Hackneyed Honeymoon Hotel Inspires Labor of Love

Craig Rosenberg had never made a film before "Hotel de Love."

Just a few years ago, he was just a writer in Australia trying to figure out how to break into Hollywood. "It's not like being in a city in America where you say, 'OK, I want to make a film; I'll go to LA,"' explains Rosenberg. "In Melbourne, you think 'How in God's name am I going to do this?'"

Rosenberg eventually figured out how to do it and, on Friday February 21, his first movie Hotel de Love will open in theaters across America. In a phone interview with the Crimson, he discussed his maiden voyage on the big screen.

As writer and director, the 31-year-old Australian wanted to "contemporize" romantic comedy for the '90s. According to Rosenberg, American romantic comedies tend to be subdued with too much talking. In Hotel de Love, he "wanted to take it a little bit further" for a more contemporary audience.

"People in their late 20s are exploring love and at the same time exploring what are the boundaries of physical love you can have with people. So I wanted to explore it in that regard," Rosenberg says.

Rosenberg also turns the traditional romantic comedy on its head by switching the usual dynamics between men and women. In Hotel de Love "it is the guys running around the corridor yelling 'I love you' and trying to deal with their emotions," he says, "and it's the women who are making the decisions."

Along with its portrayal of physical love and women's lib, Hotel de Love is, at its core, a romantic comedy. Through the story of a group of potential lovers spending the weekend at a honeymoon hotel notorious for its kitschy themed rooms, the film takes a enlightening, quirky look at romance in the '90s.

Rosenberg first got the idea for the film during a trip to Niagara Falls. After seeing the Falls, he started talking with the very cynical manager of the honeymoon hotel where he was staying. He was fascinated by the stories of "brides and bridegrooms getting out of their limousines directly from their wedding and having these incredible knock-down, drag-out fights right in the hotel foyer before they'd even gone up to their room." The hotel also featured what Rosenberg termed "very watered-down fantasy theme rooms."

Using this experience as inspiration, the Australian writer decided to create a movie about an even more cynical manager at a hotel with even more outrageous theme rooms. As a result, the rooms play a significant supporting comedic role in the movie.

To Rosenberg, the rooms serve to symbolize and accentuate the comic absurdity on the screen. For example, the parents of the twin brothers, who loathe each other after 30 years of marriage, are staying in the sports stadium room. Astro-turf on the floor, a referee signaling a goal, and the crowds painted on the walls peering down on the contest below -- all highlight the spectacle of their raucous disputes.

Of course, the movie itself does not take place at the actual Niagara Falls. Instead, it's set in a fictitious, miniaturized, Australian version of the great tourist attraction dubbed "Niagara Smalls." Like the three-foot waterfall, the cast and Rosenberg himself, Hotel de Love is distinctly Australian. But Rosenberg sees the cultural differences from Down Under as an advantage when presenting his film to American audiences.

"One of the good things about being Australian and making films in English is that we're foreign, but we're not too foreign. We have the same culture, but we have kind of a strange take on it. We have a shared culture with America, but we have our own idiosyncratic way of looking at it," Rosenberg says.

Before Hotel de Love, Rosenberg was an accomplished fiction writer who had already won three national literary awards in Australia. Now that he's made the transition to filmmaking he hopes to create a healthy balance of writing and film.

"The biggest difference I've found in directing, compared with writing, is that writing is an incredibly solitary act--I sit in my room for six months by myself," says Rosenberg. "When I go out and direct a film, I have 50 people a day coming up to me and saying 'What do you want?' It probably keeps me healthy--exercises both sides of me, the yin and yang."

To the Spielbergs of tomorrow, Rosenberg recommends a heavy dose of self-confidence, determination and persistence, since, as he sees it, rejection is just part of the culture of Hollywood.

"Everyone's job in Hollywood is to say no to you; it's only when they say yes to you that their job is in danger," he says, "They've committed to something and they're going to be judged on that. They're much happier saying no to everything."

As for his own turn in Hollywood, Rosenberg is trying to make the most of it.

"I have an opportunity with film that I have to exploit. You don't know if it'll ever come around again."