OPENING

AFTER SEVEN YEARS IN DEVELOPMENT. BORDERLANDS IS FINALLY HERE. DIRECTIR ELI ROTH TALKS BRINGING THE BOMBASTIC GAMES TO LIFE

- JACK SHEPHERD

DOGS REALLY are man’s best friend. Just ask Eli Roth, the director of Hostel and Thanksgiving, who has his French Bulldog to thank for landing the Borderlands gig.

“Whenever I take her for a walk and she has to go to the bathroom, she won’t let me look at her,” Roth tells SFX. “I have to look away because she gets really shy. But one day I filmed her. She had that shy look on her face and I was like, ‘That’s Claptrap.’”

Claptrap, as anyone who has played the Borderlands videogames knows, is the player’s fast-talking, intentionally annoying and hilarious robot companion. When Roth was first approached by Randy Pitchford, CEO of the games’ developer Gearbox Software, he wanted to know more about the series’ mascot.

“My first question was, ‘You can’t kill Claptrap, but you can shoot him hundreds of times?’ He goes, ‘Correct. Because there’s a scene where Claptrap gets shot up after being a decoy'. I said, 'So what happens to the bullets?" Randy goes, I don't know. I go, 'Could he shit out the bullets, like we're in a Mel Brooks movie? He goes, 'Yes, he could. And I felt we needed to see that."

Roth wanted Claptrap's expelling of bullets to come at a key moment in the movie just as the lead characters, a rag-tag group of bounty hunters, are trying to escape a dangerous threat. "But rather than escape, they've got to deal with this robot that needs to expel the bullets," says Roth.

The filmmaker thought of his dog and filmed him going to the toilet, looking shy. "And that was my pitch to Lionsgate," he continues.

"They were laughing so hard." Not only did this immortalise a dog's toilet habits, but it established the tone for what would become Roth's Borderlands.