{"id":637359,"date":"2026-08-14T19:15:17","date_gmt":"2026-08-14T19:15:17","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/637359\/"},"modified":"2026-08-14T19:15:17","modified_gmt":"2026-08-14T19:15:17","slug":"what-eli-roth-watches-and-reads-with-his-daughter","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/637359\/","title":{"rendered":"What Eli Roth Watches (and Reads) With His Daughter"},"content":{"rendered":"

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\n Photo-Illustration: Vulture; Photos: Getty Images, Walt Disney Co., Everett Collection\n <\/p>\n

Eli Roth might be a busy guy\u2014his 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\u2014but the director has still been able to carve out copious amounts of time to hang with his 18-month-old daughter, Donatella.<\/p>\n

\u201cOne of the joys of directing movies now is that I can schedule my time so that I can work from home and edit remotely,\u201d he says. \u201cMy editor was in Toronto but I was still in Los Angeles so that meant that at 4 o\u2019clock, I can stop because that\u2019s when my daughter wakes up from her nap.\u201d<\/p>\n

A self-described \u201cvery hands on father,\u201d Roth says he\u2019s taken great pains to curate his shooting schedule so that he will miss as little of his daughter\u2019s formative years as possible. He\u2019s also taken some of the lessons (and fears) he\u2019s learned from parenting and applied them to his work.<\/p>\n

Ice Cream Man, for instance, came from Roth\u2019s notion that as a parent, you can\u2019t always protect your kid. \u201cYou can prepare them, but no matter what you do, at some point they\u2019re going to get hurt,\u201d Roth says. \u201cNo matter what we do, someone\u2019s 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\u2019s real terror.\u201d<\/p>\n

We always read to our daughter. The first book that we read to her was Goodnight Moon. My wife is Italian, too, so she\u2019ll read her a book in Italian and then I\u2019ll read her a book in English.<\/p>\n

The copy of Goodnight Moon we read is actually my copy that my mom saved for 50 years so it\u2019s fun to pass that on.<\/p>\n

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Photo: Getty Images\/Lorraine Boogich 2019 Unauthorized use prohibited.\n <\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n

Watching her interacting with pigeons was great. Like, of all the things\u2026 We thought she\u2019d love buildings or this or that, but she loved the pigeons. She thought they were the funniest thing she\u2019d ever seen.<\/p>\n

And in Italy, they\u2019re so child friendly, too. We took her to this beautiful cafe and we\u2019re so careful with what she eats but when we went to Europe she started eating croissants and all of these things. We\u2019d 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 \u201cCongratulations, what\u2019s her name?\u201d They\u2019d talk to her in Italian, which she understands along with English, and she\u2019s very sweet and curious.<\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n

There\u2019s a fantastic Peekaboo series, and we love those, too. There\u2019s Peekaboo Christmas. There\u2019s Peekaboo Zoo<\/a>. They\u2019ve got a lot of things you can slide up and down, which she likes.<\/p>\n

There\u2019s another book called Good Night Farm<\/a> that she really loves, too. We took her to see a horse on our trip, though\u2014like we actually went to a farm with horses\u2014and I thought she\u2019d be so excited because she loves to make horsey noises but she couldn\u2019t believe the size of the horse. She was terrified. It was like it was a dinosaur.<\/p>\n

She would say, like \u201cDad, what is this thing?\u201d and I\u2019d say, \u201cuno cavallo, uno cavallo,\u201d like \u201cit\u2019s a horse!\u201d But she was like \u201cThat\u2019s not a horse.\u201d 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\u2019t really done a good job of explaining how big a horse actually was.<\/p>\n

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Photo: Walt Disney Co.\/Everett Collection\n <\/p>\n

It\u2019s a long flight to Europe and at a certain point, my wife was like, \u201cI just need to sleep. Can you take her?\u201d So I did, and we read the Peekaboo books for a while but eventually, I put on Zootopia, which was the first time I\u2019d 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\u2026 She gave me this look, like, \u201cWait, this exists?\u201d<\/p>\n

There\u2019s 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\u2019re always playing music. We play a mix of Italian kids songs that my wife grew up with but then I\u2019ll put on, like, They Might Be Giants. My wife is always like, \u201cWhy this song,\u201d but I remember when I was a camp counselor\u2014which was one of the big inspirations for Ice Cream Man\u2014if you put on They Might Be Giants, kids would go nuts. It\u2019s got a bouncy beat and fun, absurd lyrics and the songs are the kind of playful that kids like.<\/p>\n

In the morning, when we wash our hands, I\u2019ll put my daughter on this step ladder so we can lean over together and put on \u201cIstanbul\u201d by They Might Be Giants and she\u2019ll just go crazy. We dance and boogie together and we love it.<\/p>\n

I think as soon as she\u2019s old enough, I\u2019ll 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\u2019re trying to get her to draw, but she\u2019s still at the stage where she wants to eat the crayons.<\/p>\n

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