Eli Roth

He has an older brother, Adam (born May 1970), and a younger brother, Gabriel (born December 1974).

Roth was raised Jewish (his family were Jewish emigrants from Austria, Hungary, Russia, and Poland).

In addition to English, he speaks French, Italian, and basic Russian.

Eli Raphael Roth (born April 18, 1972) is an American film director, screenwriter, producer, and actor.

Roth began shooting films at the age of eight, after watching Ridley Scott's Alien (1979).

He and his brothers, Adam and Gabriel, made more than 100 short films before he graduated from Newton South High School and attended film school (the Tisch School of the Arts) at New York University.

To fund his films while in college, Roth claims to have worked as an online cybersex operator for Penthouse Magazine, posing as a woman, as well as a production assistant on feature films.

Roth also ran the office of producer Frederick Zollo, leaving after graduation to devote himself to writing full-time.

He collected unemployment and found work on Howard Stern's Private Parts as Stern's assistant, staying at Silvercup Studios in Queens at night working on his scripts while Stern slept.

Actress Camryn Manheim gave Roth one of his first Hollywood jobs, as an extra on The Practice, when he moved to Los Angeles.

Roth would stay in Manheim's dressing room, working on his scripts, while she filmed the show.

The two had become friends in New York, while Roth was working for Zollo.

Roth also met Manheim's cousin Howie Nuchow (former EVP of Mandalay Sports Entertainment and also from the Boston area) at her family Passover seder—this led to Roth's first animation project, Chowdaheads, the following year.

Roth also co-wrote a project called The Extra with Manheim, who later sold the pitch to producer (and former CEO and chairman of Fox Studios) Bill Mechanic's Pandemonium company.

At NYU film school, Roth wrote and directed a student film called Restaurant Dogs, a homage to Quentin Tarantino's Reservoir Dogs.

Through his internship with Frederick Zollo, Roth met David Lynch and remained in touch over the years, eventually producing content for Lynch with his fledgling website in the late 1990s.

Through Lynch, Roth met film and TV composer Angelo Badalamenti, whose music he used in his first feature film.

He also met a member of special effects company KNB EFX, which contributed to his first feature.

They based the premise on Roth's experience of contracting a skin infection while riding ponies at a family friend's farm in Iceland in 1991.

The film was nominated for a Student Academy Award in 1995, ultimately winning its division (Division III).

Much of it was written in 1996, while Roth worked as a production assistant for Howard Stern's film Private Parts.

In 1999, Roth moved to Los Angeles, where he wrote, directed, edited, produced, animated, and provided voices for a series of animated shorts called Chowdaheads for Mandalay Sports Entertainment.

They were to be shown between WCW Monday Nitro pro wrestling matches, but they were finished but never actually broadcast.

Roth's friend Noah Belson co-wrote the shorts and provided the other character voices.

In mid-2000, with financing from the website Z.com to deliver a five-minute pilot, Roth wrote, directed, animated, and produced a series of stop-motion shorts called The Rotten Fruit.

The company folded after several episodes were done, and its domain name was picked up by Nissan for its "Z" sports car.

A portion of Roth's work for The Rotten Fruit was done at the Snake Pit studios in Burbank with miniature sets, posable clay, foam figures, two high-end digital still cameras, and a pair of Macintosh computers.

Noah Belson co-wrote and performed character voices.

Roth had co-written Cabin Fever with his college roommate Randy Pearlstein.

Cabin Fever was produced in 2001 on a budget of $1.5 million raised from private investors.

As a director and producer, he is most closely associated with the horror genre, namely splatter films, having directed the films Cabin Fever (2002) and Hostel (2005).

The film was sold to Lionsgate at the 2002 Toronto International Film Festival for $3.5 million, the biggest sale of that year's festival.

Released in 2003, it was Lionsgate's highest-grossing film of the year, earning $22 million at the U.S. box office and $35 million worldwide.

Roth continued to work in the horror genre, directing the films Hostel: Part II (2007), The Green Inferno (2013) and Thanksgiving (2023).

As an actor, Roth starred as Donny "The Bear Jew" Donowitz in Quentin Tarantino's war film Inglourious Basterds (2009), for which he received a Critic's Choice Movie Award and a SAG Award as part of the ensemble.

Many journalists have included him in a group of filmmakers dubbed the Splat Pack for their explicitly violent and controversially bloody horror films.

In 2013, Roth received the Visionary Award for his contributions to horror at the Stanley Film Festival.

Roth was born the middle of three sons in Newton, Massachusetts, to Sheldon Roth, a psychiatrist/psychoanalyst and clinical professor at Harvard Medical School, and Cora Roth, a painter.

He also expanded into other genres, directing the erotic thriller film Knock Knock (2015) and the action film Death Wish (2018), a remake of the 1974 original.

Also in 2018, he directed the fantasy comedy film The House with a Clock in Its Walls, his first PG-rated film and his highest domestic grosser to date.