Are there any subtle references to what’s going on overseas in Hostel 2?
Life With Zoe Going with the flow of randomness By Sorina Diaconescu + Photograph by Zoe Cassavetes You know that feeling when you find yourself in the thick of your 30s and suddenly pause to take a look back and around at your friends and the thought “Everybody’s a hyphen!” just occurs to you? Well, a lot of us are hyphens—writer-Ph.D student, waitress-aspiring playwright, Arctic explorer-filmmaker in the making—and nobody more so than Zoe Cassavetes. The stations of her journey so far have included acting (“I sucked!”), muse-ing for designer/friends Marc Jacobs and Anna Sui, posing in fashion print ads (“It was fun and good money”), doing grunt work as a production assistant and consulting on matters of style and design for the posh Mercer Hotel in New York. Eventually, perhaps inevitably, Cassavetes became a director. She’s one of three siblings born to Gena Rowlands and John Cassavetes, the mercurial actress/filmmaker pair who, beginning at the tail of the ’50s, when Hollywood was
Oh yeah! The guys doing the killing in Hostel 2 justify their behavior by looking at areas of chaos around the world, anarchy areas like Chad or New Orleans 2005. They would argue that as soon as there are no laws, people go right to raping and killing. There is no intermediate step: once the lights are out, once the power’s gone and no one is looking, people turn into animals. And [my characters] totally justify themselves by saying, “We’re just getting back to what we truly are. This is the nature of man and we’re just in touch with that. We’re not sick; we’re the normal ones.” Everybody, I think, had this theory that if everything ever fell apart, you know, the police and the fire department would protect us. But New Orleans proved that if things are really bad, those in charge, who are also human, get scared and quit. It proved that there’s no backup plan—and that’s a terrifying thought. New Orleans is still a mess; Iraq is still a mess. You really feel now that no one in charge ha
