Director Eli Roth has been hard at work on the upcoming Borderlands movie, and he recently offered an update on the film’s status, saying, “I am in the world of Pandora every day, all day.” PopCulture.com spoke with Roth over the phone for an exclusive interview about his new Discovery+ series, A Ghost Ruined My Life. During the conversation, he shared that, at the time, he was sitting in “the editing room” where he’d been working on Borderlands.
“I have a team full of visual effects producers and artists waiting for me to come in and go through shots and give them notes,” Roth said, adding that it has been a “f—ing amazing” experience for him. “There’s a lot of work to go,” Roth clarified, “but I’m just so happy.” He then went on to praise actress Cate Blanchett, who portrays Lilith, saying that he feels fans have “never seen Cate do what she does in” the video-game film adaptation. “There’s nothing she can’t do. She’s absolutely incredible,” Roth added. “I’m just so excited for everybody to see the movie.”
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While fans will have to wait a while for Borderlands, as it does not currently have an announced release date, Discovery+ subscribers can check out A Ghost Ruined My Life right now. Speaking about how he conceptualized the series, Roth explained, “I was really interested in kind of documentary horror, or scary documentary, [and] I started thinking about stalkers and what if you had a stalker that was a ghost? And what if you were at dinner with someone, and they started knocking the candles over? What would that be like if you couldn’t get rid of your ex, and your ex was a ghost? And I thought, ‘Does this happen?’”
Soon, Roth and his team “started looking into” stories of real-life hauntings and they “realized that not only does it happen, it’s so unbelievably common.” Roth shared that during his research for A Ghost Ruined My Life, he came across many situations where “an entity latches onto someone, and it ruins their life.” Referring to the event as “stalking,” he said, felt right because much of these encounters have “relationship connotations” to them. “It’s just this thing you have no connection to you, randomly latches onto you for whatever reason, and it does destroy your life.”
Getting the testimonials for A Ghost Ruined My Life was one thing, but next came working out how to better depict the stories so that audiences would best understand what the subjects of each episode really experienced. “I wanted to tell their stories, tell their stories in a cinematic way,” he said. “And we have some amazing filmmakers that came on to tell their stories.” The end result is a terrifying but compelling series that is part documentary and part horror drama, which debuted its first two episodes on Discovery+ this Friday.
