
"Do you know the latest rumor they've conjured up, in their fear-induced delirium? The one that beats my boys with a bat. The one they call "the Bear Jew" ...is a golem. An avenging Jew angel, conjured up by a vengeful rabbi, to smite the Aryans!"
I have to admit that when I read this Adolph Hitler-uttered passage in Quentin Tarantino's screenplay for INGLOURIOUS BASTERDS, my first thought wasn't, "Ah, Eli Roth!" Though the director of CABIN FEVER and the two HOSTEL films had capably conveyed a kind of frat-boy malevolence in DEATH PROOF, Donnie Donowitz aka "The Bear Jew" seemed like the kind of role that should go to a stone-faced, broad-shouldered badass. Well, I was a fool to doubt Tarantino's casting instincts. From his stirring introduction, striding out of the blackness hauling his trusty, skull-dented bat as Ennio Morricone's "La Resa" from THE BIG GUNDOWN blares on the soundtrack, to his climactic encounter with Der Führer (discussed in the below interview, so be careful), Roth is utterly believable as a Boston-bred Jew whose sole purpose in life seems to be braining bigots. And his performance is all the more impressive when you consider that he gets this menace across without the help of the character's cut-from-the-film backstory, which, among other things, explained the significance of the names carved into his bat. Those extra scenes would've allowed us to ease into the idea of Roth as a feared Nazi-killer; now, he's got to sell Donnie's murderousness with nothing more than a lazy gait, a slightly deranged facial expression, and an extra forty pounds of muscle. And he does it brilliantly. Roth was still carrying most of that added bulk when I sat down with him last week at the INGLOURIOUS BASTERDS junket in Los Angeles, but that was the only trace of Donnie that remained. For the most part, it was the same old gregarious Eli I've known since he broke out with CABIN FEVER seven years ago. As we started our interview, Eli was quizzing me about Joe Dante's five-hour THE MOVIE ORGY, which I had attended at The New Beverly the night before. This led to an amusing anecdote about Dante's initial reaction to Tarantino's WWII epic.
Eli Roth: Quentin showed his very first cut to three people, and Joe Dante was one of them. Joe loved it. And it was interesting because... Quentin and I over Christmas ['08], we stayed in Paris, and we hung out watching movies every day. We went to the movies and saw THE KILLING. And we were watching Timothy Carey when he's shooting the horse - or the scene in the parking lot when he's talking to the black parking attendant, and the guy won't leave, and he has to then start using all the racial slurs to get the guy to leave him alone. We were talking, and Quentin was like, "I love Timothy Carey. He's one of my favorites. He's always so good." So then Joe Dante sees [BASTERDS], and he goes, "Eli, your performance is perfect. You're like Tony Curtis with a touch of... Timothy Carey, especially that ending." (Laughs) I didn't even realize it! Joe is like a master chef who can taste the soup and know the seventeen different obscure ingredients that went into it. I wasn't even consciously doing it. So I told Quentin. I was like, "Do you remember when we saw THE KILLING?" And he was like, "Oh, my god! You're right! You must've been channeling some Timothy Carey after our conversation."
