Photo-Illustration: Vulture; Photos: Getty Images, Walt Disney Co., Everett Collection
Eli Roth might be a busy guy—his twisted new horror flick, Ice Cream Man, hit theaters last week hot on the heels of a sufficiently creepy PR push that found Roth popping up all over Comic-Con—but the director has still been able to carve out copious amounts of time to hang with his 18-month-old daughter, Donatella.
“One of the joys of directing movies now is that I can schedule my time so that I can work from home and edit remotely,” he says. “My editor was in Toronto but I was still in Los Angeles so that meant that at 4 o’clock, I can stop because that’s when my daughter wakes up from her nap.”
A self-described “very hands on father,” Roth says he’s taken great pains to curate his shooting schedule so that he will miss as little of his daughter’s formative years as possible. He’s also taken some of the lessons (and fears) he’s learned from parenting and applied them to his work.
Ice Cream Man, for instance, came from Roth’s notion that as a parent, you can’t always protect your kid. “You can prepare them, but no matter what you do, at some point they’re going to get hurt,” Roth says. “No matter what we do, someone’s going to get to them. And in some extreme version of that, an evil force could come in and get in their mind or turn them against you. That’s real terror.”
We always read to our daughter. The first book that we read to her was Goodnight Moon. My wife is Italian, too, so she’ll read her a book in Italian and then I’ll read her a book in English.
The copy of Goodnight Moon we read is actually my copy that my mom saved for 50 years so it’s fun to pass that on.
Photo: Getty Images/Lorraine Boogich 2019 Unauthorized use prohibited.
We just spent three weeks together with [Donatella] in Europe and it was incredible. She just started walking and we went to Turin, where they have these beautiful promenades and she can walk everywhere. I have to chase after her now to catch up to her.
Watching her interacting with pigeons was great. Like, of all the things… We thought she’d love buildings or this or that, but she loved the pigeons. She thought they were the funniest thing she’d ever seen.
And in Italy, they’re so child friendly, too. We took her to this beautiful cafe and we’re so careful with what she eats but when we went to Europe she started eating croissants and all of these things. We’d watch her tear her food and have fun eating and making a mess and all the servers were so sweet with her. They loved her. Everyone said “Congratulations, what’s her name?” They’d talk to her in Italian, which she understands along with English, and she’s very sweet and curious.
On the flight over to Italy, we brought all of her books, many of which have something to do with a farm. What does the farm do? What does the horse do? What do the animals do? She loves books with farms.
There’s a fantastic Peekaboo series, and we love those, too. There’s Peekaboo Christmas. There’s Peekaboo Zoo. They’ve got a lot of things you can slide up and down, which she likes.
There’s another book called Good Night Farm that she really loves, too. We took her to see a horse on our trip, though—like we actually went to a farm with horses—and I thought she’d be so excited because she loves to make horsey noises but she couldn’t believe the size of the horse. She was terrified. It was like it was a dinosaur.
She would say, like “Dad, what is this thing?” and I’d say, “uno cavallo, uno cavallo,” like “it’s a horse!” But she was like “That’s not a horse.” She has a little action figure horse and we take all her little figures with us to the beach, but seeing a real horse, like watching her face as she saw what a real horse was made me realize that I hadn’t really done a good job of explaining how big a horse actually was.
Photo: Walt Disney Co./Everett Collection
It’s a long flight to Europe and at a certain point, my wife was like, “I just need to sleep. Can you take her?” So I did, and we read the Peekaboo books for a while but eventually, I put on Zootopia, which was the first time I’d ever shown her a screen. We held off for a year and a half, but my gosh, watching her face as she saw the animals in Zootopia coming on screen… She gave me this look, like, “Wait, this exists?”
There’s a school in Los Angeles that does a music class for babies, so we took her and she just thrived. She went crazy. She loved dancing, moving, banging the drums. So we’re always playing music. We play a mix of Italian kids songs that my wife grew up with but then I’ll put on, like, They Might Be Giants. My wife is always like, “Why this song,” but I remember when I was a camp counselor—which was one of the big inspirations for Ice Cream Man—if you put on They Might Be Giants, kids would go nuts. It’s got a bouncy beat and fun, absurd lyrics and the songs are the kind of playful that kids like.
In the morning, when we wash our hands, I’ll put my daughter on this step ladder so we can lean over together and put on “Istanbul” by They Might Be Giants and she’ll just go crazy. We dance and boogie together and we love it.
I think as soon as she’s old enough, I’ll start her on piano or guitar lessons. My wife took dance for many years, too, and so we want her to do dance lessons, music lessons, and anything creative. We’re trying to get her to draw, but she’s still at the stage where she wants to eat the crayons.
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