Eli Roth

Biography: Height: 6' (1.82 M)

Eli Roth decided he wanted to be a writer/director after watching Ridley Scott's Alien at the age of 8. He soon began shooting super 8 films with his brothers. By the end of high school Eli had completed over 50 short films. He attended film school at NYU where he won a student Academy Award and graduated Suma Cum Laude in 1994. In 1995, Eli wrote Cabin Fever with his good friend Randy Pearlstein. For the next few years he worked on a number of film and theater productions, doing every job from assistant editor, to assistant to the director. In 1999, Eli moved to Los Angeles and within four months he got funding for his animated series "Chowdaheads". Eli and his friend Noah Benson wrote the series and did the voices, Eli also produced, directed and designed. The episodes were due to run on the W.C.W.'s "Monday Nitro", but the C.E.O. was fired the day before they were set to air, so the episodes never ran. Eli used the episodes to set up a stop motion series called "The Rotten Fruit"; he produced, directed and animated, and again co-wrote and voiced the series with friend Noah Benson. In 2001, after 6 years of unsuccessfully submitting his script to studios, he shot Cabin Fever independently. The film started a bidding war at the 2002 Toronto Film Festival. It became Lions Gates' highest grossing film of the year and won the acclaim of filmmakers and critic alike. Although Eli was receiving numerous offers from studios he decided not to take any of them. Instead in May 2003, Eli joined forces with Boaz Yakin and Scott Spiegel to form the production company, Raw Nerve. Their goal was to produce 3-5 intense low budget horror films per year. In early 2005, they produced the Tim Sullivan film, 2001 Maniacs. In 2005, Raw Nerve also produced Eli's second film, Hostel. Again Eli wrote and directed but this time he took the production on the Czech Republic. Hostel went on to knock The Chronicles of Narnia out of the top spot at the box office. In 2007, Eli returned to write and direct the sequel, Hostel: Part II and the faux trailer, Thanksgiving for the Rodriguez/Tarantino double feature Grindhouse. He is currently in development for a number of projects, including a feature of faux trailers to be called Trailer Trash and an adaptation of Stephen King's novel, Cell.… Expand