How to Make Authentic-Looking Grindhouse Footage
Let’s take a break from the raging battle over the merits of Death Proof (see the Inland Empire post’s comment section below if you’ve got mucho time to kill) and get a quick lesson from Eli Roth on how to make an authentic-looking grindhouse trailer. I was struck by Roth’s trailer for his faux film Thanksgiving in that it looks and feels more than anything else in Grindhouse like actual found footage from a decades-old exploitation flick. I’d read about him going to ridiculous lengths to damage the film, and I wanted more details, so we dropped him a line to get the ditty on how to make your movie look shitty.
Eli Roth:
The first step was shooting it with old cameras; my DP and I shot it in Prague and got [older] cameras from Panavision and lenses from the ‘70s. So we filmed it with those old lenses to give it as much of a look, and we watched movies like Mother’s Day and The Prowler, Maniac, and on the Maniac DVD there is an Italian and a German trailer, and I said, “That’s it! It looks like the dub of a dub of a dub of a dub, and that’s what I want it to look like.” So we shot it and lit in a way that was if they had lit it low budget in 1980 or 1979.
The second step was in the color timing. I oversaturated the colors, then we filmed the film – we filmed it three times. Then we took it – my brother Gabe and I and my assistant editor Brad Wilhite – and we threw it over the balcony into a fountain. Then we ran it up through the balcony, over concrete, stomping on it, spitting on it, scratching it; we ran it through a garden, through the mud; we spilled soda on it, chocolate on it; we ran it through paper clips. We tried to think of all the things that would have gotten spilled on it in a projection booth in some drive-in theatre, so we had soda, chocolate, popcorn grease, cigarettes. People were coming out of their offices and the whole courtyard looked like an Imax projector, with film everywhere, and people were burning it with cigarettes; it was hilarious.
We used that as our negative, so you pick up an extra layer of grain and contrast it almost went actually too dark it actually wound up being slightly darker than I thought it would be. We did everything we weren’t supposed to, we put splices in off-frame and I took the splice tape and put it on the carpet so there was lint in it, and we cracked the film, we spilt and we snapped it and then re-spliced it with dirty splicing tape. Then we put in all the sound effects of the scratches so it really looked and had the effect as if it had been sitting in the back of a pickup truck since 1979. And getting it wet and rolling it up and unrolling it: the emulsion stuck to itself, giving it this really beautiful, static, icy snow look.
Aside from passing it through the bowels of a goat, I’m not sure what else he could’ve done to smash down that celluloid. Thanks for the low-down, dude.
Comment by Kev Weldon — April 26, 2007 @ 1:50 pm
I really truly hope they filmed themselves doing that. If it’s not on the DVD, i’ll be quite disappointed.
Comment by Jovanka — April 27, 2007 @ 10:33 am
I have to say, he did do a bang up job. Eli’s trailer was the most authentic of the group. Looked like a bad ’80s VHS trailer.