn't have the blood and gore. We used the destruction of art to substitute for the destruction of body parts.
There is a lot of psychological torture in the film, but there's very little physical violence. Why did you decide to hold back on the gore and go that route?
ER: Every movie has its own level of gore that's appropriate, and that is up to the director to decide how much is in or out. But if you're making The Green Inferno and they're getting chopped up and eaten in the jungle, it's a very visceral movie. And in Hostel, that's what people are paying for. The audience is complicit in the violence. They're paying to watch kids in the movie get killed in the same way that people are paying to kill within the movie. But that's not what this movie is about. As the director, it's my job to look at it and go, What does the story require? How much is necessary? How much is gratuitous? For me, I always want the audience to go, What happens next?
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