Roth nearly incinerated in 'Basterds' fire scene

It's vintage Tarantino, hyper-real ultra-violence that arrives as a kind of catharsis after more than two hours of intricate plot twists and baroque dialogue as the Basterds, led by Lt. Aldo Raine (Brad Pitt), do their best to destabilize German forces in Nazi-occupied France through their unique brand of terrorism: collecting the scalps of Hitler's troops.

But for cast member Eli Roth — who portrays a merciless, baseball-bat-wielding Nazi killer dubbed "the Bear Jew" by fear-stricken German soldiers in the film, which opens Friday — the scene is memorable for a different reason.

"We almost got incinerated," Roth exclaimed during a recent outing to Hollywood's Amoeba Music, where he was riffling through racks of DVDs. "The fire comes up. They thought it was going to burn at 400 degrees centigrade and it burned at 1,200. That's like 2,000 degrees Fahrenheit! You see the swastika fall. It was not supposed to. It was fastened with steel cables; the steel liquefied."

He paused midstory, however, discovering used copies of "Hostel" and "Hostel: Part II," the films that were produced by his friend and biggest booster, Tarantino, and cemented Roth's reputation as one of horror-moviedom's most extreme, successful (and reviled) auteurs. Roth's primary function is to make films, you see, not act in them (his output as a writer-director-producer even spawned its own subcategory in the genre: "torture porn"). But his role in "Inglourious Basterds" is more than simply a glorified cameo. It represents a kind of creative apotheosis in his relationship with his mentor, Tarantino — a culminant experience that drew upon Roth's skill set as a filmmaker, his hometown and his religion.

Marveling at his movies' costs — "12 bucks, what a deal!" — Roth continued his on-set story, explaining that the actor who shared the scene with him, Omar Doom, "had to go to the hospital. I was on the ground, my feet were up, I had ice packs all over me. . . . The fire department said another 10 or 15 seconds, the structure would have collapsed."

In other words, torture porn's poster boy — the filmmaker who committed to celluloid images such as a cheerleader jumping into the air and doing a split onto a gigantic hunting knife — and the guy who ruthlessly bludgeons, bombs and machine guns every Nazi in his path in "Inglourious Basterds" finally got to taste the pain himself.

"I got torched," Roth said solemnly.

Although Roth will tell you he relishes being a provocateur and enjoys pushing people's buttons ("I upset people so much they had to create a new genre for me!"), spend an afternoon with him and it becomes abundantly clear that he has done some thinking about the slagging he has taken from detractors who say his movies are misogynistic and desensitize viewers to violence, ultimately dismissing Roth as a moronic frat boy.

"When people direct insults at me, I can take it," the Boston-born New York University grad (and son of a Harvard professor) said later. "I'm an easy target. But I know where my stuff comes from.

"I have a strong art-history background," he continued. "I could discuss all these painters I grew up looking at, authors I read — how there's far more violence in those works. Why aren't you upset about that? Instead they write about me, 'Eli Roth, that fraternity boy.' People can't get past the blood."

When his movie "Cabin Fever" took in $30 million worldwide and an additional $70 million on DVD, Roth was inundated with scripts. He considered directing a big-screen adaptation of "Baywatch" (to have been titled "Baywatch 3-Double-D"), among other projects, before he told Tarantino a movie idea he had kicking around about a youth hostel in a foreign country where American tourists are tortured and murdered as sport.

The idea galvanized Tarantino. He signed on as an executive producer on 2006's "Hostel," which was billed as "Quentin Tarantino Presents," helping to propel the $4-million, independently financed film's worldwide box office to more than $80 million.

That was the start of a beautiful friendship. As Tarantino was working on the script for "Inglourious Basterds," he would enact scenes for Roth. Admiring his small turn in front of the camera in "Cabin Fever" — Roth had to fill in for another actor who dropped out — Tarantino cast him in a cameo in "Death Proof," the segment he directed in the 1970s exploitation homage "Grindhouse." (Roth also directed a now infamous trailer for a faux-horror movie that appears within the movie, "Thanksgiving.")

"That became my audition for 'Inglourious Basterds,' " Roth recalled.