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Why did you decide to take a role in your own film?
Unfortunately, that part was going to originally be played by Michael Rosenbaum. Mike's one of my best friends, and he's a horror movie fanatic like I am. He called me and he said, “Look, I can't do it. I'm going to be Lex Luther on this show.” His show "Smallville" is one of the biggest shows ever on the WB. Originally he was going to have a bigger role [in “Cabin Fever”] so I said, “You'll just play Justin.” Then two days before he was supposed to come, Mike called me and he's like, “I can't. You don't understand, I'm shooting every day. I can't leave, I can't get out of here.” It was such a big hit, he's doing press - the whole show blew up. So that day I had to just kind of make a decision and I wound up doing the part myself.

The only reason I did it was because… Well, actually it's a little bit more involved than that. I cast another actor because I had to replace Mike the day of, and this guy was not right. So while we were shooting it, I'm like, “You know what? This is not working out. I've got to figure something out.” I'd read the role in rehearsal so many times that everyone was like, “You've got to do it. You've got to do it.” That's what happened. I just shot the scene and it was tough, it was like Day 5 of shooting and everyone was going, “Oh what? He's a producer, he's a director. Now what? He's a f**king actor, too?” We showed it to a test group of our friends and everyone was laughing so hard during that scene. They were like, “We love Justin, and it's not just because we know Eli.”

Does anyone ever tell you you've got a 'Ben Stiller' vibe going on?
Yes. Everywhere I went in North Carolina I heard, “Hey, it's Ben Stiller.” And then with that hair, it's like “Hey, Zoolander.” It's like a joke, which is great. Thank God for Ben Stiller. In the 80s, it was always like the blonde guy from “Karate Kid” and “Zapped” - Greg Bradford was the actor - it was always like the blonde-haired guy who got all the girls. But then in the early 90s it was like the New York funny Jewish guy, which was me. It was Seinfeld, Adam Sandler, Ben Stiller - like that kind of came into vogue. I owe a great deal to the three 'S's' - Seinfeld, Sandler and Stiller all of a sudden made me much interesting to girls. It's very funny.

"Cabin Fever's" production notes make a point of saying you were working with horses in Iceland at age 19. Why were you there?
I love horses. I love riding, and my father had been there teaching. My father is a psychoanalyst and was teaching to the psychiatric community, which is all of 40 people in Iceland. He met a woman who had a farm with all these horses, and there was no one there to ride them. He said, “My kids love to ride.” This opportunity came up to go live on this farm. I just went out there with my brother, riding horses. It was great, I loved it. I had been working on a movie in New York City. I'd just finished my first year at NYU and I was living in the Village on 8th Street. It was so crowded, so hot, so many people, and my girlfriend at the time, there was a drive-by shooting at The Gap and she was almost killed. She left and it was like, “I'm f**king out of here.” I went to Iceland and it was perfect. There was nobody there. It was just like a farm. There was a farm, a post office, and, I think, a bank in the whole town.

That's where the idea for “Cabin Fever” came from?
That's where I got this infection that kind of started triggering the whole idea. I had a whole serious of horrific medical incidents that sort of eventually led to the script, all of which I pretty much buried except for the Iceland incident.

I was 12 and I got a virus that strikes one in a million kids and paralyzes you. I was in bed for six weeks; it was bad. The first three weeks were great, I had fudge and Atari and I got a puppy and everyone came to visit me. But then it just got bad. Then after that, when I was 17, I went to Russia and I got this parasite called Giardia, and I also got Mono at the same time. I now weigh 175 and I weighed about 110 or 115 pounds. I just sat in bed drinking this stuff, this poison to try and kill these parasites that were eating me from the inside. It really f**ked me up. I would just think of these things devouring my insides - it was awful. Then when I was 19 I went to Iceland and that's where I had the incident where I got the skin infection on my face. I started shaving chunks of my face off, scratching my skin, and ripping out chunks of my skin. I started reading about these flesh-eating bacterias.

When I was 22, I woke up one morning in New York City and I peeled down my sheets and my legs were hurting so bad. They were all completely ripped apart and cracked and rotted. I hadn't even had sex or anything! I was like, “What the f**k is this?!” It was so painful. I went to the doctor and they said it was psoriasis. They're like, “It's genetic. It's not contagious. You have it. It's been in your system and it's now decided to attack.” I just have these feelings like you can be healthy one day and then literally falling apart the next.

I think that the best horror movies are based on real fears. All my favorite horror filmmakers always said that they were just reflecting what was going on in the fears of society at the time when they made their films. Tobe Hooper, he had 'the Manson Family could be living next door to you' inspiring “Texas Chainsaw Massacre.” And “Dawn of the Dead,” America is cannibalizing itself, consuming itself, with its mall culture. There's zombies eating each other.

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