Top 45 Eli Roth Quotes

Movie stars need to retain some of that mystique if you are a big movie star.

My phobias worsen as I get older. I’m scared of flying, driving. I’m terrified of sharks. I’m a germaphobe. But I try to face my fears; I do. Well, most of them.

There’s fear in everything, but we can’t just succumb to that. We have to suppress it, so we get used to suppressing fear to make it through the our day. Otherwise, we’d become paralyzed by them.

Twitter is wonderful. You can kill rumours instantly.

I 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.

You know, I’m from Boston, and in Boston, you are born with a baseball bat in your hand.

I have so many different projects, I hear voices in my head – the characters talking all at once – and I have to write to make them stop.

The one negative to horror is that it’s always law of diminishing returns. When you go in the funhouse, the ride is never scary the second time. You will never have that pure experience as when you first watch it.

I would love to do a musical!

I’ve always dreamed of having a year-round haunted house.

I love movies that are just straight-up exploitation, but the ones that endure and the ones that last are the ones where the filmmakers put in that extra level of thought; after 25 years you put them on in front of an audience, and they’ll respond to it and enjoy it.

Much of my youth was spent in the parking lot or inside a Dunkin’ Donuts.

I generally follow my own compass and make films about what’s scaring me.

What is important to me is that people know I respect the business of making movies.

As a kid, my idols were Sam Raimi and Peter Jackson, and I get into crazy races with myself. Raimi was 21 when he made movies, and when I didn’t get ‘Cabin Fever’ made that fast I thought I’d failed.

As a kid, I was the neighbourhood baby-sitter – very responsible, always in charge.

Chile could work as a double for L.A.; it’s very production-friendly and there’s terrific talent down there.

I think characters are most terrifying when they’re relatable. It’s best when your most horrible characters make sense, and are believable. That’s when a movie is most terrifying.

A comedy can actually get funnier and funnier. Even though you know the joke, you enjoy it so much, it’s the facial expression, you laugh. The laugh doesn’t wear off. It could be with you for thirty years.

What I’ve always thought I would do is make a bunch of movies and then stop to teach for awhile. And then just teach at film schools – you know, teach children.

Everyone is so terrified of being labeled a racist.

I never put out a vanilla edition of a DVD.

I think you should make movies as long as the story dictates.

Anytime you make a movie, the goal is a wide theatrical release, with the right distributor.

I need to eliminate ‘like’ from my vocabulary. I begin sentences with, ‘That’s seriously like… ‘ I hear myself talking in this Los Angeles high-school student kind of way, and I hate it.

I love movies. I mean, I really, really love movies.

It’s very flattering to feel like you actually helped create a sub-genre.

As a director, you have to know what actors are doing. You’re the one telling them what to do. The actors’ job is to come prepared to the set, but sometimes, if they’re beginning actors or people who are non-actors, you have to teach them how to act.

I can think of endless horrible things to do to people!

I love historical movies. I want to make a violent medieval epic.

I have no tattoos. There’s nothing I’ve even been that into to get a tattoo of it.

You know, the dirty secret in the Director’s Guild is that the average life expectancy of Director’s Guild members is 57 years old. The stress level is so high and directors are generally really out of shape, cause they sit in the chair and they eat craft service.

Once I got over the fear of writing female characters, it actually came quite easily and I was really happy with it. I just thought about girls I knew really, really well and I’d just have conversations with them and tried to relay how they talk about certain things.

Believe it or not, but I was a camp councilor for three years. I love kids.

When I was 22, I had this horrible psoriasis outbreak. It was all over my legs, I couldn’t walk because my legs were cracked and bleeding. Weird things like that can happen to your body.

There’s a crazy, false notion that audiences are not patient or will not watch a story, that you have to put in a scare every ten minutes. But I always thought that was insane.

What’s important for me is staying healthy.

Natural disasters are terrifying – that 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.

I have the infinite galaxy from ‘2001’ as my screensaver – so if I space out while I’m writing and it goes to screensaver, I can just stare off into the stars.

I think horror should never be safe, whether it’s violent or non violent.

When you’re making a television show, it’s about the story and arc of the show rather than any particular episode or director.

When you make a film for a million and a half dollars and it opens at 20 million, the next question out of everyone’s mouth is, ‘When’s the next one, when’s the next one, when’s the next one?’

I’d love to see us get to a point where you can make a movie and not worry about the limits of the violence. Then I think they’d get so violent that people would get bored of it.

I get a little too obsessive with work.

If you are having fun on the set, you are not getting things done.